As recently announced, Carlos Rossel, Publisher, The World Bank, is guiding the transition of the Bank’s print publishing to largely electronic, open access publishing. As part of this transition, The World Bank invited several of its employees including editors, economists, researchers, lawyers and invited non-Bank guests to a two-hour session yesterday in Washington, DC.

Carlos opened the session introducing the issues and speakers. I then gave an overview of relevant copyright and licensing/contractual issues relating to OA publishing. The information I provided was based on U.S. law as well as international copyright principles from the leading copyright treaty, the  . . . [more]

As Connie mentioned, there are a number of us in Calgary sharing good times at the Canadian Association of Law Libraries Annual Conference.

One of the great things about our group, and this event in particular, is the opportunity to get together in special interest groups. Our SIGs, as we call them, are communities of practice whether that be a workplace type, like the Academic Law Libraries SIG or a broader topic like the Access Services and Resource Sharing SIG. The CALL website offers details about all the committees and special interest groups as well as contacts.

The Private . . . [more]

Howdy from Calgary! I am at the annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries.

There is a lot of interest in the discussions taking place at this year’s conference. I am hearing from law librarians, legal publishers, knowledge management directors, and many others as to how they can follow along if not in attendance. There is a lot of buzz about greening the library, time management, workflow, digitization, budgeting, cost recovery, legal project management, and ebooks. All the hot buzzwords! I have had more than a few people ask me to let them know the outcome of discussions. . . . [more]

With the relative newness of digital licensing and the growing opportunities for licensing electronic content (including on social networking sites), there are a number of misconceptions already developing. By discussing and clearing up these misconceptions, it will help clear the path to an easier negotiating road and to better licenses.

Misconception #1: Not all licenses are negotiable. Almost every licence is negotiable, but often you have to ask the other side if they are willing to negotiate so that you will have a licence that meets your needs. Always remember to only accept a licence and arrangement that works for . . . [more]

Kent Law School in the UK has launched the inaugural issue of a new open access journal, feminists@law. This from the journal description on the home page:

feminists@law is a peer-reviewed online journal which aims to publish critical, interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged scholarship that extends feminist debates and analyses relating to law and justice (broadly conceived). It has a particular interest in critical and theoretical approaches and perspectives that draw upon postcolonial, transnational and poststructuralist work. The journal publishes material in a range of print and multimedia formats and in English and other languages. The journal is committed to an

I have never seen so much enthusiasm over access to judicial hearings as I have this past week. The Supreme Court of Canada heard the appeal of the B.C. Court of Appeal’s decision in Attorney General of Canada, et al. v. PHS Community Services Society, et al., dealing with the safe injection site in Vancouver known as Insite.

The case deals with ss. 4(1) and 5(1) of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, and an exemption under s. 56, which allowed the clinic to stay open.

The buzz extended well beyond the legal community, and included poverty and . . . [more]

In light of the upcoming law library conference season (notably including the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference–CALL 2011–next week), I am taking the liberty of sharing a few reasons why I see conferences as essential to law library staff.

If you have a law library, sending at least one library staff member to a professional conference each year is worth more than the equivalent dollar cost of books.

Let me repeat that in another way: you will get more value from conferences than books.

Radical, I know, and my legal publishing friends are perhaps going to . . . [more]

The time is ripe for the creation of an online repository and clearinghouse for Canadian legal scholarship in digital form. There are perhaps 70 Canadian journals publishing articles on or immediately relevant to law, making for a manageable supply of material. And the software and associated technology is readily available for free or at a very low cost. Of course, the labour necessary to construct and manage such a resource is not free, and may be less than readily available; but it seems to me that the major obstacle at the moment is simply the lack of will. Someone — . . . [more]

A message on the American Law Libraries – Private Law Libraries SIS Listserv has alerted me to: (i) A new blog by Law Librarian Jean O’Grady called Dewey B Strategic which has the subtitle of “Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession,” and (ii) a recent intriguing post on this new blog called The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training that raises the challenge (if not impossibility) of trying to teach “cost-effective searching” on Westlaw or Lexis to students or associates given the complexity of how these products are priced. Some examples . . . [more]

Does our museum need a digital licensing agreement policy?

May we post content on flickr, YouTube or Facebook?

What special concerns do Canadian museums face in licensing digital content on a global basis?

What fees should our museum collect for the use of its content on an organization’s Web site?

Who should be part of our negotiating team when licensing digital content?

These are a sampling of the many questions museums face when licensing digital content. Libraries, other cultural heritage institutions as well as law firms, governments and a variety of organizations are all faced with signing various license agreements . . . [more]

I may be imagining things, but the little microphone image that now graces the right side of the Google search box wasn’t there yesterday. Regardless of when it arrived in fact, voice search on Google’s main web platform is welcome. It’s been there for a while on the Google Mobile app, and I’ve found it useful.

Of course, when there’s a full keyboard literally at hand, you may find it’s easier to let your fingers do the talking, but if you’ve got a built-in mic and if you’re not shy about talking to a thing — and a thing that’s . . . [more]

Earlier this month a certain Liam McHugh-Russell uploaded a functional Canadian Legal Style to Zotero’s style library here.

Look for the Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation, 7th ed. (McGill Guide), Liam’s style handles secondary sources perfectly, as far as I can tell, and performs well for cases and legislation.

When I asked him about the style, he did note that, due to the variety of formats in which citations to cases and legislation are offered online, the style cannot guarantee seamless downloading of citations to primary resources.

That said, I was able to extract a citation from . . . [more]