I am currently at the Internet Librarian 2008 conference in Monterey, CA. Under the category of “I wish you were here” is the presentation by Michael Sauers, Technology Innovation Librarian from the Nebraska Library Commission. I caught the tail end of his presentation and unfortunately didn’t take notes, but here are his Lessig-esque slides. Michael knows a lot about Creative Commons through practical use as well as trial-and-error.

The Canadian government has released the massive (544 pages) final report of the Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin [PDF] chaired by The Honourable Frank Iacobucci, q.c. Commissioner. There is a secret report, as well as this public version, containing material subject to national security confidentiality.

It is worth, I believe, quoting at some length from Justice Iacobucci’s opening “Commissioner’s Statement”:

[R]espect for rights and freedoms is a constraint on a democracy that ter-rorists do not share. Indeed by their very actions they repudiate these rights and freedoms.

A colleague, John Gillies at Cassels Brock, introduced me to the book “Keeping Found Things Found” earlier in the year. This book should be a key reference for Information Technology (IT) and Information Management (IM) professionals. The book’s subtitle says it all “the study and practice of information management”. Information Management and Knowledge Management are often used as interchangeable terms. However, to do this implies information and knowledge are equivalent. Not! I quote from John Seely Brown who makes the distinction – we say to people “I sent you the information, did you get it?” But we . . . [more]

Ideas are certainly a coin of the internet business realm, if not the only specie, and so it’s natural that makers and marketers want to claim and protect them. Since there’s no copyright in ideas, corporations are careful to require strict non-disclosure agreements from those whom they employ or with whom they do a certain business, relying on secrecy (and prompt NDA enforcement) to protect a notion until it can be matured to a patentable or copyright-able form. Apple, for instance, imposed a NDA obligation on anyone who wanted access to that company’s iPhone operating system data in order to . . . [more]

Steve Matthews frequently teaches us about using RSS feeds and how to repurpose them for different uses. I like this example: last week JD Supra announced all documents are now available for redistribution using RSS feeds and widgets. If you are a member of JD Supra, you can re-purpose your own documents using these tools. Whether you are a member or not, you can also pull specific types of documents (hot documents, law practice articles, legal alerts and newsletters) or specific subjects (currently commercial, environment and energy, and technology law) onto your blog, website, or intranet page.

For an . . . [more]

The website of the Ministry of the Attorney General for Ontario includes an interesting discussion of publication bans in Ontario, but really misses the point when it comes to the distribution of court judgments and publication bans in the era of online distribution and access to legal information.

Publication bans are described on the website as “an exception to the constitutional right of the media to publish information about court cases”. The website goes on to say that publication bans may be necessary in certain cases “to protect the fairness and integrity of the case, the privacy or safety of . . . [more]

As a supplement to Omar’s post, the US Human Rights Action Center has a beautiful animated and musical version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Not the exact text, mind you, but a faithful rendering of its spirit and parts, minus a bit of stiffness. It proves that, as Simon suspected , not all lawyers are typographically challenged.

I’m introducing International Legal Research to our Jessup Moot team today, and the compromis raises, among others, issues of human rights and humanitarian intervention. On these topics the best guide I have found is Marci Hoffman’s chapter in the . . . [more]

Doug Cornelius–someone whose thoughts many of us have followed through his blog KM Space–is leaving his real estate practice at his law firm in Boston and with it his hard-core legal knowledge management work. That being said, I am still hopeful he will practice what he learned there about knowledge management and will continue (at least a little) to update his KM blog. He had me worried that he wouldn’t.

Doug has joined Beacon Capital Partners, a real estate firm also in Boston, as their Chief Compliance Officer.

In talking to Doug recently, I learned that . . . [more]

Attorney Sergei Lemberg, the head of Lemberg & Associates, LLC and who specializes in “lemon law“, has a practical guest blog post over at the Virtual Law Practice blog worth reading. He talks about how he uses newer Web technologies to get work done, collaborate with clients, and advertise his practice.

Some highlights:

I have clients from all over the country and rarely see them in person. I use VOIP for my office phone system for onsite and off-site staff, which gives the impression of everyone being under the same roof. I also take advantage of the Web-based

The Library of Congress website THOMAS, which provides information about U.S. legislation, has established a system of persistent URLs for legislative documents. This means that hyperlinks using this format will always (i.e. for the foreseeable future) take a reader to the desired document, regardless of any server changes that might have occurred since the link was created.

The persistent link is created by following a syntax that assembles a document’s URI. (A “uniform resource identifier” is a unique string of characters that is used to identify a particular resource on the internet; a URL — “uniform resource . . . [more]

Today is Blog Action Day 2008, an international call to action for bloggers to raise awareness on issues of poverty:

“Poverty is not only a pressing issue, it is a complex one. It’s easy to think that there isn’t much an individual can do. Fortunately this isn’t the case at all. With activities ranging from advocacy and professional contribution to charity and financing, there is in fact many ways that we can act.”

The idea is that bloggers sign up to blog about poverty reduction today.

This year’s Blog Action Day has dozens of organizational sponsors and supporters, including . . . [more]

Over the years inside some organizations, libraries and IT departments have had difficulty working with one another. Episode 33 of the TechTherapy podcast from the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the differences and similarities between Libraries and IT departments and, without pointing any finger of blame, discusses why this rift exists. The discussion focuses on academic departments, but a lot of this applies to other types of organizations. (Length of this episode is 13 min, 37 sec.)

Hosts Scott Carlson and Warren Arbogast come up with these differences: . . . [more]