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]

Parliamentary websites are too often overlooked as sources for legal research. And that’s a shame because the best ones tend to offer access to an amazingly broad range of material.

The new website of the Australian Parliament, launched last week, is a case in point. There is a ton of stuff there. Most interesting, from my researcher point of view, are the research publications written by the Parliamentary Library, the bill digests (summaries) and the committee pages.

The Library of Congress blog, In Custodia Legis, has a description and evaluation of many of the site’s new features. . . . [more]

We are deep in Pilot rollout of Windows 7 and Office 2010 at Field Law. It is fun, interesting, frustrating, and intense.

Fun – I love learning new things, especially technology things. I especially like being in Pilot groups where I can see that my feedback is shaping the way we offer these tools to the rest of the firm.

Interesting – It is interesting to see how ribbons and menus were contemplated by the developers who are likely not the same folks who created Windows originally. New technologies are often, for me, a glimpse of how the current generation . . . [more]

The 2012 Conference in Toronto will mark the 50th annual meeting of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and provide an occasion to highlight many of the accomplishments of the association and its members over the decades since its creation. One of many accomplishment worthy of note is the Index to Canadian Legal Literature for which CALL provided both the inspiration and the support required to create a Canadian publication that met international indexing standards.

The Proposal for a New Index

In December 1983, The Canadian Law Information Council and The Canadian Association of Law Libraries developed a proposal to . . . [more]

Well, as Simon Chester alerted us it would, CanLII has just now clicked the odometer over as the millionth judgment comes on line. Here’s the graphic evidence (courtesy of Colin Lachance):

Fittingly, perhaps, the millionth judgment was an opinion from the Supreme Court, S.L. v. Commission scolaire des Chênes 2012 SCC 7.

That’s a whole lot of precedent. Use it wisely, Canada. . . . [more]

Getting the word out about copyright compliance is never easy; once a year you can be part of an international trend and plan a copyright education and awareness day with posters, discussions and more. The Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has helpful archives from its 2011 Copyright Day.

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) lists three “special days”:

1. World Intellectual Property Day. April 26 is a day to highlight creativity and innovation in all of our lives. WIPO has press releases, posters, bookmarks and special publications to help member States celebrate this day. The 2012 theme is: Visionary

The Association of American Publishers announced yesterday that they have successfully taken two websites offline that were freely distributing copyrighted e-books. One of these sites, library.nu, was said to contain more than 400,000 protected digital works.

PaidContent.org has a post up describing how publishers are banding together to fight against book piracy, similar to the battles the RIA has fought over the past decade. The piece also correctly notes how this takedown was conducted without any new legislative powers, such as those in the failed US SOPA bill.

But perhaps the best read of the bunch (at least for . . . [more]