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]

Congratulations to Lexis-Nexis Canada and a squadron of Canadian legal authors for achieving what many of us doubted that we would ever see, a contemporary Canadian legal encyclopaedia. Halsbury’s Laws of Canada has reached its seventy-seventh volume as a statement of common-law Canadian law in English.

Lexis took over the ground floor bar at Toronto’s Trump Hotel and flew in from the sunny California campus of Pepperdine University, the grand old man of Canadian tort law, Allen Martin Linden. And of course a Butterworths author and latterly a Lexis-Nexis author.

While AML delivered the one-liners, Halsburys is testament to the . . . [more]

Don Tapscott, author, speaker and advisor on new technologies and media, was interviewed by McKinsey Quarterly back in September 2012, and a video excerpt plus transcript of the interview was released last month. See: Making internal collaboration work: An interview with Don Tapscott. This interview has been raising questions around the web, and thought it would be useful to look at it here on SLAW.

Nick Holmes over at Binary Law has posted an interesting review of the new GOV.UK universal website. The UK government’s attempt to make web surfing for government information “simpler, clearer, faster.”

The website is only partially finished at the moment, with all departments expected to be integrated by April, 2013. Like any large portal, the arrangement of information — along with a dysfunctional site-search functionality, which Holmes touches on a few times — are going to be major hurdles to overcome.

The interesting issue for me, however, is whether they are trying to accomplish too much on a singular . . . [more]

The Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada (APLIC) has launched the bilingual Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal.

It provides access to over 340,000 electronic provincial, territorial and federal government publications and legislative materials dating back in some cases to the mid-1990s.

Users can search by keyword, title, author, and then link to the electronic copies of the materials hosted by the collecting library. Results can be cross‐jurisdictional or limited by jurisdiction or date.

APLIC provides a table describing the types of material as well as the coverage period for each jurisdiction. . . . [more]

At New York Legal Tech this week, Thomson Reuters will unveil an interesting basket of software products for the legal market. While a lot of hard innovative work has gone into the products to be released at the start of February, the most notable feature is the elements that they share in common.

The most significant development was not the suite of products that were unveiled but the change in strategic direction that they embody. I’ve commented before on how Thomson Reuters acquisitions appear somewhat disjointed. But this was evidence that the central vision of products like Serengeti has . . . [more]