So the Hogwarts’ Headmaster was. So much for innocence. In a pre-wired, pre-web connected world, would it have mattered? Will this effect sales? Will there be be some re-enactments of Fahrenheit 451? Celsius 232.78 doesn’t quite have the same ring. Or class actions commenced by entrepreneurial legalists seeing the return of their clients’ ill-obtained shekels? Or alleging intentional or reckless or at least negligent infliction of mental suffering on the sensitive souls nurtured in the gentility of NASCAR ?

Off to more important matters. I think I can add to the discussion that Barbara Johnson has started in her Slaw . . . [more]

I’ve blogged a couple of times already about Zotero, that impressive Firefox extension that operates as a note-taker and bibliographic software. Zotero can tell when you’re viewing a book or an article or, now, a legal judgment, but until recently it had no category, if you like, for blog entry. That’s changed.

COinS (ContextObjects in Spans) is a simple way of embedding citation metadata in web pages. Zotero developed a WordPress plugin that uses the COinS specification for making basic metadata available to it. ((There seems to be a problem with the way the plugin interacts with version 2.2.2 . . . [more]

Microsoft’s Live Search has a “Books” section that lets you search for and within the books that Microsoft is scanning for those libraries with which it is partnering. Material in the public domain is 100% searchable, readable on line and, typically, capable of being downloaded in PDF.

I did a very crude search (Canada and Canada AND law) — there doesn’t seem to be an advanced search feature in Live Search Books — and came up with hundreds and hundreds of hits. There is truly a treasure trove here for legal historians and historians of law. . . . [more]

From the International Herald Tribune article, “Research libraries close their books to Google and Microsoft,” by Katie Hafner:

The Boston Library Consortium, a group of 19 New England institutions ((:The members of the BLC are Boston College, Boston Public Library, Boston University, Brandeis University, Brown University, the Marine Biological Laboratory & Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, MIT, Northeastern University, the State Library of Massachusetts, Tufts University, University of Connecticut, University of Massachusetts Amherst, University of Massachusetts Boston, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, University of Massachusetts Lowell, University of Massachusetts Medical Center, University of New Hampshire, Wellesley College, and Williams College” . . . [more]

I’ve just come across the site for a conference given at Berkeley early in the year: Law and the Emotions: New Directions in Scholarship and I have to say the topic was a new one for me. A couple of the papers may give you a sense of the thing:

• Cheshire Calhoun, Department of Philosophy, Colby College, “Hope Matters” [abstract] [full paper PDF]
• Owen Jones, Vanderbilt University Law School & Department of Biological Sciences, “Biology, Emotions, and Law” [abstract PDF] [precis PDF]
• Dan Kahan, Yale Law School, “Two Conceptions of Emotion in Risk Regulation” [

Here’s a Library Journal article, referenced by Steven Cohen of Library Stuff on how to use 2.0 tools to help manage some of the flood of incoming info.

While librarians and users have been inundated with advice on how to produce content for MySpace, blogs, and other Web 2.0 services, there’s been much less discussion about using newer technologies to consume all this new content efficiently.

I was surprised to learn that a number of colleagues from other firms had not heard of Legal OnRamp and that it does not appear to have yet been mentioned on SLAW. The idea behind the site is that law firms and in-house counsel can register for free as a means of “online networking”. The condition for law firms to register is that they must contribute substantive content on one or more legal topics in their area of expertise and introduce a client to the service.

The idea is that in-house counsel would have an online source of expertise when . . . [more]

I thought I was on top of the management/leadership literature but was surprised to have only come across the concept of “servant leadership” (while at a KM meeting in New York last week that I recently mentioned) when a colleague mentioned the concept in a list of suggested readings.

Although the Wikipedia entry for this topic notes that the principles date back thousands of years, the concept entered the management literature a number of decades through writings by Robert Greenleaf. It is a philosophy of “serve first” and then lead by seeing that other people’s highest . . . [more]

In a recent post, I raised the (common) issue of the desire to allow users to tag, rate or bookmark internal or external sites or documents with the challenge being that most current document management systems (DMS) do not easily allow this to happen.

While looking for something else, I came across an August 12, 2007, post from LawyerKM discussing ConnectBeam, an enterprise social bookmarking and tagging system that works behind the firewall. Searching on a keyword brings up a list of all items tagged with that word. There is also a bit of an expertise locator that . . . [more]

Some thoughts this morning on memory…

A Boston Globe article last week commented on the problems arising from the virtually limitless “memory” of our digital age, allowing all of our indiscretions and mis-steps to survive forever in cyberspace – and to be easily indexed and retrieved. As librarians and researchers, of course, this is great. But as “normal people” (I use this merely for lack of a better term :-) there are advantages to amnesia.

The article discusses the concept of “data ecology” where companies collecting and holding certain types of data would be required to delete it after . . . [more]

An interesting subject over at Slate: what can we learn from looking at the laws that are not enforced? Lawyer Tim Wu looks for patterns in how law is not applied (in the US).

Almost as much as the laws that we enact, the lawbreaking to which we shut our eyes reflects how tolerant U.S. society really is to individual or group difference. It forms a major part of our understanding of how the nation deals with what was once called “vice.” While messy, strange, hypocritical, and in a sense dishonest, widespread tolerance of lawbreaking forms a critical part

The annual combined meeting of the Toronto and New York Knowledge Management Lawyers group met this past Friday in New York (the group also included others, including some from Boston and one colleague from the United Kingdom). I learned a lot. In no particular order:

1) Never, ever fly into LaGuardia Airport again. A group of us from Toronto suffered a 12-hour trip to New York due to cancelled flights (apparently due to weather conditions at LaGuardia). On arrival, there was the longest lineup for taxis I have ever seen (likely 300 people or so in line).

2) I intentionally . . . [more]