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]

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]