Bucking the trends of the global free access to law movement, our friends in Eagan have unveiled an ambitious interface to Chinese law.

We’re back to East of Eagan: . . . [more]

Ever since Thomson took over the Lawyers’ Co-operative Publishing Company in Rochester and acquired West Publishing in Eagan and St. Paul, there’s been apprehension about what the new owners might do to high-paying editorial jobs in both towns. If Indian outsourcing is affecting legal information, could it also affect the production and processing of legal information?

At the same time that Toronto’s Globe and Mail was printing an upbeat story about silver linings in economic clouds, the local papers in Rochester and Eagan were reporting about seventy editorial and production jobs that are heading east to India and the Philippines. . . . [more]

Those interested in European law or in freedom of expression might want to take a look at documents from “The European Protection of Freedom of Expression: Some Recent Restrictive Trends”, a recent seminar at the European Court of Human Rights, which was directed at the question: “Are recent developments in the Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights case-law undermining adequate guarantees for freedom of expression?”

Here’s a partial list of papers available in PDF, to give you a sense of what’s there:

Freedom of Expression and Article 10 ECHR – Summaries of 20 recent

I doubt that this is much of a surprise to the law library community. US New and World Report has discovered that special librarianship is a great career choice for those who enjoy watching politics. I can’t imagine doing this job without some interest in and knowledge of the machinery of government and the workings of the political process!

Other jobs mentioned in the article: lobbyist, tour guide, reporter, translator/interpreter, journalist. Folks, I think we picked the right one (although journalism wouldn’t be bad…)

If you weren’t following your current career, what would you do?

(Hat tip to the Law . . . [more]

Google introduced a really clever website over the last few days. Although they’re always getting flak for all the personal info they gather from you, there really are some pretty interesting things they can do with all that information. Like make the Centre for Disease Control obsolete.

OK, maybe that’s a bit too hyperbolic, but their new program has managed to closely approximate the CDC’s tracking of flu bugs, simply through aggregating all the web searches people do on the topic. Apparently the number of people who google “Neo Citran” or other similar terms gives you a great idea . . . [more]

Although both of the Canadian tools below have been available for some time now, I have only recently started to experiment with them.

Both products – which are free but which each require subscriptions/passwords – will “auto-populate” your research memos with hypertext links to the cases cited in your memo.

The Quicklaw product is Auto Link which will add hypertext links to the Quicklaw version of cases cited in your memo (it allows you to do this in bulk, that is, with more than one memo at a time). Related to this product on the same page is downloadable software . . . [more]

I have a thing for government documents. “GovDocs” was my best class in library school.

I have a particular thing for UN documents because the UN deals with just about anything and everything.

Here are a few recent ones:

• Our World 2.0: the United Nations University (yes, they have their own university) launched a webzine this past summer about solutions for the planet’s climate, oil and food security messes
• Toolkit to Combat Human Trafficking: the UN Office on Drugs and Crime has developed a “toolkit” that provides guidance to policymakers, law enforcers, judges, prosecutors, and victim service providers

Any thoughts on whether you think any sort of trend has emerged re how libraries are paying for licensed content/databases/periodicals? In other words, are libraries paying on a per use basis, or as annual, quarterly, etc., subscription fees, or otherwise?

Please post your comments here or at: www.licensingdigitalcontent.blogspot.com. . . . [more]

Lawyers often pride themselves as being the gatekeepers to legal information. But with the proliferation of free legal citations and commentary online, some are turning to Google.

Devin Johnston, a law student at UofM and contributor at Law is Cool, has an excellent piece today, GoogleLII: Using Google to Research Case Law.

He outlines some basic techniques like advance searches, and the quality of information found on the net.

Devin does say that Googling is not appropriate for traditional legal practice. But Prof. Moin Yahya of the University of Alberta also noted earlier this year that the failure . . . [more]

The Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation was created by the editors of the McGill Law Journal and published by Carswell Thomson. The Guide is unique in that it is truly national in scope. It covers both civil law and common law and is published in English and in French. It has been adopted as the official standard for citation by both French language and English language law reviews and by a number of courts. These are significant accomplishments.

However, unlike the inclusive nature of the content, the Guide takes a restrictive approach to access. Originally published in 1986 and . . . [more]

Seems Slaw isn’t the only website having tech troubles. This from CanLII just now:

We are currently experiencing difficulties with our case law search indexes. Some recent cases may be omitted from your search results. We will inform you as soon as the problem is fixed.

We apologize for the inconveniences.

In response to the changing needs of students and researchers, and the changing information environment, academic libraries are re-evaluating their roles, and planning their futures. As part of this general and ongoing adjustment, there is an opportunity for librarians to capitalize on their expertise in bibliography, to shore up their position at the heart of scholarly communications, and to improve their budgets by supporting in-house academic publishing.

Karla Hahn, Director of the Office of Scholarly Communication at ARL, has done a lot of ground breaking research in this area, and an accessible interview with her on the topic has . . . [more]