I recently helped the Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) set up a Facebook group. I’ve long suspected it: law librarians *love* Facebook. It is a place where we can talk to each other one-on-one, share photos about our personal lives, play word games, and join groups of interest. Almost immediately after creating the TALL group, we had over 30 people sign up by word of mouth. Official word about the group went out a few weeks ago, and we now have more than double that signed up.

Some of our thinking behind creating the group:

• members were asking

White Park Bay, a company that seems to specialize in porting Oxford University Press books to the iPhone, has published a number of OUPs technical dictionaries as iPhone apps, among them the Oxford Dictionary of Law. (This link will take you to it in the app store on your iTunes.) The dictionary sells for CD14.99 (who’s kidding whom with this penny less pricing?). You will note that while rich for an iTunes app, many of which sell at just under a dollar, it’s a whole lot cheaper than the Black’s Law Dictionary, which sells for CD50 (with a penny . . . [more]

Real competition has finally arrived in the market for legal information. The existence of alternative product offerings from multiple sources has shifted the legal information market in Canada from a seller’s to a buyer’s market. Making matters worse from the perspective of a commercial publisher, although not from that of the legal profession, is the dramatic growth in the number of free sources of online legal information.

To simply stay in the game, commercial publishers will have to offer more content for less money. This shift in the nature of the business is something new in the world of legal . . . [more]

The “me” generation was out in full force in the world of biotech this week:

General Electric offered $100 million of loans as part of its healthymagination program, which is bound to — not coincidentally — boost sales of GE’s medical records systems. Good press and good sales. Good job!

In the U.S. Senate, a new version of the Comparative Effectiveness bill tries to allay Republican concerns by focusing more on the individual patient … leading comparative effectiveness right to the doorstep of personalized medicine.

In Wisconsin and Jerusalem, everyone was vying to divy up the biotech pie . . . [more]

The Justice Reporter [PDF] is a fairly new online publication that focuses on issues affecting journalism and the law, conceived and edited by Tracey Tyler, legal affairs reporter at the Toronto Star, and Tony Wong, a litigation partner at Blakes specializing in media law. The editors say in the first edition [PDF] that they aim to

catalogue these problems [i.e. problems with free reporting] and change policies that thwart the media’s ability to inform the public about its justice system.

The current edition leads with an article by three Ontario Court of Appeal judges, Russell Juriansz, James MacPherson and . . . [more]

I had a bit of a head-scratching experience just now: Google gave me a precise answer to a search that was more or less framed as a question; and I can’t recall ever seeing that before. Is this an old feature I’ve never stumbled on or is it something new that’s having a soft launch?

I usually don’t give Google a question, having learned instead to feed it a string of keywords tied in a Boolean knot. But today I asked “how many canals in amsterdam”? The first item in the results was an unequivocal answer — and not one . . . [more]

US Christians concerned to suppress the civil liberties of others are agitating in Wisconsin to burn a novel that is sympathetic to the plight of young homosexuals. Salon has a good summary of the story, including some recognition for the librarians involved. Others are also covering it. In this case, the librarians are supported by their community, which is always crucial for the profession, which is undervalued on a gender basis and saddled with disempowering stereotypes (which are nevertheless sometimes fun). . . . [more]

It is Day 1 of the Edmonton Law Libraries Association Head Start Program and I am writing this post as I assist with timekeeping and travel for the students hands on legislative research sessions in the Alberta Law Society Library in Edmonton.

Every year we bring the attendee articling students into the library and work through hands on research sessions with them using print resources. This year, like those in the past, we “old” librarian types tell war stories about how crappy it was to update regulations before the Internet existed, and especially before the new electronic official copies that . . . [more]

Following an “emergency hearing held by telephone on [a] Friday night”, the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia recently refused to grant an injunction restraining the Halifax Herald from publishing a story using a five hour digital recording of a conversation between Minister Raitt and her former press secretary, Jasmine MacDonnell. This ruling is the latest to comment on the state of the potential common law tort for invasion of privacy in Canada.

Ms. MacDonnell, not Minister Raitt, commenced an action against the Herald and its reporter, Mr. Mahar. The common law tort of invasion of privacy was included in the . . . [more]

I think the new name of Westlaw Canada will be easier for a lot of users (particularly American users) compared to the old name of WestlaweCARSWELL.

The new logo is here:

The change in name is also accompanied by some improved content. I like the fact that they have “chunked together” individual paragraphs from the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest (CED) into a series of paragraphs in a single view (this avoids having to click on “next” or “previous” as much). Their commitment to update all of the CED titles in the next year or so is also very welcome (and overdue). . . . [more]

Available as of today on SSRN, “Dissents from the Bench: A Compilation of Oral Dissents Issued by U.S. Supreme Court Justices“, by Jill Duffy and Elizabeth Lambert, identifies 117 instances where justices of the the United States Supreme Court issued oral dissenting judgments. Duffy is a research librarian at the Court and Lambert is a staff attorney at the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The authors examined all decisions from 1969 to the present day. Curiously perhaps, oral dissents are not officially recorded as a matter of course, and some were only . . . [more]

Last week I came across the news story on the YorkRegion.com News website: Libraries fight proposed Internet Blocking (June 10, 2009). It talks about a private member’s bill in Ontario that proposes the use of Internet filters to block pornographic websites from children, and how Ontario libraries are standing up against it. Considering the Bill has been sitting at First Reading since November 19, 2008, I tried to find out why it was making the local news once again. My research did not turn up satisfactory results. . . . [more]