A post on the Read Write Web site caught my eye this morning. The post alerted me to Deloitte LLP’s 2009 Tribalization of Business Study, which evaluates the perceived potential of online communities and identifies how enterprises believe they may better leverage them.

Although there is a “maturation” of business use of social media, the summary document perceives that organizations are not yet reaping full potential of social media activities.

Survey results indicate that while enterprises are effectively using online tools to engage with customers, partners, and employees for brand discussion and idea generation, organizations are continuing to struggle

There has been plenty of press on how the tracks we leave online are going to haunt us – or at least stay with us – for ever. Much has been written, including at this site, about how the vast wealth of information that gets into the cybersphere puts a complete picture of our lives, good and bad, right out in public. The CBC was running a story yesterday about a Privacy Commissioner report warning that young people, as a result of posting too much information online, are being fired and missing out on job interviews and academic opportunities. . . . [more]

Email lists still exist.

One of the first — if not the first — social media on the internet, they’re still enjoyed by people who like to find their information in their inbox. Though perhaps their number is not what it was when Eric J. Heels compiled his 1996 catalog of Law-related Resources on the Internet.

The International Law Librarians List is of interest because, unlike many, it has a publicly accessible and searchable web archive, which makes it a potentially valuable research tool, of course, and also a source of interesting information if you’re just browsing.

For . . . [more]

I’ve learned from Hughes-Jehan Vibert that his JurisPedia project has recently won the 2009 Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics [in German]. We talked about JurisPedia a couple of years ago here on Slaw. And last year Simon Chester posted about the 2008 winner, Case Matrix.

JurisPedia’s new front page operates as a search engine, using Google’s Custom Search, with filters available that let you focus your search on any one of 70 jurisdictions around the world. You can, as well, search the wiki that is the growing JurisPedia encyclopedia.

Hughes-Jehan, who studied at UQAM and is now a . . . [more]

Scottish authorities released the Report of the Scottish Civil Courts Review on September 30. This was a far-reaching review designed to modernize the Scottish system of civil justice. The extensive Report is available in two PDF files; as well, there is a synopsis [PDF] available. . . . [more]

Thanks to a tweet by Stephane Cottin (@cottinstef), I’ve found a catalogue of resources on legal informatics — “legal information systems. . . a research area within the disciplines of information science and computer science.” Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources by Robert Richards contains a hoard of links and references to material that is mostly beyond my ability to understand. But for those of you trained in information science, this should be a useful resource.

Despite my relative ignorance, I’ve found that some of what Richards offers is stimulating and informative even for me. For example, . . . [more]

Today’s episode of the Law Librarian podcast will be recorded at 3 pm ET or 12 noon PT on Blogtalkradio. Our topic today will be social media and law libraries. Join us live (listen via the website –headphones recommended at the office) and call in with questions, or listen to the recording later. I will be participating in this episode. Richard Leiter hosts with his new co-host Marcia Dority Baker.

Incidentally, I was away during the last recording on September 3rd but have had a listen. The focus of the episode–“What’s Real in the Real World?”–was on resources used . . . [more]

Twitter is developing a way of making a shareable list of Twitter users, so that people can form, recommend, or adopt groups of users. (See the story on ReadWriteWeb.)

Currenlty, TweepML offers a way of doing this sharable list making. (The name is a take on OPML, which stands for Outline Processor Markup Language, an invention of Dave Winer, and used principally for making an XML list of RSS feeds. Tweeps are people — “peeps” — who use Twitter.) The idea of such a list is that it makes it technically easier for you to follow groups of people. . . . [more]

The National Archives and Records Administration of the United States and Footnote.com yesterday announced the release of the Internet’s largest Interactive Holocaust Collection with hundreds of thousands of records, including:

• The Ardelia Hall Collection of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
• Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
• Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
• Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proceedings

Access to the collection will be available for free on Footnote.com through the month of October.

On the matter of looted art, there are a number . . . [more]

The Australian government has launched data.australia.gov.au as the new home of Australian government public information datasets. There are more than 165 sets arranged into 30 or so categories, covering such topics as culture, planning, environment and education. The invitation on the site is to “[mash]-up the data to create something new and exciting!”. The datasets are in various formats — XML, XLS, ESRI Shapefiles, CSV, etc. — each accompanied by basic metadata.

The United States federal government offers an increasing number of federal datasets free via Data.gov.

Partly in response to the U.S. initiative, . . . [more]

The debate in legal publishing circles continues with regard to retro case law builds. Does anyone really need them? If so, which ones and why? Do any of retro builds in the planning or development stages have any real value to the legal researcher?

Unreported court cases that pre-date 1970. Boxes and boxes of older full text court cases that were not reported in print law report series still haunt some court houses and some legal publishers. What should be done with them? Tens of thousands of these cases exist in hardcopy and rest heavy on the consciences of those . . . [more]

A patron asks you to find (and update) a Canadian federal private Act. How do you do it?

The legal research literature lacks detail on the process, so I thought I would test the following approach with SLAW readers and ask if there is a better way. I also provide links to some additional resources on researching federal private Acts.

In the following example, I have (arbitrarily) picked the Stanmount Pipe Line Company (which would appear to no longer exist – at least based on Google searches; as such, it is not a very realistic example, but I needed . . . [more]