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]

The UNESCO supported World Digital Library launches today. Shaped in concept and realization largely by the U.S. Library of Congress, the WDL aims to enable the sharing of important cultural “objects” within and across cultures. Sensibly, perhaps, given the fate of the European equivalent, Europeana, the WDL is starting out small: there are at launch just over a thousand items in the library, some from every region of the globe. There are, for example, 13 items from Canada (and 6 from Mexico) among the 133 items from North America. One of the reasons for the paucity of Canadian objects . . . [more]

Some recent posts have advocated the idea that law school publishers should “stop publishing” law journals in print. Instead, the posts say, the publishers should direct their energy to “creating definitive versions of their journals in digital formats and making the law review articles readily accessible in online repositories”.

I agree with the conventional wisdom that the demise of print formats for law journals and law reports is an inevitability and that it will happen in the not too distant future. Acceptance by the legal community of “digital only law journals” combined with economic realities will ultimately produce that result. . . . [more]

In a decision released earlier this month a strong panel of the Ontario Court of Appeal took a look at one aspect of the issue of what constitutes a “record,” in this case for the purposes of applying the Municipal Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. M. 56. Toronto Police Services Board v. (Ontario) Information and Privacy Commissioner 2009 ONCA 20 entailed a request by a journalist for information stored in Toronto police databases in a format different from the one used by the police. The data could have been produced in the . . . [more]

Taking off from David Canton’s post on the Economics of Spam, here’s a link to a survey from McAfee published today that has some findings that surprised me – One e-mail is like driving three feet:

An estimated worldwide total of 62 trillion spam emails were sent in 2008
Globally, annual spam energy use totals 33 billion kilowatt- hours (KWh), or 33 terawatt hours (TWh). That’s equivalent to the electricity used in 2.4 million homes in the United States, with the same GHG emissions as 3.1 million passenger cars using two billion United States gallons of gasoline
Spam filtering . . . [more]

Something with only a tangential relation to law, but squarely in the middle of our interest in online resources and libraries:

As of today all Canadians can log into the Canadian Cochrane Centre, part of “The Cochrane Collaboration,” and free of charge read abstracts in plain language of studies in medicine and health care — or, as the welcome page puts it:

…the best available evidence on which health treatments work, which ones don’t, and which may cause harm.

I have to say I’ve never encountered the Cochrane Library before and am basically ignorant about how it’s funded and . . . [more]

Here is a link to the settlement that Florida Attorney General Bill McCollum announced this morning to resolve a dispute about Matthew Bender’s subscription renewal practices. . . . [more]

A large crowd to attended the TALL luncheon today to hear Dr. Michael Geist speak on Digital Advocacy. Although his presentation was about an hour long, it seemed far too short. Beginning from his own work using social media to educate people and collect opinion on copyright reform, net neutrality and other information policy issues, Dr. Geist galloped through a multitude of examples of citizens engaging with government (and each other) on issues of public interest. 

Readers of Don Tapscott’s books (especially Wikinomics) will not be surprised at the diversity of the initiatives which featured in the TALL presentation. . . . [more]