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]

As reported in the Globe,

In my mind, sir, and in the minds of many of my colleagues and many, many Canadians,” said Mr. Batters during a Jan. 31 meeting of the Canadian Heritage committee, “the purpose of Telefilm is to help facilitate the making of films for mainstream Canadian society – films that Canadians can sit down and watch with their families in living rooms across this great country.

No comment. . . . [more]

Wayne MacPhail, columnist for Rabble.ca (among other things–Wayne wears many hats), tackles the the topic of How Media Can Misrepresent the Web using the sensitive topic of reporting that takes place regarding child pornography. From his article:

A couple of weeks ago, Canadian media outlets reported that, across the country, 44,970 computers were actively engaged in trading child pornography – 15,140 of them in Ontario.
…

First, this story is a classic case of mainstream media slipping casually into the “Internet as source of all evil” mindset. Yes, child pornography is heinous and those who either abuse children and/or collect

We learned recently via Michael Lines’ post “Harvard Adopts an Open Access Mandate for Faculty Publications” that that Faculty of Arts and Sciences has adopted an open access mandate. I thought it might be interesting for our readers to see the actual wording of the mandate.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit (CALL/ACBD) sent out a reminder today that members of CALL/ACBD have until 31 March 2008 to nominate a person or organization to receive the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

Although it would be extremely presumptuous of me to suggest that readers of SLAW who are also members of CALL/ACBD think of SLAW as a possible recipient (in light of the high calibre of past recipients of this award – listed here if you scroll down the page), it would be an honour to just be . . . [more]

Just received from Patrick McNeill, ((VP, Sales, LexisNexis Canada Inc., Reed Elsevier)).

Attached is an announcement released today from LexisNexis Canada regarding enhancements to our case law collection in light of the Canada Law Book takedown March 31, 2008.

It’s a long statement, a letter from Gary Rodrigues, and an Appendix of Contents . . . [more]