The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has made available free a 138 page e-book, “THE FBI: A Centennial History, 1908-2008.” You may read it online (HTML format) or download the PDF files for each chapter or for the book as a whole; I’d recommend PDF if only for the photographs throughout, which are absent from the HTML version. The various chapters are as follows:

Dedication/Foreword
The Nation Calls, 1908-1923
The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938
World War, Cold War, 1939 to 1953
And Justice for All, 1954-1971
Crime and Corruption Across America, 1972-1988
A World of Trouble,

I’ve just released a new blog watch website over at Stem; this time tracking 54 different law blogs on the topic of DUI law.

A while ago here on Slaw I published a Yahoo pipes tutorial, and tried to show how we can take a set of authoritative feeds for a particular topic and mix them together as a current awareness tool. This new site is a good example of a subject-based feed mix. It’s also a good example of how feed mixing might help for the development internal collections; not simply because it pulls together like subject . . . [more]

I was off for a couple of weeks and am quite proud to say that I did not access my email for 10 days, which is up there with my personal bests. I did have 266 messages in my inbox when I returned but it was worth it. I still find it nice to know that there are places where wireless signals aren’t bouncing off of me and I can’t plugin.

Upon getting plugged back in this week, it has been interesting to watch the goings on with Facebook, Scrabulous and Hasbro. I find it curious that Hasbro has . . . [more]

Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada is a new custom search engine in beta for searching across Canadian law firm websites.

It indexes content from all manner of law firms, big and small. This includes practice group and individual profiles, press releases, news releases, case analysis, and publications such as newsletters.

I have commented on the Library Boy blog on a few other sources for finding law firm newsletters:

• We need a central repository for Canadian law firm newsletters and bulletins (March 8, 2005)
• Tracking Law Firm Newsletters With Linex Legal (July 31, 2007)
• Mondaq – Another Service For Tracking Law

As I’m sure many of you are already aware, LexisNexis has received some interesting press lately. In the July 28, 2008 report issued by the U.S. Department of Justice, a LexisNexis search used by a DOJ employee is reprinted (on p. 21). This search was apparently used for vetting potential employees:

[First name of a candidate]! and pre/2 [last name of a candidate] w/7 bush or gore or republican! or democrat! or charg! or accus! or criticiz! or blam! or defend! or iran contra or clinton or spotted owl or florida recount or sex! or controvers! or racis! or fraud!

Out-Googling Google.

by David J. Bilinsky

July 29, 2008.

♫ I tried my best to let you know
That I’m not trying to test you
It’s just so hard to let you go
When I have nothing against you…♫

Words and music by Midtown

It was just a matter of time. It isn’t that I have anything against you, Google, indeed I have learned so much from you, but in time, all things must end. Alas, I have found another.

Cuil (pronounced cool) is the new well, Cool search engine in town. And she is big – very big . . . [more]

What with the arrest of Radovan Karadžić, world attention will likely return for a moment at least to the Hague, and to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in particular. One way to stay in touch with developments at the ICTY and, indeed, all international justice doings at the Hague, is to frequent the Hague Justic Portal. Available in Dutch, French and English, the portal is the creation of The Hague Academic Coalition, a consortium of various institutes in the Hague. . . . [more]

beSpacific reports that LLRX has posted a positive description of Zotero. The review does not mention that there is only a draft version of a citation style for the Blue Book, and nothing in the works to make Zotero work with our own inimitable Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation.

I think Zotero is the product of the near-to-mid future, and I expect legal writers will move to it as soon as there is a style for them to use, because most of us are fed up with the vagaries of Endnote and related products (lack of networkablility . . . [more]

Genie Tyburski gave us the disappointing news yesterday that she is bringing her site, The Virtual Chase, to a close over the coming months. I will miss her regular updates, hints, tips, and posts of other useful information. She has been maintaining the site and its update, TVC Alert, hosted by her firm Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll in Philadelphia for 12 years. I think congratulations to Genie are in order both for her excellent work with The Virtual Chase and for her new role, as of yesterday, as library manager at Ballard Spahr. However, note that Genie hints . . . [more]

Or rather the value of access to Halsbury’s Laws. That’s the issue that the English courts must decide in a breach of contract claim involving a Reed-Elsevier legal author and the Anglo-Dutch legal publishing conglomerate.

English silk, David Phillips is suing the English division of the publisher, trading as LexisNexis Butterworths, for £316,730 including interest and costs.

Legal publishers aren’t used to being sued.

The claim alleges that LexisNexis breached a deal with Phillips’ father a High Court judge who edited the Income Tax volume of Halsbury’s in the 1970s. I suspect that his Lordship didn’t think it . . . [more]

We encourage you to take a look at our friend Jordan Furlong’s provocation to his legal publishing colleagues:

Stop.
Time out. Stop doing what we’ve always been doing. Put aside the deadlines and schedules for a moment. Put down the pen, those of us still using one. Push back from the keyboard, take a deep breath, and close our eyes. Make a mental list of all of our longstanding assumptions about this industry — what we produce, how we sell it, who buys it. Now, throw all these assumptions out, because it’s just about time for us to reinvent

Some time back we posted about Google’s wisdom of the crowds encyclopedia knol, the idea being that it would be useful to have experts write about what they know and authenticate the pieces by attaching their names and info to them. Google now tells us that the experimental phase is over and you, too, can contribute to the store of the world’s knowledge by either writing your own knol or by making suggestions to those of others, suggestions they’re free to accept or not, of course (a process Google has called “moderated collaboration”).

I have to say that thus . . . [more]