The announcement that Louis Mirando has been appointed as Osgoode’s new Chief Law Librarian was made today by Dean Patrick Monahan:

I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Louis Mirando as
Osgoode’s Chief Law Librarian, effective March 1.

Mr. Mirando, who has a Master of Library Science degree from the University
of Toronto and has also done post-graduate studies at the University of
Cologne in Germany and at U of T, has provided outstanding leadership as
Director, Library Services at Torys LLP in Toronto for the past 15 years.
Prior to that, he held a variety of

Perhaps the only consolation for going to the dentist is the chance to read a magazine of the sort you wouldn’t normally see. Buried behind sadly outdated copies of Flare and Chatelaine, Sports Illustrated and People, I found MIT’s Technology Review. It’s great. If you’re interested generally in technology, and not just in the information technology that powers much of your legal work, this is the mag for you. But don’t take my word for it — I’m not selling subscriptions. Check it out online.

Three or four fresh stories get posted each day [feed]; there are . . . [more]

Last week Agnese Caruso reported that the Library of Congress is running a pilot project with Flickr to make its photographic collections available over the web. According to the Library of Congress Blog, the response has been tremendous:

The response to the Library’s pilot project with Flickr has been nothing short of astounding. You always hope for a positive reaction to something like this, but it has been utterly off the charts—from the Flickr community, from the blogosphere, from the news media—it is nothing short of amazing.

Let’s start out with a few statistics, as of last night (thanks,

New on LLRX.com is an article by Debbie Ginsberg and Meg Kribble called Social Networks for Law Librarians and Law Libraries, or How We Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Friending. Great title, and a great article to go with it!

I enjoyed their discussion of how law librarians are using social networks to connect with communities and each other. My personal interest is how law firms are using social networks, so I found this little tidbit interesting: . . . [more]

The most recent issue of the Canadian government’s Weekly Checklist features the 2006 annual report on electronic surveillance from Public Safety Canada.

The report outlines the use of electronic surveillance of private communications by law enforcement agencies to assist in criminal investigations.

Under the Criminal Code, agencies must obtain judicial authorization before conducting the surveillance.The government is required to prepare and present to Parliament an annual report on the use of electronic surveillance.

The 2006 Annual Report covers a five-year period from 2002 to 2006. The Report includes new statistics for the period of January 1, 2006 to December . . . [more]

We’re getting ready to launch our SharePoint 2007 portal. At launch, our goal is to have features and functions that will appeal to both searchers and browsers. The portal will be the new desktop and will be the access point for legal, non-legal, business, administrative, client and financial information in the firm.

Some of the content on the portal is organized by practice area. Content for a practice area will include relevant precedents, commonly used research resources, practice area materials (such as meetings agendas and minutes), and relevant business development material.

Of particular interest to me is the ability to . . . [more]

An announcement that’s appropriate, given that this weeks Column is on e-discovery:

The Sedona Canada E-discovery Principles [PDF] in English are now up on the Canadian E-discovery Portal, which is hosted by Lexum. The French version will be posted soon.

You will also be able to find Canadian e-discovery related precedents (common law, civil law) on the Portal.

Congratulations to everyone involved, particularly the “content managers” Peg Duncan, Dan Pinnington, Frédéric Pelletier and (Slawyer) Dominic Jaar. . . . [more]

We learn yet again, from a recent N.Y. Times piece that book titles can’t be copyrighted: there are now two books in print (one 30 years old, mind you) called The Saucier’s Apprentice.

Apart from the fact that Raymond Sokolov, the author of the older book, has done a brilliant job of promoting his work through this piece — it’s the work that comes up when you search for “the saucier’s apprentice” — what interests me is the question of why. Why can’t you copyright a book’s title? Or, to put it more broadly, why can’t you protect . . . [more]

A letter has gone out to Canada’s law deans from the Director General of Legal Affairs Bureau of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) stating that the Bureau wishes to “enhance Canada’s current engagement with the work of the [International Law] Commission, including its studies and recommendations.” The Bureau would like

to hear of Canadian legal academics who are following the Commission’s work, whether in total or with respect to a specific topic. …We would welcome receiving an email providing us with the name, contact details, and areas of specific interest with respect to the Commission’s work

Larry Lessig’s book “The Future of Ideas” is now free to download under Creative Commons attribution-non-commercial license.

Published in 2001 by Random House, the book addresses IP and the impact on it of the internet. You can read an excerpt here.

Lessig’s other books are also available free under a Creative Commons license:

Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Creativity (Penguin Press, 2004).

Code And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (Basic Books, 2006).

[via Digital Koans] . . . [more]

Although many online repositories of books have been mentioned here, one that has not is the Universial Digital Library. This collection, created by a group including Carnegie Mellon university, the Library of Alexandria, and a number of universities from China and India, already has over a million titles (of which 360,000 are in English), and claims it will grow to 10 million within 10 years.

You can browse the collection by title, author, year, language, or subject. Browsing the “Law” collection yields 24,772 titles. An advanced search function is also available.

Now if only someone would invent the perfect . . . [more]

I don’t think Slaw has mentioned the International Judicial Monitor, an “international law resource for judiciaries, justice sector professionals, and the rule of law community around the world.” Published, or refreshed, every two months or so, this issue of the Monitor has a feature piece on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, and notes on a dozen judicial developments in as many countries. There’s also a useful page of “international resources.”

The Monitor is published by the American Society of International Law in Washington, D.C. . . . [more]