On June 2, 2008 (one week ago) the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of Major League Baseball Advanced Media v. C.B.C. Distribution and Marketing, Inc (2007) 505 F.3d 818. ((8th Cir.(Mo.) Oct 16, 2007)), the Fantasy Sports case. To backtrack a bit; for those who are unfamiliar, Fantasy Sports (or rotisserie and many other names), is the pursuit where players “select” teams of players from real sports teams and compete against other fantasy sports players based upon the statistics compiled by the players they have selected, Wikipedia Definition here.

Fantasy sports have evolved over the . . . [more]

Digital Research Tools (DiRT)

This wiki collects information about tools and resources that can help scholars (particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research more efficiently or creatively. Whether you need software to help you manage citations, author a multimedia work, or analyze texts, Digital Research Tools will help you find what you’re looking for. We provide a directory of tools organized by research activity, as well as reviews of select tools in which we not only describe the tool’s features, but also explore how it might be employed most effectively by researchers.

I like the way the table . . . [more]

Following along from last month’s exchanges at the Writers’ Union, a couple of interesting speculative pieces on what technology will do to book publishing and to libraries.

The Economist has a piece this week from Book Expo America on Publishers worry as new technologies transform their industry
. I liked the last line, which echoes what I said to the Writers’ Union:

Publishing has only two indispensable participants: authors and readers. As with music, any technology that brings these two groups closer makes the whole industry more efficient—but hurts those who benefit from the distance between them.

But . . . [more]

A friend raises an interesting question for the Slaw community:

Imagine that you have a ten person lawyer firm (+ support staff) that needs to move to matter-centric DM. What choices would such a firm have, other than the conventional (and somewhat pricey) legal DM vendors (i.e. OpenText and Interwoven), whose work is good but doesn’t quite scale this small.

Does anyone know whether there is a matter-centric DM based on open source or web services, keeping in mind standard law firm security and confidentiality requirements. Does anyone have any novel ideas or suggestions? . . . [more]

Two recent announcements show that Lexis has identified India as a significant market for future sales. This is all before the Indian market is fully opened up for foreign law firms, of course, when there will be an explosion of demand for access to foreign law.

LexisNexis, as part of its global expansion strategy, aims to be the number one print and electronic, legal, tax and regulatory publisher in India. LexisNexis has offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai. To this end, a senior executive, John Atkinson has been named Managing Director for LexisNexis Butterworths India, to be based . . . [more]

Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson point out in the May 29th FIR Cut of their public relations and technology podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report that the Canadian government has a contract with Open Text to develop social networking tools for its quarter of a million employees.

The May 27, 2008 news release on the Open Text website indicates this a renewal of their enterprise content management (ECM) system currently used by 58 federal government departments and agencies. What is new are the implementation of Web 2.0 capabilities:

The contract will also enable the Canadian Federal Government

One of the highlights of this year’s CALL conference was the presentation by Darlene Fichter on Web 2.0 which kicked off our conference program Monday morning. I was privileged to introduce Darlene, who is Coordinator of the Data Library Services at the University of Saskatchewan and Advisor on Emerging Technologies, as well as consultant and project manager on various website, portal, library and intranet projects. Her talk was delightful. These slides which she posted to Slideshare for us only partially capture her lively presentation.

I love those gophers! During her presentation Darlene identified that . . . [more]

Simon noted last year the sources available for legal researchers on Microsoft’s Live.com book search.

However, an announcement on Microsoft’s blog on Friday indicated that the project is over and that this field has now been yielded entirely to Google. . . . [more]

What do law librarians get up to. Some wonderful images from AALL’s Day in the Life Competition in which the third prize combines my dear friend Ricki Andersen‘s passions for cats and statutes: . . . [more]

Today’s Dayton Business Journal describes a shake-up involving our friends at Lexis, as Reed Elsevier continues its process of moving jobs from Ohio to India.

The plans are to move a quarter of the jobs over the next few years. It’s been a forty year linkage between Dayton and legal research since the Ohio Bar started the work on automating legal information.

In a presentation given in Toronto late last year, former Reed Elsevier plc officer Sanjay Viswanathan gave a presentation that showed the LexisNexis parent company restructuring through 2010. The presentation shows the company will shift 900 jobs

A 2007 discussion paper mooting a proposed “plurilateral” Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, to bind Canada, the U.S., Japan, and European nations among others, has been making the rounds of various websites lately. Leaked last week by the interesting WikiLeaks, you can read the document here [PDF].

Quite apart from anything else, the role proposed to be given to border guards seems problematic.

[And while I’m here, why “plurilateral,” a word that hasn’t yet made it to the online OED? What was wrong with “multilateral”?] . . . [more]

A few Slawyers are currently in Saskatoon at the annual conference of CALL/ACBD. On Sunday we held business meetings of the various committees and special interest groups, as well as held a Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum to discuss publisher/vendor issues, followed by demonstrations by a number of the vendors.

A few trends to report back:

• During the Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum the publishers asked about reducing the number of paper catalogues they produce both to be more environmentally friendly and no doubt to also reduce costs as catalogues are expensive to produce and print. One suggestion was