Here’s an announcement that 1.8 million pages of US case law are soon to be available online for free under a CC licence, and will be explicitly marked as public domain. The database will be a

free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754.

This via Library Stuff, Open Access News, and BoingBoing . . . [more]

Hello folks

We just got an email press release from Hein today announcing its partnership with Serials Solutions.

The press release is here:
http://www.serialssolutions.com/press/press10-18-07.pdf

I wonder what Hein means when it says:
“William S. Hein & Co., Inc. announces the availability of the first direct and authorized federated search connection”…

I could be wrong here, but I think they are trying to suggest to us that perhaps our digging into Hein collections by any other federated search would be “unauthorized”.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but the mere suggestion irritates me. How else are library users supposed . . . [more]

I saw an in-person demo today by RBRO Solutions on the new Interwoven Universal Search. Nice product.

Pros:

– it can crawl and search pretty much any type of data or document management system (i.e., it is not limited to Interwoven for DMS searching)

– the “universal” element means you can choose to search, for example, on “motion to compel” on your internal document management system, on Lexis or Westlaw, the World Wide Web and your internal library catalog, all in one search (the product comes “out of the box” with a fairly large number of “connectors” to allow . . . [more]

I couldn’t resist immediately checking out docstoc when I received Robert Ambrogi’s post on the topic just now. The site, as mentioned, is like a “YouTube” for “professional” documents, including legal documents. I remain skeptical, but who knows? . . . [more]

The U.N. has a Universal Human Rights Index of United Nations Documents that lets you search the database by country, the right in question (e.g. “acceptance of international norms” “right to life”) and by the relevant Treaty Body (e.g. Committee on Migrant Workers, Committee on the Rights of the Child). The index is accessible in English, French and Spanish. . . . [more]

Professor Armand de Mistral’s project on PTAs has just been published on the internet. The announcement from McGill describes it as follows:

The database is an information center that lists international PTAs, and contains links to their texts, and the official websites of the government department responsible for them. It also contains an interdisciplinary bibliography on PTAs-related issues. The database was built two years ago and since then, we are constantly adding information to it to keep it as current as possible. In fact, we believe that it is the most up-to-date and comprehensive database of its kind.

Some sections . . . [more]

The blog Rands in Repose just published a Nerd Handbook, ostensibly aimed at helping someone attached to a nerd understand that nerd. Here the nerd is understood in terms of involvement with a computer.

You could, of course, understand the handbook as applying to lawyers or legal librarians, it seems to me. The fit isn’t perfect (observation 5 doesn’t carry over for lawyers in my experience), but it’s enough to give one pause.

Herewith the topic heads from the handbook, with substitutions suggested where appropriate, and a few quotes under the first heading to give you the flavour:

1. Understand

The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) today unveiled its new Legal Threats Database (http://www.citmedialaw.org/database), a catalog of the growing number of lawsuits, cease and desist letters, and other legal challenges faced by those engaging in online speech. This publicly accessible database — already containing hundreds of entries — will provide lawyers, citizen journalists, and mainstream media alike with a valuable resource for assessing the validity and possible outcomes of legal threats to online speech, based on actual cases and legal actions.

Center for Citizen Media Press Release

The Citizen Media Law Project is an affiliate of both Harvard’s Berkman . . . [more]

Back in June I wrote about Powerset, a start-up aiming to become an important natural language search engine. At the time I said, “I’m probably wrong, but this one feels like it might go a mile or two.”

Since then I’ve become one of the Powerset Labs volunteers, let into the alpha test phase, and if anything my sense has strengthened that these people are on to something important and useful. Along with perhaps a couple hundred other active volunteer testers — there’s growning bench strength, and I imagine more and more will move from passive to active roles . . . [more]

As I said I might, I did in fact “feed” IBM’s Many Eyes with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, just to see what a “tag cloud” for it would look like. You can get to it here, or by clicking on the image.

As you can see our anxieties — French, English, language — are writ large. (En anglais, il faut dire; je me demande comment la version français apparaîtrait et s’il y aurait des differences entre les versions…) I’m glad to see “law” is larger than “government.”

The site uses Java, so you’ll have to have that . . . [more]

Many law firms appear to have implemented or will be implementing Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS 2007) for online network collaboration and search.

A Google Blog Search on: *sharepoint law firm* has any number of interesting and relevant posts on its applicability to a law firm environment.

From a recent post (sorry, can’t remember where from) I saw mention of a fairly recent “pedia” (or is that “wiki”?) for SharePoint called SharePointPedia that I don’t think has yet been mentioned on SLAW. They describe themselves in these terms:

SharePointPedia.com is a web site where people discover and

Speaking of visualizing legal information, as I was just a post ago, here’s the Brazilian 1988 Constitution done as a “tag” cloud. It’s one of the Visualizations on Many Eyes, an IBM experimental particpatory sandbox. The graphic is linked to the site, and you’ll need Java on to see it. You can search for terms (in Portuguese, naturally) and the cloud display will give results that reflect your search term as it changes letter by letter.

I can’t say that this is ideally what I’d do to a legal document but it does at least give a different perspective. . . . [more]