Some time back we posted about Google’s wisdom of the crowds encyclopedia knol, the idea being that it would be useful to have experts write about what they know and authenticate the pieces by attaching their names and info to them. Google now tells us that the experimental phase is over and you, too, can contribute to the store of the world’s knowledge by either writing your own knol or by making suggestions to those of others, suggestions they’re free to accept or not, of course (a process Google has called “moderated collaboration”).

I have to say that thus . . . [more]

Law librarians dutifully tell their students that s. 11(3)(c) of the Statutory Instruments Regulation, C.R.C. 1978, c. 1509 requires that proclamations must be published in the Canada Gazette, Part II. We also them show them various alternative ways to find coming into force information, including, among other things, the Orders-in-Council website.

This week, however, I experienced “proclamation by media release” regarding the coming into force of the Wage Earner Protection Act and subsequent amendments to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act and the Companies Creditors Arrangement Act. This Act was “proclaimed in force” by the Minister in a . . . [more]

I recently came across the site for the International Seabed Authority, an autonomous organization formed under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. From their “about” page:

The Authority is the organization through which States Parties to the Convention shall, in accordance with the regime for the seabed and ocean floor and subsoil thereof beyond the limits of national jurisdiction (the Area) established in Part XI and [the 1994 Agreement relating to the Implementation of that part of the Convention], organize and control activities in the Area, particularly with a view to administering the resources

Those interested in the work of the European Court of Justice, might like to subscribe to the ECJ Blog. Allard Knook, a lecturer in law at the Institute of Constitutional and Administrative Law, University of Utrecht, has regular postings in English on cases decided by the Court. . . . [more]

I’ve been getting a daily blast of legal-tech news from Lexology, having ticked the IP, IT etc. boxes and those for Canada, the U.S. and U.K. Today, there was a single item under the “Canada” banner: “Employers need to be careful to avoid waiving the protections of written computer and email policies” from the firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton LLP, a name I’m not familiar with — but then I’m not exactly up on them all. The telltale was the mention of the 9th Circuit Court and then “the Ontario Police Department.” Ah. No . . . [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

We’ve noticed Fastcase a couple of times on Slaw, including a piece in 2006.

A recent piece from Forbes uses Fastcase as the poster boys for open source access to the law. But it also speculates what impact services like PreCydent, Public.Resource.org and Collexis Holdings’ Casemaker division will have on the major players. It makes a convincing case that for small to medium firms, the majors may have priced themselves out of consideration, opening a niche for new entrants ((Lest anyone is tempted to organize a flag day for the majors, Forbes reports that Fastcase’s revenue last year . . . [more]

From time to time lawyers need to touch base with sub-political reality, and scientific journals offer one way to do that. WorldWideScience is a cooperative venture among 44 countries under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (sigh: I wish I didn’t wish it was run out of Denmark or Korea or Chile) that offers a federated search of the various countries’ databases. Canada’s contribution, for example, is the National Research Council’s Institute for Scientific and Technical Information and Defence Research and Development Canada’s Defence Research Reports.

I ran a simple search . . . [more]

After having solicited suggestions from all and sundry, the U.K. Law Commission has chosen seven projects to work on. According to an article in today’s Times Online these include marriage contracts and separation agreements (referred to by that irritating, to me, Americanism “nups”) the law on intestacy, consumer rights of redress, laws on residential care, treason and level crossings.

Only in Britain could an institution seriously combine interests in treason and level crossings.

The Law Commission’s own Tenth Programme of Law Reform is available as a PDF.

It interests me that the Commission has explicitly chosen to avoid issues such . . . [more]

Today’s Dayton Business Journal describes a shake-up involving our friends at Lexis, as Reed Elsevier continues its process of moving jobs from Ohio to India.

The plans are to move a quarter of the jobs over the next few years. It’s been a forty year linkage between Dayton and legal research since the Ohio Bar started the work on automating legal information.

In a presentation given in Toronto late last year, former Reed Elsevier plc officer Sanjay Viswanathan gave a presentation that showed the LexisNexis parent company restructuring through 2010. The presentation shows the company will shift 900 jobs

A few Slawyers are currently in Saskatoon at the annual conference of CALL/ACBD. On Sunday we held business meetings of the various committees and special interest groups, as well as held a Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum to discuss publisher/vendor issues, followed by demonstrations by a number of the vendors.

A few trends to report back:

• During the Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum the publishers asked about reducing the number of paper catalogues they produce both to be more environmentally friendly and no doubt to also reduce costs as catalogues are expensive to produce and print. One suggestion was

The Association of College & Research Libraries publication C&RL News has a current article by Anne Blecksmith pointing to open access digital image collections on the deep Web (you won’t find these collections via search engines or Flickr). The article links to and describes a wide array of digital image collections, including collaborative collections as well as those from universities, public libraries and archives, and historical societies. See the post on this article from one of my favorite blogs ReadWriteWeb. . . . [more]