Yesterday, I attended a really stimulating discussion at the Writers’ Union Annual Meeting involving Jill Tonus of Bereskin & Parr and the Director of the Scream Literary Festival and York University’s experimental new media lab, Bill Kennedy. The session was moderated by Derek Weiler, the Editor of Quill & Quire.

The issue that Canadian authors confront is how to adapt their work and their expectations to shifting business models for Canadian book and periodical publishing which are continually under threat by shifting market forces, and the new technologies. . . . [more]

Statistics Canada just released its youth court and adult criminal court statistics for 2006/2007. Key findings:

Youth court:

• Fewer young people have been appearing before a judge since the enactment of the Youth Criminal Justice Act in April 2003, and fewer are being sent to custody.
• The youth court caseload has declined in every province and territory since the introduction of the Act.
• The proportion of cases in which young people either pleaded guilty, or were found guilty, has been gradually declining.

Adult criminal court:

• Cases in adult criminal courts are taking longer to complete.
• Fewer cases are being

15 months after its creation by the Quebec government, and after extensive public hearings in all regions of the province on the issue of how far society should go to accommodate requests for religious and cultural adjustments from individuals from minority groups, the Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences finally released its report and recommendations.

The 2 commissioners, sociologist Gérard Bouchard and philosopher Charles Taylor, make 37 recommendations.

Among them, they suggest that the government prepare an official White Paper on secularism (“laïcité”), that it promote interculturalism and provide better funding to diversity programs, that it . . . [more]

As reported in Slaw (Oregon Claims Copyright Over Laws and It’s All Gone Ore-gon), the state of Oregon maintains that it holds the copyright over its laws and has moved to prevent their publication by others. Now the state will hold a hearing in June to reconsider the question. . . . [more]

Colleague Elizabeth Ellis blogged here last month on the advantage that SharePoint provides with distributed content: the idea that you can build a list of links to websites in a single source and then have SharePoint use that data to harvest the information, filter it by category (e.g., Litigation) and display it to the appropriate group within your organization.

I wholeheartedly agree with this, but having been several months behind Elizabeth on a similar project, the cynical part of me starts to ask (after just adding to my list the 650th URL): do users actually use lists of website links . . . [more]

The Association of College & Research Libraries publication C&RL News has a current article by Anne Blecksmith pointing to open access digital image collections on the deep Web (you won’t find these collections via search engines or Flickr). The article links to and describes a wide array of digital image collections, including collaborative collections as well as those from universities, public libraries and archives, and historical societies. See the post on this article from one of my favorite blogs ReadWriteWeb. . . . [more]

Library and Archives Canada (LAC) has launched a new website called A Nation’s Chronicle: The Canada Gazette:

“Often referred to as ‘the official newspaper of the Government of Canada,’ the Canada Gazette has been an important instrument in the Canadian democratic process for more than 160 years. It has served to inform Canadians of the operations of government and to involve them actively in the legislative process. With this site, Library and Archives Canada (LAC), in co-operation with the Canada Gazette Directorate, Public Works and Government of Services Canada, will make the Gazette available online, in its entirety, for

CALL/ACBD’s annual conference is quickly approaching. This year we are meeting in beautiful Saskatoon. There is still time to register if you have not yet done so! Also, the pre-conference workshop on Saturday, May 24th is the Law Library Leadership Institute looks outstanding.

If you go, please say hello. . . . [more]

Roy Mersky may not have been the first person to ride a horse through a major law library but he was likely the smartest, shortest and most published ((His bibliography is awesome in its length)). . . . [more]

Well this is news to me! If you check out Michel-Adrien’s post below, this news item was delivered via a new CanLII blog. And guess what? There’s an RSS feed too!

Now we can follow along at home. :) . . . [more]

The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), the source of free online Canadian legal information created by the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, announced earlier this week that it has surpassed the 500,000 case mark in its database:

“When it was launched in the fall of 2000, CanLII contained less than 30,000 cases. Over the years, the content development went through various stages: first, recent cases from all appeal and superior courts, then from all courts, and so on. Recently, focus has been placed on the addition of important historical case law as well as administrative tribunals. All those

Last week I was invited, wearing my hat of law librarian, to participate in a round table discussion on art, the Internet and intellectual property with the group ArtMob. ArtMob is a group of artists, scholars and other stakeholders interested in the intersection between Canadian culture and copyright and intellectual property law, and how it comes into play with the Web. . . . [more]