Announced Friday by the Prime Minister’s Office:

PM announces appointment of new Librarian and Archivist of Canada

24 April 2009
Ottawa, Ontario

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced today the appointment of Daniel J. Caron as Librarian and Archivist of Canada, effective April 25, 2009.

Mr. Caron, currently Senior Assistant Deputy Minister, Corporate Management and Horizontal Integration Sector, Library and Archives Canada, replaces Ian E. Wilson, who is retiring from the Public Service after a very distinguished career.

The Prime Minister also announced that, upon his retirement, Mr. Wilson will hold the title of Librarian and Archivist of Canada Emeritus

Book off an hour or so at 3 p.m. ET this coming Tuesday, April 28, to join, via webcast, the “sneak preview” of the grandly named Wolfram/Alpha Computational Knowledge Engine at Harvard’s Berkman Center. As we told you last month in One to Watch?, Wolfram, a mathematician, has kept wraps around his project while talking up its potential in general terms. Will it be a search engine? Will it be an answering tool? Will it be so much more? Now you can tune in as Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, law prof at Harvard expose some of the . . . [more]

We’ve blogged recently on studies showing the colossal waste of time and energy that spam causes. But fret not, the Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Industry, today announced that the Government of Canada is delivering on its commitment to protect consumers and businesses from the most dangerous and damaging forms of spam. The proposed Electronic Commerce Protection Act (Bill C-27) will deter the most dangerous forms of spam, such as identity theft, phishing and spyware, from occurring in Canada and will help drive spammers out of Canada.

“Our government knows how damaging spam can be to Canadians and Canadian . . . [more]

Yesterday’s Federal Court decision of Mr. Justice O’Reilly, Omar Ahmed Khadr v. The Prime Minister Of Canada, The Minister of Foreign Affairs, The Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and The Commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police 2009 FC 405, is available in PDF.

[3] I am satisfied, in the special circumstances of this case, that Mr. Khadr’s rights under s. 7 of the Charter have been infringed. I will grant his request for an order requiring the respondents to seek his repatriation from the United States. Given my conclusion regarding s. 7, it is unnecessary for

The notice from Quicklaw about legislation that Shaunna just mentioned has been causing a fair bit of discussion in TALL‘s listserv. As a result, Louis Mirando, Chief Law Librarian at Osgoode Hall Law School has described the Ontario historical legislation digitizing project that is currently underway. With a slight bit of editing, here is Louis’ message, reprinted with permission:

most recent efforts have been undertaken as part of, and are funded by, the “Ontario Digitization Initiative” (ODI) of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL). As its pilot ODI project, OCUL is digitizing Ontario legislative materials from the

This notice is making the rounds:

Notice to Quicklaw Customers:

Please be advised that the bills sources will no longer be available on the Quicklaw™ service starting in May.

However, customers can still access a full annual statutes service for Canada (English and French), Alberta, British Columbia and Ontario on the Quicklaw service. Full-text versions of the annual statutes are made available on Quicklaw upon receipt of royal assent. The annual statutes sources contain the commencement information for each annual statute, as well as a list of the acts amended by any particular statute.

Hopefully someone will fill the void . . . [more]

A NJ Appellate Division court says that Wikipedia is too malleable to be used as evidence in Palisades Collection v. Graubard, A-1338-07.

Mary Pat Gallagher of the New Jersey Law Journal reported yesterday,

“[I]t is entirely possible for a party in litigation to alter a Wikipedia article, print the article and thereafter offer it in support of any given position,” an appeals court held. “Such a malleable source of information is inherently unreliable and clearly not one ‘whose accuracy cannot reasonably be questioned,'” such as would support judicial notice under New Jersey Evidence Rule 201(b)(3).

The decision reversed an . . . [more]

This teaser from the National Law Journal Web version caught my eye:

Are you interested in legal issues but shudder at the thought of wading through massive law review articles riddled with footnotes? A new Web site just might be the answer. Legalworkshop.org aims to bring content from some of the most prestigious law reviews in the nation to a wider audience by offering condensed version of articles translated from scholarly language into plain English, and at no cost.

This is a very interesting idea. First a new and free aggregated source for accessing peer reviewed legal research. Second a . . . [more]

Today (being both Shakespeare’s birthday and Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’ deathday) seems apt for some comment on World Book and Copyright Day.

Last month, at the Second Global eIFL-IP conference in Istanbul, librarians from thirty-nine developing and transition countries decided to highlight the importance of users’ rights for libraries and education to mark the occasion. eIFL.net is an international foundation, which supports national library consortia in approximately fifty transition and developing countries to negotiate and advocate for the wide availability of electronic resources to education, research and professional communities as well as governmental organisations and civil society. This global . . . [more]

We’ve mentioned the practice of having a web adjunct to conventional law journals. A collective was announced yesterday. I’ll let them speak for themselves:

Law Journals Band Together to Launch Web Magazine

The Legal Workshop Aims to Revitalize Legal Scholarship

STANFORD, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A consortium of America’s most influential law reviews today launched The Legal Workshop, a free, online magazine featuring articles based on legal scholarship published in the print editions of seven participating law reviews: Stanford Law Review, New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Georgetown Law Journal, Northwestern Law Review, and University of Chicago

The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in the United Kingdom recently launched the FLARE Index to Treaties, a searchable database of basic information on over 1,500 of the most significant multilateral treaties from 1856 to the present.

Information comes from many sources such as Multilateral Treaties: index and current status (London: Butterworths, 1984, tenth supplement, 1994), International Legal Materials (Washington: American Society of International Law, 1962-) , Bulletin of International Legal Developments/Bulletin of Legal Developments (London: British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 1966-), United Nations Treaty Series Index, etc.

Information about each treaty includes:

• the official, popular

Statistics Canada has introduced a new measure of police-reported crime, the crime severity index, in which more serious crimes are weighted more heavily, by comparison with the usual crime rate in which all crimes affect the outcome equally. The Daily has a summary of the current index data and the chart reproduced below. For a detailed description of how the index is calculated see “Measuring Crime in Canada: Introducing the Crime Severity Index and Improvements to the Uniform Crime Reporting Survey.”

. . . [more]