A big congratulations goes out to our long-time Slaw colleague Connie Crosby, who has been elected Vice-President of CALL/ACBD for the term running from 2013-2015. This position is effectively a six year commitment, with the succession plan running through each of the VP, President and Past-President positions (each for two years).

Many readers will recognize Connie as one of our founding members here at Slaw. She also has a long, successful track record working in Canadian law firm libraries; including more than nineteen years working in-house. Connie has been a past-President of TALL, served in a variety of . . . [more]

My colleague Alex Yiu and I recently presented at an Edmonton Social Media Breakfast. It was great fun, a neat venue, and a very engaged audience. SMBYEG as it is known on Twitter is held in this beautiful venue (Startup Edmonton HQ at the Mercer Warehouse):

The TEDx sign in the corner while we were presenting was a bit intimidating. I did get me thinking about legal industry ideas worth spreading though. Last August Connie shared a list of the most popular TED Talks. Simon commented on searching TED Talks for law. The search result is now 232 . . . [more]

The 2013 Law Via the Internet conference will take place in late September 2013 on Jersey, one of the Channel Islands (I admit, I had to look it up on a map).

The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

The conference “tracks” will be:

• E-Learning: distance, blended, open, mobile, gaming, MOOCing and more?
• Online legal information – starting from scratch
• Legal knowledge in the age of the semantic web
• Communicating our work: journals, blogs and other ways of publishing about open access

The Canadian Legal Information Institute, CanLII, has just announced that it will be introducing an API (application programming interface) in mid-March. This will allow developers and others to obtain direct access to the CanLII database in order to use the resulting data within their applications or web pages.

This is very good news indeed — and a very smart move by CanLII. If you’re in the “business” of giving data away, as CanLII is, you want to make the transfer as easy and enticing as possible. As the announcement says:

We hope law schools, legal information and legal aid resources,

Chris Dale, a lawyer-turned-eDisclosure-consultant based in the UK, has taken my two-post series from December on search inside the legal organization (see here and here) and applied the thinking specifically to eDiscovery. In his post Why Don’t We Just Use Google for eDiscovery? he suggests that the complexity of using litigation support tools–with concept searching, de-duplication, e-mail threading, clustering and predictive coding–has lawyers asking why not just use Google, or something like Google?

He gets to to the crux of the problem in this notion:

If the primary point is that Google does not purport to give you everything

Dear new grad:

Welcome to Libraryland. I enjoyed our conversation at the OLA reception in January – your energy and eagerness were wonderful to see. I also appreciate your concerns about your career, and especially this first step. Landing the first job can be tough, and it takes a lot of fortitude to get through the dry spell that proceeds that first day on the job.

Of course, I was particularly pleased that you are attracted to a career in law libraries. I have worked in legal environments of one kind or another for many years, and have found the . . . [more]

Scholarly publisher bepress recently launched The Digital Commons Network that “brings together scholarship from hundreds of universities and colleges, providing open access to peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work” [About page]

One of the subsets is the Law Network, which already has more than 100,000 articles from 170 institutions. The institutions all seem to be U.S. universities.

It is possible to sign up for free to follow all new legal scholarship, content in a specific practice area, from a specific institution or author.

This appears to be an interesting complement . . . [more]

I had the pleasure of attending a lecture by Stephen Abram yesterday. The Edmonton Public Library brought Stephen in to do some work with their organization, and they generously invited members of Edmonton’s library community to attend a portion of their event.

An interaction with Stephen Abram is always thought provoking, often inspiring and generally entertaining, whether it is reading his blog or seeing him in person. Stephen’s address was geared toward public libraries, but really it was about libraries and librarians finding ways to keep making a difference in our communities, for law libraries, perhaps our communities of practice. . . . [more]

In case there are any Slaw readers who have not yet learned of it, I thought I’d point you to some posts about Edwin Mellen Press‘s lawsuit against McMaster librarian Dale Askey (and against McMaster University as well). EMP claims Askey defamed them online in a post, and a series of comments to it, entitled “The Curious Case of Edwin Mellen Press” (a turn on Dickens’s “The Curious Case of Edwin Drood,” by the way) and in the Notice of Action begun in June 2012 they ask for $3,500,000.00 in damages.

The Notice of Action is available online here . . . [more]

The Supreme Court of Canada has published its calendar of appeal hearings for February 2013.

To find out more about any particular case
, the Court’s website has a section that allows users to find docket information, case summaries as well as factums from the parties. All you need to do is click on a case name.

It is also possible to follow any hearing live via webcast. Webcasts are then archived on the Court’s website. . . . [more]

CanLII users will have noticed a couple of interesting recent developments over at our free legal information institute.

In January Simon Fodden pointed us to CanLII’s announcement of a new partnership with a translation agency “to ensure selected leading Canadian judgments are available in both of Canada’s official languages.” As Simon noted, challenges of access to decisions in one language or the other have been discussed…more…than…once at Slaw, and this is welcome news.

And a post last week hints at exciting developments yet to come. CanLII is advertising an opportunity for the right person . . . [more]

There is a fantastic article in the Attorney at Work Blog by Daniel Gold today titled Save Random Sparks of Genius. Part of the article discusses the art of capture:

Finding a way to capture information anytime and anywhere—and then do something with that information—is critical to our success. It allows us to snare random sparks of genius like a hunter gets his prey.

Slaw has featured posts on capture using technology tools like Evernote, and Storify. There are low tech methods for remembering those fantastic ideas; I have a friend who swears by the notepad on the bedside . . . [more]