George Raine, a recent graduate of the Faculty of Information’s Master of Information program at the University of Toronto, has created the Snowden Surveillance Archive, a searchable database of all the publicly released classified documents leaked by former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The leaks reveal the widespread surveillance practices by security and espionage agencies in the US and allied countries.

Archive project partners are Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Politics of Surveillance Project at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information. Funding came from The New Transparency: Surveillance and Social Sorting, a seven-year Major Collaborative . . . [more]

Film nerds can get all their Oscar-related facts from a series of databases supplied by the Margaret Herrick Library, the research library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences.

Among the library’s many goodies are:

• the Academy Awards Database which contains the record of past Academy Award winners and nominees
• the Academy Awards Acceptance Speech Database with more than 1,400 transcripts of onstage acceptance speeches
• the Digital Collections with more than 5000 items, including correspondence, photographs, early release fliers, full issues of rare periodicals, sheet music, lobby cards and movie star ephemera

Enjoy tonight’s Awards show. Go . . . [more]

Brad Duguid, Minister of Economic Development, Employment and Infrastructure released the 79-page report on the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act review to the public on February 13, 2015. Overall, the report indicates that although the government and public and private sectors have shown strong support and commitment to accessibility, the slow implementation of the AODA has resulted in rather modest improvements for persons with disabilities in the areas of jobs and access to goods or services.

The UN Human Rights Office has launched a major public online database that contains all the case law issued by the UN human rights expert committees known as the Treaty Bodies.

The Treaty Bodies are committees of independent experts that monitor implementation of the core international human rights treaties. There are 10 of them including the Committee against Torture, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, the Committee on Enforced Disappearances and the Committee on the Rights of the Child.

The database was developed using data from the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) at the Utrecht . . . [more]

Late last week fellow Slaw contributor John Gregory brought up some idiosyncrasies in his post about how web-sourced versions of laws stack up against more official looking books with laws printed in them. You know, the ones that only the law library has?

This brings up a pet peeve of mine—something that Ontario has solved, but which BC practitioners are technically still exposed to. The fact is that if you’re not producing photocopies of the official books with BC laws in them, you’re technically not doing your job for the court in BC. That’s ridiculous, right? Well, yeah. It is. . . . [more]

I’d like to use my last entry of 2014 to highlight a few worthy potential recipients of your charitable spirit. Depending where you live, and to whom you contribute, you may also still have a few hours left to earn a 2014 charitable tax credit or to see your donation doubled for the recipient.

If, like me and other old and not-so-old people, you continue to rely on good old email, you likely are still seeing a steady stream of last-minute 2014 donation appeals from one charity, non-profit, or political group or another.

A recent lesson in giving reminds . . . [more]

In with the new, out with the old. Last week I beamed about the promise of new gifts from Google in the form of the pending End-To-End extension which will put pretty good privacy in reach of ordinary Gmail (and probably other email) users. As Tiny Tim may have said, “Encryption to us all; God bless us, every one!”

This week I draw your attention away from the shiny and new, and direct it to the digital dumpster—where all shiny toys eventually end up. Fresh to the heap: the Yahoo Directory. This marks not the passing of some fleeting fad, . . . [more]

As I like to tell users who come to my library, law reform commission reports can be a legal researcher’s best friend.

Law commissions consult widely with stakeholders, they may compare how other jurisdictions have dealt with the same problem that has you stumped and they frequently dig into the history of an issue.

Here are a few recently released reports that caught my attention.

• Law Reform Commission of Ireland Issues Paper on Cyber-Crime and Cyber-Bullying: “The Commission seeks the views of interested parties on the following 5 issues: 1. Whether the harassment offence in section 10 of the

. . . [more]

Via Archive-It, the Internet Archive is building a comprehensive collection of information and discussion related to the August 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The project partner responsible, Internet Archive Global Events, comprises the Archive-It team in collaboration with other partners. The Internet Archive invites the public to suggest specific content—news articles, blog posts, other social media, and more—for the collection by submitting the relevant URL, or seed. I’m sure the legal commentaries on federal and state grand juries and indictments, including contrasts with Canadian criminal process, published this week will make useful content.

Help

. . . [more]

“Disruption equals opportunity“–Robert Ambrogi

What’s that Chinese proverb? Oh yes, “In every crisis, there is opportunity.” That is Robert Ambrogi‘s position in this great post from last month, “Turning Challenges into Opportunities: New Directions for Legal Information Professionals.” . . . [more]

CAIJ, the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique (the network of courthouse law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association), has signed resource sharing agreements with 6 major law firms in Québec that will make their legal commentary freely available on the CAIJ website.

The firms in question are:

• Cain Lamarre Casgrain Wells
• De Grandpré Chait
• Langlois Kronström Desjardins
• McMillan
• Osler
• Robic

Their guides, bulletins and commentary articles will be added to a collection that already includes full-text commentary and textbooks including the Développements récents (annual reviews of areas of law), the Collection de droit (Bar School materials), proceedings of the . . . [more]

Cheryl Niemeier, Director of Knowledge & Research Services at Bose McKinney & Evans LLP, started a series of blog posts on legal research apps last week. The post was titled Part 1 – Legal Research in Your Pocket: Fee-based Services and it made me a little bit jealous.

It also made me a little bit nervous and a little bit worried and a little bit puzzled.

Cheryl’s excellent annotated list of research apps includes content that many Canadian law libraries would license, HeinOnline and CCH Intelliconnect. It also contained a lengthy list of sources that would only apply for . . . [more]