UK law librarians are now following our lead, encouraging the UK legal publishers to produce a new titles RSS feed.

Publishing consultant Nick Holmes has been calling for this service for some time, and recently put the pressure on publishers by scraping their websites to create sample feeds, posting them on the infolaw site. He also wrote an open letter to UK legal publishers on November 2nd asking for RSS feeds.

Blogger lo-fi librarian reports that a Facebook group has also been set up to help build concensus amongst law librarians in their request for RSS feeds from . . . [more]

Today’s press release:

Dear users,

The Law Foundation of Ontario has funded a large project to extend the historical coverage of CanLII’s case law databases. This project’s first results are already available to our users. All Supreme Court of Canada decisions originating from Ontario back to 1876 are now published on CanLII in searchable HTML and PDF-image format.

The project’s next phase will bring you all Court of Appeal for Ontario decisions that were appealed at the Supreme Court of Canada. In a third phase, CanLII will publish all reported Ontario Superior Court of Justice cases back to 1994.

I’ve only just noticed that CanLII has warnings that alert you if you wind up at a version of a statute that predates the last update of the collection. See, for example, this version of the Family Law Act. How might you get into an older version on CanLII anyway? Via Google. A Google search for “Ontario family property” gives a link to a 2004 version within the first 20 hits — and, alas, no more current link. . . . [more]

Oxford University Press has a line of small books — each somewhere around 150 pages in length — known collectively as “Very Short Introductions” and, well, introducing you to 173 subjects, such as Engels, Atheism, Feminism, American Political Parties and Elections. (The list is so eclectic that it can’t really generate a representative sample.)

These are serious books — hardly Wittgenstein for Dolts — typically written by noted academics or other experts. They are also books that have little to do with Slaw’s usual beat, I admit. At a stretch I could point out . . . [more]

The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP) today unveiled its new Legal Threats Database (http://www.citmedialaw.org/database), a catalog of the growing number of lawsuits, cease and desist letters, and other legal challenges faced by those engaging in online speech. This publicly accessible database — already containing hundreds of entries — will provide lawyers, citizen journalists, and mainstream media alike with a valuable resource for assessing the validity and possible outcomes of legal threats to online speech, based on actual cases and legal actions.

Center for Citizen Media Press Release

The Citizen Media Law Project is an affiliate of both Harvard’s Berkman . . . [more]

Steve Matthews, Slawyer and the person behind Stem Legal Web Enterprises, has once again shown his technical chops. Now that the Canadian legal publishers have finally come into this decade by putting out RSS feeds, thanks in large measure to his and Connie Crosby’s chivvying and chiding, ((See, e.g., Canadian Legal Publishers – RSS Feed Update)), there’s some interesting publisher data to work with.

Steve has taken advantage of the various tools that are out there now on the web to mix and to gather the feeds into one place, LegalPubs.ca.

There you’ll find an aggregation of . . . [more]

Today’s Bar Talk in The Globe & Mail suggests that the Canadian Lawyer Magazine is soon to formally launch its new magazine aimed at Associates (and to be called by the same name?). So far, there only appears to be “blog-like” postings on the website and it is not clear to me when the formal magazine launch will take place. Since most of the large Toronto law firms are doing student recruitment interviews next week, I thought the posting on the “Google Effect” by Donalee Moulton was timely – as per one of the persons quoted in that . . . [more]

Following my jubilant post on Thanksgiving about all major English Canadian legal publishers now having new title RSS feeds, in her recent post Why Can’t We Be More Like Canada? UK librarian lo-fi librarian bemoaned that UK publishers are behind and have not equally taken up the call.

In response, legal publishing consultant Nick Holmes has now put together his own sample RSS feeds for Sweet & Maxwell and Jordans in an effort to urge the publishers on. He discussed the effort on his blog Binary Law in the blog post Feeding the five thousand (2) . lo-fi seems pleased . . . [more]

I earlier commented on the blog called Precedent-The New Rules of Law and Style, as did Jordan Furlong, here.

Well, that site has now been revamped as part of the launch of a new magazine under the same name published by Law and Style Media Inc. and edited by Melissa Kluger (she was key in getting Ultra Vires, the U of Toronto law student law school paper off the ground).

I unfortunately missed the magazine launch last night since I was not feeling well. I suspect, however, the magazine will do well since it fills a gap by . . . [more]

Microsoft’s Live Search has a “Books” section that lets you search for and within the books that Microsoft is scanning for those libraries with which it is partnering. Material in the public domain is 100% searchable, readable on line and, typically, capable of being downloaded in PDF.

I did a very crude search (Canada and Canada AND law) — there doesn’t seem to be an advanced search feature in Live Search Books — and came up with hundreds and hundreds of hits. There is truly a treasure trove here for legal historians and historians of law. . . . [more]

It has been a long time coming, so I must make a big deal that we are there! The majority of English Canadian legal publishers now have feeds for their new titles.

On October 3rd Thomson Carswell sent out the message that they now have RSS feeds available. It had been in the works for a while, but they wanted to ensure they did it right, not just for the one new titles use, but for other uses as well. They started with new academic print titles, and have now moved to new and upcoming titles. The feeds are available . . . [more]

A few quick hits today as I’ve ushered 174 law students, mostly first years, through database training this week, and I’m nearing the end of my brain being productive.

I always find it interesting to observe the students during these training sessions to see how they relate to the technology. This year I noticed two interesting things. Firstly, in our training area the students can open either Firefox or Explorer and for the last few years when asked to open a browser Firefox has more often than not been their browser of choice. Not so this year, this year I . . . [more]