[Colin Lachance is the President of CanLII.]

In his recent column on Slaw entitled Funding the LIIs, Sean Hocking wrote of the challenges faced by BAILII, the successes of AustLII and, to the extent information was available, the various funding models pursued by other legal information institutes. In referencing CanLII, he noted:

They don’t tell us much just that “CanLII is funded by the members of the Federation of Law Societies of Canada, in other words, the law societies of Canada’s provinces and territories and the Chambre des notaires du Québec.”

It’s true, our site does . . . [more]

My post earlier this morning complaining about “and/or” has got me on a roll.

Here are a few more pet peeves or commonly seen grammar errors:

1) Commas in Pairs (Rule 6.17, Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed)

Whenever a comma is used to set off an element, a second comma is required if the phrase or sentence continues beyond the element being set off:

– Incorrect: Judy went to Italy on June 15, 2004 to eat pasta.
– Correct: Judy went to Italy on June 15, 2004, to eat pasta.

You need a comma after the year in . . . [more]

As reported last week internet activist Aaron Schwartz “was charged … with sneaking into a computer closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and making unauthorized downloads of more than four million journal articles” from JSTOR. While there is a long list of charges (a copy of the 15 page indictment from the US District Court can be found here), the charge that has generated the most online debate is “intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access” 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2).

Academic libraries pay for access to JSTOR – an enormous repository of . . . [more]

In addition to the blog posts I put together from selected sessions at the PLL Summit on Saturday, I have also liveblogged a few of the other conference sessions I have attended:

• Barbara Tillett and John Mark Ockerbloom on Authority Control Vocabularies and the Semantic Web
  These are notes are from talk by Dr. Barbara B. Tillett of theLibrary of Congress and John Mark Ockerboom of the University of Pennsylvania.
• To Recover or Not to Recover: Trends, Solutions, and Alternatives for Taming Online Research Costs
  These are notes are from a panel discussion session with Joan Axelroth

I am currently in Philadelphia for the American Association of Law Libraries 2011 conference. Today is the PLL Summit put on by the Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section (PLL-SIS). I have live-blogging the sessions I attended:

• James Jones on Understanding Law Firm Trends
• Esther Dyson on Technology Changes in Business and Libraries
• Steven Lastres, Julie Bozzell and Toby Brown – Moving Beyond the Library Walls to Support Strategic Knowledge Management
• Joan Axelroth – What Law Firm Administrators Want Librarians to Know
• Greg Castanias – How librarians add value to their law firms
• David Curle on transformations in the

Law library consultant Nina Platt is the editor of the new PinHawk News free daily email alert service for law librarians, the Librarian News Digest.

From the inaugural issue:

Welcome to the first issue of the daily Librarian News Digest, a free digest of news from publications and blogs on the internet that focus on topics of importance to librarians. As editor of Librarian News Digest, my goal is to track pertinent news and select what’s most important to you as a librarian. Expect to see news and ideas that help you manage, acquire, organize, research, and market your

Justia.com is now providing free daily and weekly opinion summaries for the US Supreme Court, all US federal courts of appeal, and state supreme courts. As well, free weekly opinion summaries are available for nearly sixty areas of practice. These, it would seem, are delivered by email; there doesn’t seem to be an RSS feature. If you’re curious, you can look at a sample daily email for the US 9th Circuit Court of Appeals or a sample weekly summary for the practice area of environmental law.

Needless to say, this is a powerfully impressive service and a considerable contribution . . . [more]

A few months ago on SLAW I mentioned the ebook initiative by LexisNexis Canada for three of their court rules / legislative services.

They have now added a fourth title, being the Canadian Federal Courts Practice 2012 (Hughes, Renaud and Horne).

The books are published in epub format and can be read in a variety of readers. Purchasers of the print version get the ebook version included as part of their purchase.

Since lawyers seem to increasingly be using the iPad and other larger screen tablet devices, I think it is useful that publishers are experimenting with ebook versions of . . . [more]

It appears that SLAW has not yet mentioned what appears to be a very useful and reasonably priced current awareness and case law service in Manitoba: Cite-on-Site Publications.

The site is run by Manitoba lawyer Brad Brooks and offers current awareness newsletters with case law summaries for the following 5 topics of Manitoba law: civil, criminal, family, first nations and municipal. Annual pricing seems extremely reasonable, with a range from $20 per year for the municipal service and $100 per year for the First Nations service, with the other services falling in between those ranges. Sample newsletters are provide . . . [more]

Some of you may know that I am celebrating the unboxing of the Mireau family treasures onto library shelving that travels most of the length of my new house. My husband and I are getting up extra early these days to enjoy our reading time before the work day begins. The alarm ringing at 5 is obnoxious but the extra minutes spent with a novel is lovely. I am secretly hoping that it continues to rain so that I can read novels for my vacation next week rather than landscape.

A few of the novels read in the past couple . . . [more]

Fellow law library consultant Kathie Sullivan and I have been working together to track new collaboration tools and document the challenges that groups face in using them. New project management platforms such as Basecamp, collaborative mindmapping, and wireframe/mockup tools like Mockingbird and Balsamiq join familiar tools like wikis and Google Docs to make teamwork easier, regardless of where everyone is located. We are specifically interested in how these might be used in library and legal settings.

We are building a wiki that will document the tools and related stories (still to be made public), and will be speaking at two . . . [more]

There are a number of newly-published-or-soon-to-be published new editions or new titles in the Canadian legal literature that caught my eye as being useful research tools.

I have set some of these titles out below in alphabetical order by publisher (note: the dates indicated are from the publisher’s website; as you know, these dates are sometimes “approximate” due to the inevitable delays – usually by authors! – in getting books finalized for publication): . . . [more]