I am spending a month on an academic exchange at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. This is a researcher’s heaven. There is a library of nearly 500,000 volumes covering about 200 (yes, 200!!) jurisdictions, with legislation, caselaw, journals, and monographs available for use in the library. The major databases, including key European West databases, are available to researchers. Every researcher has an allocated desk or office.

There are perhaps 100 users of the facilities at any one time, from all around the world. They are not here to undertake a specific degree, . . . [more]

According to the Secrecy Report Card 2008 of the U.S. advocacy group OpenTheGovernment.org, U.S. government secrecy continued to rise in 2007.

It is the organization’s fifth annual report assessing trends in public access to information in that Great Republic to the South.

A representative of the American Association of Law Libraries sits on the steering committee of the watchdog group that fights to push back government secrecy.

Among the highlights:

• The American government spent $195 maintaining the secrets already on the books for every one dollar the government spent declassifying documents in 2007, a 5% increase in one year. At

♫ If you’ve got a plan
If you’ve got a master plan
Got to vote for you
Hey hey, got to vote for you
‘Cause you’re the man… ♫

Words and music by: Marvin Gaye and Kenneth Stover.

The fall election – in both Canada and the USA – is taking place at a particularly interesting time. Courtesy of blogs, the public are making their voices heard to a degree that has not been possible in the past. Access to the media was not particularly easy in the past, but by virtue of the Internet, that no longer matters . . . [more]

Lexis has released a web search page, LexisWeb, that offers, in effect, federated searching across an unspecified number of law-related web pages from sites vetted by Lexis editorial staff.

From the user guide [PDF]:

The Lexis Web product includes important, legal-oriented Web content selected and validated by the LexisNexis editorial staff. You can trust that all content has met LexisNexis criteria for being authoritative and accurate. The current beta version combines content from thousands of Web sites and millions of Web pages, with more being added each day:

• Governmental agency information (federal, state, local)
• Informal commentary on

…at least according to a list put together by Best Colleges Online. The list is divided under the heads of Architecture, Technology and Innovation, and Digital Collections.

Not a single Canadian pick, alas. And though the bulk are U.S. libraries, of course, there’s a solid rank of choices from abroad under the architecture section, for some reason. And speaking of the architecture section, I have to say that whoever put the list together wasn’t thinking: many of the links lead to the main library sites, where (somewhat surprisingly) there are no photos of the building or the facilities. ((For much . . . [more]

♫ Oh I…
I want to be with you everywhere… ♫

Words and music by Christine McVie, recorded by Fleetwood Mac.

It seems that we are living in a mini-renaissance with new technology applications being released seemingly daily. Google has released Google Chrome (see Simon Fodden’s post of Sept 1, 2008) with the stated justification that the web needs a solid foundation for modern web applications. Law firms face a similar problem – the need for a solid foundation for capturing of all the myriad bits of information that form the electronic client file into one place. . . . [more]

Good news from Austlii, which has had a rocky year since some of its core funding was cut off. There is a good explanation of just how the legal profession benefits in a letter from the Law Council.

From a Canadian perspective, Austlii has effectively supplanted the commercial services for our access to Australian law. It’s financial troubles are deeply troubling, and one hopes that Canberra will follow Victoria’s lead

The Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) is to receive nearly $840,000 to expand the scope of Victorian legal information, such as legislation, decisions and interpretive material, that was

Not yet, according to widely reported remarks from Bangalore over the weekend, to the graduating class at the National Law School. See the Hindu ((Not the Hindu Times, Simon, as you blogged in August)),Economic Times and Mangalorean reports.

National Law School of India University Vice-Chancellor A. Jayagovind on Sunday expressed concern over decline in the number of students pursuing higher studies in law.

The Vice-Chancellor went on:

“Our law schools are however yet to make a mark in terms of advancement of knowledge. Hopefully, most of us have been able to impart reasonably good legal education which was

At ILTA last week, Lexis teamed up with Interwoven to announce a new product that they claim will solve the vexed problem of e-mail management, including the ability to automatically file by subject and client, as well as support for archiving and disposing of e-mail as appropriate. The tools integrate tightly with Microsoft Exchange Server and Open Text’s document management tools.

Here is the announcement: . . . [more]

Our friends at Canlii are celebrating eight years. Yes August 29, 2000 it all started.

Now CanLII publishes over 140 databases, gets nearly 25,000 visits per day, 2,500 new cases are added every week and 11 statutory databases are updated monthly.

The announcement has links so you can look back at what it used to look like.

Long may it thrive. . . . [more]

While we’ve had discussions from time to time about Second Life, but we missed telling you about a novel virtual workshop on innovative forms of library services through virtual worlds. The workshop explored the benefits and challenges of operating a virtual world law library program, leading to practical advice on how to create and present a program or topical resource within Second Life.

The website noted that a legal community is developing in Second Life: over 65 lawyers and firms have an official Second Life presence, the “Second Life Bar Association” has 200+ members, and the ABA has recently . . . [more]

I am occasionally surprised by really great service.

Here is an example: In the spring I sent an email to the Alberta Energy Resources Conservation Board to let them know that even though their news releases were available through the Alberta Government RSS feeds, I thought it would be a good idea if they had their own RSS channels so that if someone only wanted their material, it would be available. I was happily surprised this week when I received an e-mail saying they had their own RSS feeds.

A quick check tells me that there are a couple of . . . [more]