I am in the lovely City of Calgary today celebrating Stampede, well, working AND celebrating. My office mates are wearing hats and boots and western dress. I crossed a street in downtown cowtown behind a horse at lunch. There are parties, parties, and more parties. It is very cool! Even though I am an Albertan from birth, I didn’t realize what a big deal Stampede is.

Stampede often serves as an excellent analogy for our Alberta politicians. Evidence of this can be found in the Alberta Hansard from March 5, speaking about the budget and the economy:

This is

A working paper on the digitization of Canadian parliamentary publications was produced in the spring and posted recently to the Parliamentary Internet site:

The aim of the Working Paper (begun in September 2008) is to provide an overview of:

• which published papers relating to the operations of Parliament have been digitized;
• by which organization;
• where the digitized works are housed;
• who is permitted access &
• plans for future digitization.

(…) The goal is to help inform the development of a coherent strategy amongst the various stakeholders to digitize, make available and preserve over the long term, the corpus of Canadian

Yahoo Search has just launched a notepad that’s aimed at helping you do research on the web. It is, in effect, a replacement for the Notebook that Google killed a few weeks ago, and Yahoo hopes it will draw searchers into using their engine.

It’s a fairly simple but smart application: when Yahoo senses from your queries that you’re doing research, it will make Search Pad available in the upper right hand corner of your Yahoo Search window, along with some suggestions as to how your searches might be glossed. Search Pad will automatically capture the bones of your searches, . . . [more]

The venture capital press have announced that

Thomson Reuters, the leading financial news and business information company, has acquired Indlaw Communications Pvt. Ltd., a Delhi-based legal information company, for an undisclosed amount. Indlaw runs a legal, tax and regulatory information database website called www.Indlaw.com.

Earlier in the week e-discovery diva and twitterer Peg Duncan sent out a request for “an ‘official’ French translation for ‘redaction’…” (She’d come up with épuration, caviardage and expurgation thus far.) Then, as synchronicity will have it, shortly afterwards I came across the University of Ottawa’s CLTD (Centre for Legal Translation and Documentation) lexicons, which I believe we’ve not pointed to on Slaw before.

The Federal Lexicon / lexique fédéral presents you with a word list in either English or French, each word linked to a collection of uses (word plus context) drawn from federal legislation in the other language, . . . [more]

A rant / proposal on Canadian legal journal indexes:

As many SLAW readers will know, there are two main products that index Canadian legal journal literature:

– the Index to Canadian Legal Literature (ICLL), available in print from Carswell and online on each of Westlaw Canada and LexisNexis Canada (early 1980’s to current but I believe the print purports to include some pre-1980 content).

– the Index to Canadian Legal Periodical Literature (ICLPL) (print only, from 1960 to current but with a large publishing lag/delay (i.e., I believe the 2005 annual volume was published circa 2008).

[I am intentionally not . . . [more]

A small Canadian legal venture announced itself recently, going public in its very early stages. LexPublica, using the .ca domain so that the URL is lexpubli.ca, aims to be both a business and an online source for free legal instruments and information. At the moment LexPublica is only a blog, where the two founders, Martin Ertl (a McGill grad who has worked at Davis LLP) and Zak Greant, a techie, explain what they hope to do, which seems to be akin to what JD Supra is doing in having lawyers post their material for display and use by . . . [more]

The British Library, together with partners, has put on line the Codex Sinaticus, the earliest known surviving version of the Christian Bible, including the Old Testament, dating to somewhere in the middle of the fourth century. The website enables you to peruse certain pages of the document with varying magnification and, in some cases, with different kinds of lighting. The image you see here is a portion of Leviticus — Chapter 21, Verse 5 — chosen more or less randomly from among the many regulations and statutes found in the Septuagint.

  . . . [more]

These news items likely aren’t worthwhile putting as separate posts, so this is a silly season round-up of odd notes from the legal media.

We’re Staying in Dayton

Despite what we speculated last year about the outsourcing of jobs from Dayton, Lexis told the local paper last week that it has no plans to move and that 3,000 jobs in town are safe.

Amazing ROI in Legal Publishing

Want to quadruple your money in 55 months? Sounds like a Madoff line.

Well, in 2004, a London fund put £750,000 of fund money into a Lexis spin-off, a MBO . . . [more]

The British Library has made two million pages from forty-nine mostly regional 19th century newspapers available online. There’s a search function that does an adequate job of locating your terms within the scanned-in pages, though because of the quality of much of the type and the imaging, it’s less than perfect. (I did the, for me, obvious search on my last name, which is sufficiently uncommon to make the inquiry worthwhile: wound up with a great number of hits on the word “sudden” because the “s” was often a long ‘s’ — the one that looks like an ‘f’ — . . . [more]

Starting today, the CRTC is holding meetings in Gatineau, Quebec, to examine how Internet service providers, notably Bell and Rogers, manage and manipulate traffic on the Internet and whether this is in accordance with the Telecommunications Act. Their current “traffic shaping” practices include throttling, deep packet inspection, and putting download limits or extra charges on high bandwidth users.

There are a number of arguments against their current practice:

• smaller ISPs who buy bandwidth from Bell and resell it should be allowed to decide how to manage their own traffic, that the current practice is anti-competitive
• ISPs should not

Since Steve pointed the way, Slaw readers might well be interested to see from the Public Accounts volume III that Justice Canada appears to be a Lexis shop rather than a Westlaw-ECarswell.

Page 71 of the Accounts provide details of where “Canada’s largest law firm” – as Justice Canada is often described – spends its legal information dollars:

Lexisnexis Canada Inc Kingston Ont $1,146,011
Quicklaw Inc Kingston Ont $200,484
Carswell Toronto Ont $409,583

The DPP expenditures are similarly skewed.

Lexisnexis Canada Inc Kingston Ont 324,940
Quicklaw Inc Kingston Ont 102,476

Of course the really large cheques are cut elsewhere: CGI . . . [more]