Make your dreams come true….

♫ When you wish upon a star
Makes no difference who you are
When you wish upon a star
Your dream comes true .. ♫

Music by Leigh Harline, lyrics by Ned Washington.

Despite all the assistance from technology and the labour-saving devices available today, I don’t believe that most of us are really any closer to achieving our in-our-heart-of-heart’s dreams…you know what I mean…the ones that you think about at quiet moments..such as at dawn or gazing into a sunset.

I have talked to many lawyers …many many lawyers – who in the words . . . [more]

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has made available free a 138 page e-book, “THE FBI: A Centennial History, 1908-2008.” You may read it online (HTML format) or download the PDF files for each chapter or for the book as a whole; I’d recommend PDF if only for the photographs throughout, which are absent from the HTML version. The various chapters are as follows:

Dedication/Foreword
The Nation Calls, 1908-1923
The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938
World War, Cold War, 1939 to 1953
And Justice for All, 1954-1971
Crime and Corruption Across America, 1972-1988
A World of Trouble,

I was off for a couple of weeks and am quite proud to say that I did not access my email for 10 days, which is up there with my personal bests. I did have 266 messages in my inbox when I returned but it was worth it. I still find it nice to know that there are places where wireless signals aren’t bouncing off of me and I can’t plugin.

Upon getting plugged back in this week, it has been interesting to watch the goings on with Facebook, Scrabulous and Hasbro. I find it curious that Hasbro has . . . [more]

Or rather the value of access to Halsbury’s Laws. That’s the issue that the English courts must decide in a breach of contract claim involving a Reed-Elsevier legal author and the Anglo-Dutch legal publishing conglomerate.

English silk, David Phillips is suing the English division of the publisher, trading as LexisNexis Butterworths, for £316,730 including interest and costs.

Legal publishers aren’t used to being sued.

The claim alleges that LexisNexis breached a deal with Phillips’ father a High Court judge who edited the Income Tax volume of Halsbury’s in the 1970s. I suspect that his Lordship didn’t think it . . . [more]

We encourage you to take a look at our friend Jordan Furlong’s provocation to his legal publishing colleagues:

Stop.
Time out. Stop doing what we’ve always been doing. Put aside the deadlines and schedules for a moment. Put down the pen, those of us still using one. Push back from the keyboard, take a deep breath, and close our eyes. Make a mental list of all of our longstanding assumptions about this industry — what we produce, how we sell it, who buys it. Now, throw all these assumptions out, because it’s just about time for us to reinvent

The ninth International Conference on Law Via the Internet will be held this year in Florence, on October 30 and 31, and is to be hosted by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the Italian National Research Council. The topics to be discussed are as follows:

* Free access to law: the situation in different geographic areas
* Legal aspects concerning management, creation and filing of digital information
* Legal blogs and wikis
* Open legal archives
* Quality of legal information available on the web
* Right to legal information as a fundamental right
* Semantic

CanLII has introduced a new search screen, called Database Search, that uses AJAX to let you tag all the databases you’d like to search with your terms. You can see a (somewhat edited) shot of the page below:

. . . [more]

The Texas Digital Library, a consortium of Texas universities, publishes the open access Journal of Digital Information. The contents of the curent issue (Vol 9, No 27 (2008)) will give you an idea of its scope, if you’re not already familiar with the publication:

• Developing and Sustaining the Northwest Digital Archives, by Alan Kevin Cornish and Trevor James Bond
• Tagging tagging. Analysing user keywords in scientific bibliography management systems, by Christian Wolff, Markus Heckner and Susanne Mühlbacher
• Digital (Library Services) and (Digital Library) Services, by Jeffrey Pomerantz

[via Digital Koans] . . . [more]

Al Podboy, Director of Library Services at Baker Hostetler, has some useful and provocative thoughts on Law.com about law librarians and their relationship to vendors: . . . [more]

One of my first efforts as Crosby Group has been evaluating the B.C. legislation tracking/research service Quickscribe. An excerpt of the press release is below. I hope you find this report useful. I would love to hear your comments!

Quickscribe: A Comparison and Evaluation Report (White Paper) Released

[June 26, 2008] A new white paper comparing British Columbia legislative tracking services was released today by Crosby Group Consulting. The report titled, Quickscribe: A Comparison and Evaluation Report, was commissioned by Stem Legal Web Enterprises Inc. to objectively identify key differences between Quickscribe Services Inc. and the BC government

Or just around the corner. Adobe today announced the shipping availability of the Adobe Acrobat 9 product line. Acrobat 9 apparently delivers native support for Adobe Flash technology, the ability to unify content in rich PDF Portfolios and PDF document co-navigation capabilities. . . . [more]

I just noticed this morning that CanLII has introduced a help feature. When you mouse into any of the search entry fields, a popup appears with the various options available to you to do a Boolean search dans les deux langues, naturellement. The graphic below shows what comes up when you mouse over the “full text” entry field.

It’s possible that this has been around for a while and I’m the last to find it — if so, I apologize for the stale news. But CanLII has a habit of introducing changes by stealth, so it might indeed be . . . [more]