The unique and indefatigable Tom Bruce is the Director of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell – no need for a geographical adjective when you were the first on the block.

Yes, LII was the first – and it’s coming up to its Twentieth Anniversary – or at least an excuse for a party in Finger Lakes.

Tom explains:

The LVI conference started out as a rather clubby event for a smallish group of open-access publishers largely based in the academic world. More recently, we’ve been joined by some academic researchers in legal informatics and by a few government

One of the most popular uses of libraries and archives–especially public libraries and municipal archives–is genealogy research. I had never seen law libraries, however, used for this purpose. I was therefore surprised when watching the celebrity family history research show Who Do You Think You Are? on Friday to see Jennifer Frazier, Kentucky State Law Librarian, filling in some of the last vital pieces of the puzzle for NFL superstar Jerome Bettis.

Some of the key pieces of information in researching his family history were found in a court decision: his ancestor Abe Bougard had taken on the Illinois Central . . . [more]

Many SLAW readers will already be familiar with the excellent video legal research tutorials that the Courthouse Libraries BC have put together. If you are not I encourage you to check them out. The videos look great and really demonstrate the power of the medium as a teaching tool.

The tutorials provide the novice researcher with an excellent introduction on how to approach researching legislation and case law. For those of use who are librarians or lawyers working with students, the tutorials are a wonderful resource for supplementing and reinforcing our instruction and giving students something short and engaging . . . [more]

Recently, I made a major life change. After having been at my firm, Norton Rose Canada, for a number of years, I accepted an offer to become senior counsel, employee relations, for a major Canadian retailer. My focus is going from a mostly Quebec-based practice, to one with Canada-wide scope.

In the same vein, I’ve decided to change the focus of the blog I created (the Quebec Labour Law Blog) to give it a national and international scope. I have the benefit now of having collaborators from ex-colleagues from across the Norton Rose Group (Australia, South Africa, Germany, France, . . . [more]

Documents are at the heart of any legal system—writing’s the thing, ever since Hammurabi. And though legal documents do change in form and character, there’s a strong impulse for things to remain “the same” or at least sufficiently similar that past experience and rulings can limn the future. That’s on the surface.

The relatively recent introduction of digital documents has, perhaps paradoxically, brought about considerable and continuing change underneath. As the duck seems serene but paddles furiously below the waterline, so it is with legal “duckuments”: it’s all text above the waterline, but underneath there’s much churning as HTML, DOC, . . . [more]

On Friday the Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario released the paper Embedding Privacy into the Design of EHRs to Enable Multiple Functionalities – Win/Win authored by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario Dr. Ann Cavoukian and Richard C. Alvarez, President and CEO of Canada Health Infoway.

From the March 2, 2012 news release:

Research indicates that Canadians have a degree of comfort with using EHR information for such purposes, as long as privacy and security protections are in place. The paper underscores the need for transparency in the way EHR information is managed and safeguarded.

This week the Supreme Court of Canada released the decision in Richard v. Time Inc., considering an appeal of prohibited business practices in marketing under Quebec’s Consumer Protection Act. John Gregory summarized the case on Slaw previously here.

The plaintiff received $1,000 in compensatory damages and $15,000 in punitive damages after he received a direct mailing from the defendant that appeared to indicate that he had won a Cash Prize of $833,337.00. The Quebec Court of Appeal reversed the trial judge’s decision in favour of the plaintiff, indicating that the campaign did not explicitly make any promises and . . . [more]

AALL Spectrum was kind enough to publish in their March 2012 edition my article called “Legal Project Management for Law Librarians” (PDF, 4 pages).

Legal project management (LPM) has already been a popular topic on SLAW for some time now (click here for past stories).

Although the foregoing article is a shortened version of my longer paper from last year entitled “Project Management in Law Firms: A New Role for Librarians?” available on my website, in the 10 months or so between articles I have seen a steady and growing interest in LPM in Canadian . . . [more]

Publishing academic monographs – the kinds of books that may sell only a few hundred copies – in an era of digital platforms and shrinking library budgets is a serious challenge. Earlier this year leaders from many of the major US libraries and academic presses were hosted by Robert Darnton, the Harvard University Librarian, to discuss the idea of a Global Library Consortium (GLC).

In a nutshell something like the GLC would allow academic library members of the consortium to work with publishers to identify which monographs they would be willing to purchase. The more purchasers for a specific title, . . . [more]

Hallelujah, @Orders-in-Council is tweeting again.

This twitter stream that monitors updates from the Privy Council Office has been intermittent to say the least. It is really important to know what is coming out of the Privy Council Office.

Given the on again off again nature of this particular twitter stream, should we follow it or not?

My instinct says watch for it, but continue with regular monitoring of the OIC database. What do you think? . . . [more]

Google keeps revising its menu structure, and one of the recently demoted links was Scholar: you now have to do three clicks to call it up from the Google search page—More, Even More, & finally Scholar. Johan Ugander, a grad student at Cornell, has come up with a bookmarklet, Scholarfy, that will take you with one click from the main Search page right to results in Scholar. (You have to go to Google Search to begin with. You can then either enter your search term and hit the bookmarklet, or do it in the reverse order.)

Readers . . . [more]

The Conference Planning Committee for CALL 2012 is fully immersed in the final details – making sure that the little things are under control, so that the big event looks effortless and professional. It’s nice to take a step back every now and again, and look at the big picture. And what a picture it is!

 We have dazzling venues, from the Royal York (our conference hotel), to the Ontario Legislature at Queen’s Park (the home of the opening reception), to the Liberty Grand (where we’ll be kicking off our 50^th anniversary year). You’ll be learning more about the . . . [more]