Yes, it is that time of year in Canada. On or before April 30, 2010, to be specific, for most people.

As a known procrastinator, I vow to file on time this year.

I find the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) website surprisingly helpful on the special deductions this year for the home renovation tax credit and also in answering questions on RRSPs (although the CRA is an easy target for criticism, their website is one of the better websites having an effective online A to Z index).

And with the advent of online tax preparation software, the . . . [more]

Marilyn Johnson is a fan of libraries. And librarians. She came to this appreciation while researching The Dead Beat (a book about obituary writers). To her, it seemed that librarians had the most interesting obituaries! So when the time came for a second book, librarians seemed a natural focus. The result is This Book is Overdue : How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us.

“I wrote the book originally to teach myself how to get more technologically savvy, and I wrote it for my parents, who I know felt like the computer age had zoomed of and left them in . . . [more]

The Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) hosted a Publishers’ Forum at the University of Toronto Law School last week entitled “Free Access to Legislation: How Do They Do It?”

The meeting was well attended by TALL members.

Publishers making presentations to the forum included representatives for the Department of Justice Laws website, CanLII, the Legislative Assembly of Ontario website, and Ontario e-Laws.

All four of these sites and their developers are to be applauded. Although not necessarily the intent of the session, I came away with a better sense of appreciation for their hard work . . . [more]

For all the tax researchers out there:

The Tax Court of Canada’s Current Appeals Docket is now online. Finally. . . . [more]

So far as I can tell, we’ve not talked about the (U.S.) Supreme Court Database on Slaw, even though it’s about twenty years old. The current version offers the researcher:

247 pieces of information for each case, roughly broken down into six categories: (1) identification variables (e.g., citations and docket numbers); (2) background variables (e.g., how the Court took jurisdiction, origin and source of the case, the reason the Court agreed to decide it); (3) chronological variables (e.g., the date of decision, term of Court, natural court); (4) substantive variables (e.g., legal provisions, issues, direction of decision); (5) outcome variables

In university history classes the textbooks provided shots of cuneiform for our wonderment. It was hard to imagine reading the stuff, though, and I recall being told that the ancient Messopotamian tablets were mostly accounting documents. Well, no more. According to Knowlegde and Power:

The Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh in northern Iraq, from the mid-7th century BC, is the earliest attested site of courtly scientific patronage in world history. This website presents the scholars’ letters, queries, and reports to their kings and provides resources to support their use in undergraduate teaching. Since the summer of 2008 it also gives

A law library is central to a law school.

Pretty unarguable proposition I would have thought.

Students have to have a library to learn. Faculty to teach and write.

That’s why I can’t understand the story told in the Queen’s Journal this week under the headline Future uncertain for law library.

Like many universities, Queen’s has had to make regular operational budget cuts. But Queen’s isn’t a tiny school and serving the needs of 30 full-time law faculty and about 500 law students, can’t be easily done with the six and a half full-time staff at the Lederman Law . . . [more]

Statistics Canada released today a report on “Legal Aid in Canada: Resource and Caseload Statistics.” [HTML, PDF] The report consists, essentially, of some 30 tables of data; however, there is a helpful page of “highlights” that verbalizes some of this information. Thus, for example, we learn that:

In 2008/2009, legal aid plans spent approximately $730 million on providing legal aid services in 11 provinces and territories [excluding NL & PEI], which amounts to approximately $22 for every Canadian. After adjusting for inflation, legal aid spending was up about 6% from the previous year

The federal

My wife and I did a good thing on the day of the recent Oscar telecast: we attended a 1 pm showing at our local theater of the Oscar-nominated short films and short animation films.

Although I thought the Oscar presentation was too long and not funny enough, having seen the 1 pm showing made the presentations later that night for those two categories much more interesting.

If you get the chance to see the winning short animation film it is simply brilliant. It was Logorama, a 16-minute animated film set in what is presumably Los Angeles that uses . . . [more]

CaseStudiesOnline.com is a new web site with hundreds of social media marketing case studies, all fully indexed and searchable. The site was created by Tod Maffin, a well-known strategist, consultant, speaker and thought leader based in Vancouver. The site is currently in beta with more case studies being added each day. Maffin also plans on interviewing both thought-leaders in social media marketing and the people in the trenches who are putting these tools into action.

Here’s a short video by Maffin showing how CaseStudiesOnline.com works:

I took the opportunity to interview Tod Maffin over the phone last week to . . . [more]

The Obama Administration recently announced the details of its $400 million multi-year Healthy Food Financing Initiative, which will expand access to nutritious foods for underserved urban and rural communities in the US (see the press release from the US Department of the Treasury). To identify communities which currently lack healthy food options, the US Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service launched a great online research tool called the Food Environment Atlas. This tool allows you to compile county-level statistics on three categories of food environment factors:

1. Food choices (e.g., lbs per capita prepared meals, lbs per capita solid . . . [more]

Changes are afoot with the Law Librarians podcast! We have moved to hosting and support by CALI (Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction). We have also taken advantage of this change to rename the show Law Librarian Conversations.

More information is on the website at http://lawlibcon.classcaster.net/. This show was created and is produced by Richard Leiter, is co-hosted by Marcia Dority Baker, and given web support by Roger Skalbeck. It includes a varying group of panelists (of which I am one) and a number of special guests.

We are now recording live twice a month (the first and third . . . [more]