It has been a long time coming, so I must make a big deal that we are there! The majority of English Canadian legal publishers now have feeds for their new titles.

On October 3rd Thomson Carswell sent out the message that they now have RSS feeds available. It had been in the works for a while, but they wanted to ensure they did it right, not just for the one new titles use, but for other uses as well. They started with new academic print titles, and have now moved to new and upcoming titles. The feeds are available . . . [more]

Slaw is proud to appear, along with five other great blogs, in Binary Law’s list of “6 top legal info and legal web marketing blogs.” Tagged in one of those “top ten xxx” memes, Nick Holmes, the doyen of Binary Law, chose half a dozen blogs from his blogroll:

• Information Overlord
• LI Issues
• lo fi librarian
• Slaw (Canada)
• Lexblog (USA)
• Stem Legal (Canada)

Thanks, Nick. It’s good company you’ve put us in. . . . [more]

A few quick hits today as I’ve ushered 174 law students, mostly first years, through database training this week, and I’m nearing the end of my brain being productive.

I always find it interesting to observe the students during these training sessions to see how they relate to the technology. This year I noticed two interesting things. Firstly, in our training area the students can open either Firefox or Explorer and for the last few years when asked to open a browser Firefox has more often than not been their browser of choice. Not so this year, this year I . . . [more]

Some links to a podcast discussion of how the speed and collaborative nature of blogs is a real challenge to the traditional model of law journals.

In Santa Clara, a debate on Blogging, Scholarship, and the Bench and Bar Video: The event can be viewed by visiting this link.

Event login info: Username: aals, Password: scu2007

And a good discussion at Law.com, in a thoughtful posting and a further provocation, the debate continues. . . . [more]

The University of California, Berkeley announced today that it is posting the lectures from courses on YouTube.

“YouTube’s ongoing innovations create a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share educational videos,” said Ben Hubbard, ETS co-manager of webcast.berkeley. “We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on YouTube and will continue to expand our offerings.”

At the moment the offerings on the Berkeley Channel are mostly science courses, and there’s no law yet. A couple of the more accessible offerings include PACS 164A: Introduction to Nonviolence – Fall 2006 . . . [more]

Captus Press has notified customers today that it is discontinuing its Index to Federal and Ontario Statutes Online. Although the online version had a slightly clunky interface, it was reasonably priced and sometimes a useful trigger to identify possibly relevant Ontario or federal legislation on a given topic.

At the time Carswell stopped publishing the convenient print edition of this title back in 2000 or thereabout, I recall being surveyed by someone (likely Captus) about demand for the product and preferred format, etc. I always liked (and preferred) the print edition and wonder if there are plans to somehow . . . [more]

Today, any book bought online in England, even one published exclusively in another country, can ostensibly be subject to English libel law.

A clear candidate for today’s doc du jour would be the decision of Justice Benotto in the Red Cross tainted blood criminal trial, released yesterday afternoon. The only trouble is I can’t find it in an online form I can link to. For most lawyers this is no biggie: the commercial databases will have all the hot (and luke) decisions up within hours, if not minutes. CanLII, of course, will have the decision online in a few days’ time. But that’s not soon enough in a case like this, a case that excited considerable public attention, a lot of it . . . [more]

The ALA’s Banned Books Week runs Sept. 29-Oct. 6. They have a first amendment resource page, which includes links to notable cases. In Canada, the CLA supports the Freedom to Read Week, coming up Feb 24-March 1. The Week is the collaborative work of several organizations, with the Book and Periodical Council in the lead role. Their website is worth a browse, as it has quite a bit of interesting content, including a list of Canadian articles and books on freedom of expression issues. . . . [more]

A nice story on the BBC website today about the digitization & online publication of more than 100,000 19th century books by the British Library.

Not that the digitization of paper is new to anyone here at Slaw, but the girth of the project is certainly worth noting:

“At full production approximately 50,000 pages per working day will be scanned.”

and:

“Approximately 30 terabytes of storage will be required to accommodate the project’s output.

The first 25 million pages are expected to take two years to complete. Texts which are hard to get hold of will particularly benefit from the

. . . [more]

 

La Fédération des associations de juristes d’expression française de common law inc. (FAJEFCL) est le regroupement des associations régionales, provinciales ou territoriales de juristes d’expression française engagée à promouvoir et à défendre les droits linguistiques des communautés francophones et acadiennes, notamment en favorisant l’accès à la justice en français partout au Canada.

Particulièrement utiles, peut-être, sont les liens à de divers groupes et ressources francophones. Par exemple, içi on trouve les liens à Centre de traduction et de documentation juridiques, Centre de traduction et de terminologie juridiques, Le Programme national de l’administration de la justice dans les . . . [more]

“Don’t be evil,” is Google’s motto, or one of them at least. But even were that the central pillar supporting the nine-year-old giant, Siva Vaidhyanathan, a Professor at the University of Virginia, would still be worried, worried enough to write a book called The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce and Community — and Why We Should Worry. Well, to be writing a book called “The G of E etc.”: he’s constructed a blog of that very same name that will document and invite comment on his work as it proceeds. He puts it this . . . [more]