We’ve blogged a couple of times about Carl Malmud’s efforts to provide free access to U.S. cases and other important documents (see: Case Law Just Wants To Be Free and Carl Malmud Publishes Cases). Now Boing Boing reports that Malmud’s efforts to gain access to U.S. federal legislative histories has run into a block in the form of Thomson West. Complied by law librarians at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the histories have been scanned by Thomson West pursuant to a deal they made with the GAO; and now Thomson West claims an exclusive right to the documents.

Malmud . . . [more]

I earlier commented on SLAW on the problem of link rot on the web.

I am updating my “Doing Legal Research in Canada” guide on LLRX.com since I believe I last updated it in 2004 and it is out-of-date (my similar guide on NYU’s Globalex site is more current for now than the guide on LLRX.com).

As part of updating the LLRX.com guide, I was struck by the fact that easily more than 50% of the links were broken (and for some topics, it was as high as 90%). All within 3 years or so! And the existing links were . . . [more]

A colleague made me aware of an online Compendium of Damages Awarded in Personal Injury Actions Across Ontario (January 1999 – November 2005). It is posted on the website of the County of Carleton Law Association (CCLA) and appears to have been part of a project chaired by Mr. Justice Chadwick, with the help of local lawyers, students and law clerks.

I assume it was aimed at pro se litigants and must have been quite an effort. What I find puzzling though is that most of this data (and I assume more extensive data) is available in Carswell’s Goldsmith’s . . . [more]

We have friends whose marriages have been arranged and who find themselves far from India in new relationships. A new website provides legal information for women in that situation.

A venture of the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Extension, the Legal Resource Centre, the Alberta Law Foundation, and the Changing Together organization the website was launched last month to help educate foreign brides and immigrant women about marital relationships and the law in Canada. . . . [more]

CALL/ACBD 2008
May 25-28, 2008
Saskatoon

Tomorrow is the early bird deadline for this year’s CALL Conference.

Also, there is a terrific pre-conference workshop, the Law Library Leadership Institute being held Saturday, May 24th that is definitely worth checking out.

If you work in a law library, or are otherwise part of the law library community, I hope you will join me at the CALL conference! . . . [more]

That’s the argument in a great posting by Bob Ambrogi, which describes the history of the last quarter century of providing greater public access to the decisions of the courts.

According to Bob, it’s all over for American caselaw, as of February 11, 2008. . . . [more]

Via Resource Shelf, a link to UNESCO’s new Freedom of information: a comparative legal survey. This follows on Alasdair Roberts’ 2005 Blacked Out: Government Secrecy in the Information Age, which won the 2006 Louis Brownlow Book Award, and three other book awards in 2007. Professor Roberts is another high-octane Canadian hiding out in the US. . . . [more]

On Monday the British House of Lords starts blogging. The Times reports that Lord Soley, Lord Norton, Lord Tyler, Lord Lipsey, Lord Dholakia, Baroness D’Souza, Lord Teverson, Baroness Young of Hornsey and Baroness Murphy — collectively to be known as Lords of the Blog — will begin a 6-month experiment aimed at raising public awareness of the role and business of the House of Lords.

Lord Soley of Hammersmith has been blogging for some time under the title of Lord of the Blog, and has just now (6 pm EST Sunday, March 16), even as I write, posted about . . . [more]

For all of you who manage the firm intranet, or are charged with capture technologies for internal KM… do yourself a favour and check out this post on Google Blogoscoped.

A very interesting look at Google’s internal web functionality. Comes via a KM World webinar yesterday called Innovation@Google: A Day In The Life. An event I didn’t partake in, but really wished I had. :)

One of the screen captures below:

. . . [more]

KMWorld’s recent article “Content Management vs. Knowledge Management: A Summary of Key Differences” highlights the key differences between content management systems and knowledge management systems. As the article points out, understanding these differences is important when deciding which type of solution will best meet your organization’s need for producing, creating, capturing, distributing and evaluating knowledge. . . . [more]

Thought I’d pass along this excellent resource that was featured in a message posted to the NCALL listserv today by Neal Ferguson of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Ottawa. It’s a PowerPoint by Catherine Best of Best Canadian Guide to Legal Research fame that was used at a presentation to the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries last month. It’s available here.

The CanLII interface is also reviewed.

This will certainly be useful for legal research sessions when people start asking why they should use one resource over the other…. . . . [more]

The UN Statistics Division has a search tool, UNdata, which is worth looking at. Drawing on 13 databases — environment, population, agriculture… but not law — UNdata provides a window on some 55 million records.

The search results are presented in a really useful format, as well. The results page offers you two tabs, Data Series and Table Presentations, that will give you documents or tables, respectively, in which your search terms appear. As well, in the Data Series tab you may choose whether to download the document, view it online, or preview it in a popup window.

[via . . . [more]