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]

I’d like to share a new website launched yesterday in the BC market by Dye & Durham: The BC Law Watch Blog.

The approach with this website is very focused on news within the BC legal community – from local associations, to government agencies, the LSBC, Law Foundation and the BC Courts, to name a few. And for those interested, I posted some additional comments on the monitoring tactics we’re using in a VLLB post yesterday.

Please drop by and have a look. . . . [more]

Over on 3 Geeks and a Law Library, Greg Lambert makes note that yesterday at the Law Marketing Association conference, Joe Calve, the new CMO of Morrison Foerster mentioned he had moved their Library department into the Marketing department. Lambert questions the change, but does say, “From what I’m hearing from the Librarians at MoFo, they are excited about the change and are looking forward to the transition.” MoFo is known for doing things a bit differently than everyone else, after all.

I do think it odd, but perhaps no odder than having the Library report to IT as in . . . [more]

The January/February 2010 Law Librarians newsletter put out by legal publisher Westlaw has published an article entitled Law Firm Economics and the Librarian—Bring Value Through Training. The lessons can apply beyond the context of private law firm libraries:

“Bring value through training. That was one message that came through loud and clear recently in ‘Succeed in the New Law Firm Library Reality—Learn the Business Side of the Firm’, a webinar hosted by the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) and the informal group of law library managers of the Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, D.C. (LLSDC) (…)

“So how