So far as I can tell, we’ve not talked about the (U.S.) Supreme Court Database on Slaw, even though it’s about twenty years old. The current version offers the researcher:

247 pieces of information for each case, roughly broken down into six categories: (1) identification variables (e.g., citations and docket numbers); (2) background variables (e.g., how the Court took jurisdiction, origin and source of the case, the reason the Court agreed to decide it); (3) chronological variables (e.g., the date of decision, term of Court, natural court); (4) substantive variables (e.g., legal provisions, issues, direction of decision); (5) outcome variables

In university history classes the textbooks provided shots of cuneiform for our wonderment. It was hard to imagine reading the stuff, though, and I recall being told that the ancient Messopotamian tablets were mostly accounting documents. Well, no more. According to Knowlegde and Power:

The Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh in northern Iraq, from the mid-7th century BC, is the earliest attested site of courtly scientific patronage in world history. This website presents the scholars’ letters, queries, and reports to their kings and provides resources to support their use in undergraduate teaching. Since the summer of 2008 it also gives

StatsCan has released the data from the Civil Court Survey for 2008/2009 of Nova Scotia, Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut. The data are available upon request from Statistics Canada’s Centre for Justice Statistics.

Slaw has made that request and has placed the data file we received online for you to download [PDF]. The data are in ten tables for each of the years of the survey, i.e. the years 2005/2006 to 2008/2009. The tables respecting 2008/2009 begin on page 33 of the file. They (and those for the other years) are as follows:

1. Civil court

We haven’t discussed the joint US/UK Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access which last week published its final report titled “Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet: Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information”.

This is the most sustained attempt to deal with the long-term problem of data deluge to ensure that researchers and scholars in the future can access our knowledge heritage in the same way that can now be done at the Bodleian or the Library of Congress.

The size of our stock of digital knowledge doubles in less than two years. This is a . . . [more]

A law library is central to a law school.

Pretty unarguable proposition I would have thought.

Students have to have a library to learn. Faculty to teach and write.

That’s why I can’t understand the story told in the Queen’s Journal this week under the headline Future uncertain for law library.

Like many universities, Queen’s has had to make regular operational budget cuts. But Queen’s isn’t a tiny school and serving the needs of 30 full-time law faculty and about 500 law students, can’t be easily done with the six and a half full-time staff at the Lederman Law . . . [more]

My family is building a house, again. A dislike of reality TV has the effect that the P. and S. Mireau family builds things. One of the features of our new building will be a 38 foot long, full wall height library area extending down a wide hall from the door into the garage past bedrooms and bathrooms and taking up one wall of the living room. It will be lovely, clear fir shelves filled with our large collection of reading material. And I do mean filled. We last packed and moved in September 2008 and 39 boxes of books . . . [more]

Statistics Canada released today a report on “Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics.” [HTML, PDF] The report consists, essentially, of some 30 tables of data; however, there is a helpful page of “highlights” that verbalizes some of this information. Thus, for example, we learn that:

In 2008/2009, legal aid plans spent approximately $730 million on providing legal aid services in 11 provinces and territories [excluding NL & PEI], which amounts to approximately $22 for every Canadian. After adjusting for inflation, legal aid spending was up about 6% from the previous year

The federal

The Library Journal has issued its list of Movers & Shakers. (ht to Stephen Abram). See the list here, and more importantly, the stories which led to the nominations.

I like the way the list is categorized – makes navigation much easier. There are lessons to be learned from each of these people, but it is much more efficient to read up on those working in your own area of obsession/interest.

Like all good librarians, I encourage you to have a look through these profiles, and find some ideas we can steal, er, adapt to our own work. . . . [more]

My wife and I did a good thing on the day of the recent Oscar telecast: we attended a 1 pm showing at our local theater of the Oscar-nominated short films and short animation films.

Although I thought the Oscar presentation was too long and not funny enough, having seen the 1 pm showing made the presentations later that night for those two categories much more interesting.

If you get the chance to see the winning short animation film it is simply brilliant. It was Logorama, a 16-minute animated film set in what is presumably Los Angeles that uses . . . [more]

Olivier Charbonneau, doctoral candidate in law, associate librarian at Concordia University, blogger, and all-around legal information expert, has a post up on VoxPopuLII, the blog associated with Cornell’s Legal Information Institute. In “Collaboration and Open Access to Law,” Charbonneau talks about certain aspects of his research work on the way in which the public and legal documents interact with each other on the web.

In this post he gives only a few suggestions as to how we might improve this interaction and points us to his paper submitted at the Law via the Internet . . . [more]

On Friday the Early Bird Deadline to register for the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference in Windsor was extended from March 12th to April 9th. Before April 9th, the full conference registration is $460 for members ($505 after April 9th), $520 for non-members ($555 after).

This year’s conference runs May 9-12th with a pre-conference workshop on U.S. legal research and two local tours on Saturday, May 8th. This year’s conference is run jointly with MichALL, the Michigan chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries.

To register online, visit the conference website: English | French . . . [more]

Mobility, Equality, Internet, Language? Which of these doesn’t fit? According to a recent BBC survey all of them fit. A sizable majority of nearly 28,000 respondents from 26 countries (79%) indicated that they feel that the Internet is a fundamental human right, BBC story. The data from the survey of 26 countries has other interesting results. The three countries who had the highest percentage who believed the internet was a fundamental right were: South Korea (96%), Mexico (94%), and China (87%). In Canada 77% of respondents felt that the internet should be a fundamental right of all people, while . . . [more]