As Clay Shirky’s latest book makes clear, the internet’s reduction of publishing costs to effectively zero has critical implications for all the professions that are built upon the former reality of high publishing costs, librarianship and journalism among them. What will happen to libraries in the coming decades? Do libraries have staying power in the face of a total reversal of the economic reality they are predicated upon?

As the recent discussions on Slaw about changes at Lexis-Nexis Quicklaw and Canadian Law Book indicate, many expect primary legal resources in the digital age to be free of costs, perpetually available, . . . [more]

I just saw an excellent demo by Recommind of two of their products: Decisiv Email and Axcelerate eDiscovery.

A huge challenge for every knowledge enterprise is capturing email on a centralized document management system. This is particularly so for “sent” email.

The Decisiv Email product uses Recommind’s “smart” technology to anticipate which folder to file an email in, whether the email arrives in your Outlook inbox or is being sent by you from Outlook. As you type the subject and content of an outgoing email, for example, the software predicts which client folder the email should be filed in. . . . [more]

First Monday, that veteran academic web journal, has a sustained critique of the web in its current issue. Here are the titles of the articles, linked to abstracts, which will give you a feel:

• Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
• Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
• Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
• Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
• The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
• Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

All of which is framed by a Preface . . . [more]

Canadian Lawyer has given SLAW a nod as a Top 10 luminary of the Canadian blawgosphere.

Others include:

Michael Geist

Law21

Law Firm Web Strategy

eLegal

The Bizop News

Toronto Estate Law Blog

Law is Cool

Library Boy

Rule of Law . . . [more]

From Library Stuff, we learn that Zotero has outperformed all other citation software tested at Citefest 2008, sponsored by Northwestern University Library and Academic Technologies. They tested CiteULike, Connotea, EndNote, NoodleBib, RefWorks, and Zotero. Now we just need a Canadian legal citation style. . . . [more]

Statistics Canada’s February 2008 Health Reports has a study “Getting a second opinion: Health information and the Internet” that explores Canadian adults’ use of the Internet to find health information. Using data from the 2005 Canadian Internet Use Survey, the study found:

• more than one-third of Canadian adults, over half of them women, used the Internet to find health information
• about 38% reported that they had discussed their findings with a doctor or other health care professional
• of the estimated 15 million Canadians who used the Internet from home in 2005, 58% went online at some point to

CCH Canada was kind enough to let me write a column in their monthly e-newsletter for Canadian law students. I had not realized though that it was possible to get a free archive of these (and other CCH newsletters) online and to register to receive them. The articles (not mine!) are quite good and I assume (or hope) that students can benefit from the newsletters.

My column last month was entitled “Managing Legal Knowledge: KM Demystified.” Although most of my columns focused on legal research, I thought it important to introduce students to formal law-related KM since . . . [more]

When you go to the CanLII splash page — http://www.canlii.org — you have to choose between the French and the English version of the site. I noticed today that there is now a tick-box that will cause your browser to remember your choice. This feature may have been there for a while, but I don’t think so, since I’ve been relying on CanLII pretty heavily in recent weeks for judgments for my teaching materials. At any event, this is a small but welcome change, and shows that the great folks behind CanLII are bent on continuous improvement of the service. . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada has published a special edition of its Bulletin of Proceedings that contains a statistical overview of its work for the period 1997-2007.

Tables include:

• number of complete applications for leave to appeal and notices of appeal as of right filed by litigants with the Court’s Registry each year;
• number of leave applications granted and the percentage granted of the total submitted;
• number of appeals heard each year and the number of hearing days over the year;
• information with respect to the number of judgments rendered each year;
• time lines in the life of a

Here’s a note about a new bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents. The announcement is on several lists.

In a long-term labor of love, Hazel Lord, Senior Law Librarian at the University of Southern California School of Law has been tirelessly working on a bibliography of published sources of English medieval legal documents (covering the years 600-1532). What she had thought originally would only be a few hundred sources, has blossomed into a list of close to 1,000 sources!

Because of the nature of the project, Hazel decided that it might be most useful as a wiki.

The group Librarians Without Boders, started at the University of Western Ontario, and aimed at founding “an organization that would benefit libraries around the world” has been asked by Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières to stop using the name.

It’s the white coats the librarians wear: that’s the problem. Far too many people in the world have been summoning librarians to the bedsides of the ailing; far too many donors have been sending money by mistake to “those doctors, you know, those people with their hair up in buns and who wear glasses and say ‘shh!'” instead . . . [more]

MTagger is a tool developed at the University of Michigan to let online library users tag various library resources. For instance, a registered user can tag any item from the main catalogue, Mirlyn. Those not logged in can see the tags and the tag-clouds that appear for every item, and can view the resources bearing a given tag. You can see an invitation to tag an item in the image that appears in this post “below the fold.” At the moment there are just under 300 tags in the tag cloud for all items (where “screwball comedy” and “nouvelle . . . [more]