Riffing on the collaboration note in Simon’s post on Shirkey’s new book, the Library of NYU has just announced a new partnership with the Institute for the Future of the Book

The partnership will support, as their first project, new tools to advance the potential of the MediaCommons, which is an ongoing experiment in the potential of the internet to facilitate better scholarship.

One of the Institute’s most accessible inventions is the CommentPress, a WordPress extention that allows for paragraph-level comments on blog posts, reviving for the internet the traditional practice of creating marginalia. . . . [more]

Very neat idea:

HP BookPrep, a new offering from HP’s IdeaLab, is a print-on-demand service where you can order a book (current or out-of-print or rare or damaged) and have it produced for you as a print-ready PDF file. . . . [more]

A tip of the SLAW hat to SLAW’s own Steve Matthews for his article called “Who Do You Think You Are?” in this month’s edition of the CBA National magazine. Among other things, Steve writes on protecting your online brand and developing an online network. Nice work Steve. . . . [more]

Thought I’d pass along this excellent resource that was featured in a message posted to the NCALL listserv today by Neal Ferguson of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Ottawa. It’s a PowerPoint by Catherine Best of Best Canadian Guide to Legal Research fame that was used at a presentation to the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries last month. It’s available here.

The CanLII interface is also reviewed.

This will certainly be useful for legal research sessions when people start asking why they should use one resource over the other…. . . . [more]

First Monday, that veteran academic web journal, has a sustained critique of the web in its current issue. Here are the titles of the articles, linked to abstracts, which will give you a feel:

• Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
• Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
• Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
• Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
• The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
• Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

All of which is framed by a Preface . . . [more]

When you go to the CanLII splash page — http://www.canlii.org — you have to choose between the French and the English version of the site. I noticed today that there is now a tick-box that will cause your browser to remember your choice. This feature may have been there for a while, but I don’t think so, since I’ve been relying on CanLII pretty heavily in recent weeks for judgments for my teaching materials. At any event, this is a small but welcome change, and shows that the great folks behind CanLII are bent on continuous improvement of the service. . . . [more]

As reported in the Globe,

In my mind, sir, and in the minds of many of my colleagues and many, many Canadians,” said Mr. Batters during a Jan. 31 meeting of the Canadian Heritage committee, “the purpose of Telefilm is to help facilitate the making of films for mainstream Canadian society – films that Canadians can sit down and watch with their families in living rooms across this great country.

No comment. . . . [more]

We learned recently via Michael Lines’ post “Harvard Adopts an Open Access Mandate for Faculty Publications” that that Faculty of Arts and Sciences has adopted an open access mandate. I thought it might be interesting for our readers to see the actual wording of the mandate.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University is committed to disseminating the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible. In keeping with that commitment, the Faculty adopts the following policy: Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit (CALL/ACBD) sent out a reminder today that members of CALL/ACBD have until 31 March 2008 to nominate a person or organization to receive the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

Although it would be extremely presumptuous of me to suggest that readers of SLAW who are also members of CALL/ACBD think of SLAW as a possible recipient (in light of the high calibre of past recipients of this award – listed here if you scroll down the page), it would be an honour to just be . . . [more]

Just received from Patrick McNeill, ((VP, Sales, LexisNexis Canada Inc., Reed Elsevier)).

Attached is an announcement released today from LexisNexis Canada regarding enhancements to our case law collection in light of the Canada Law Book takedown March 31, 2008.

It’s a long statement, a letter from Gary Rodrigues, and an Appendix of Contents . . . [more]

The National Centre for First Nations Governance has announced the publication of “The Jurisdiction of Inherent Right Aboriginal Governments” [PDF] by Osgoode Hall Law School Scholar Kent McNeil. From the press release:

The inherent right of the Aboriginal peoples to govern themselves has become a generally accepted aspect of Canadian constitutional law.

But what is the scope of the governmental authority, or jurisdiction, that can be exercised by inherent right Aboriginal governments? And how does the jurisdiction of Aboriginal governments interact with the jurisdiction of other governments in Canada, especially the federal and provincial governments?

This important research

No time for long posts, but three small timbits from the news today.

Job cuts announced at Reed Elsevier, the owner of Lexis-Nexis.

Reed Elsevier, the Anglo-Dutch media group, is drawing up plans to axe more than 1,000 jobs as part of a continuing efficiency drive, The Sunday Telegraph has learned.

The company, which owns the LexisNexis information service and the medical journal, The Lancet, is understood to be preparing to cut the jobs over the next couple of years as it centralises functions such as procurement, human resources and IT across the group. Analysts expect the job cuts