Munro Day in Nova Scotia it may be. But it’s also Groundhog Day. Here in Ontario the good news is that Wiarton Willie, depicted above (yes, the image is “shadowed”), didn’t see his shadow; and in Nova Scotia Shubenacadie Sam, a resident of the eponymous town, also failed in the same way.

The rodents in question (properly Marmota monax, cousin to squirrels, rats, marmots and the like) are featured along with their U.S. cousin Punxsutawney Phil on a brief CBC news video.

This is indeed good news, but a little nuts, no? Well, there’s a history of sorts . . . [more]

Happy Munro Day everybody! I’m home today owing to the pre-cursor to Harlequin novels. And speaking of stories with painful plots, I thought it would be appropriate to share the story of the Halifax Regional School Board, which is currently a board of one. For many months, back in the fall, it seemed that the HRM school board could barely agree on a seating arrangement for their meetings, forget about substantial business. So after some time the NS Minister of Education dissolved the school board in December, citing the powers granted the minister in section 68 of the . . . [more]

An email announcement today from Cornell Law Library for a new Legal Research Engine

According to Julie Jones from Cornell,.”this specialized search engine helps users easily find authoritative online legal research guides on every subject. It searches approximately 20 different web sites that either prolifically publish guides, or index and link to guides. The number of web sites searched was deliberately kept small to keep search results manageable and focused. You can also add it to your Google home page”

I’ve done a preliminary run through the site, and it looks well constructed, although still very print and text oriented. . . . [more]

Bill Maes, the Chair of Canadian Intiative Digital Libraries (CIDL) announced the dissolution of CIDL effective 31st March 2007 and endorsed Alouette Canada as the logical successor to develop Canada’s digital collections. I’m optimistic that this will mean that Alouette Canada will take over the Inventory of Canadian Digital Initiatives. . . . [more]

There’s been considerable updating to the Ontario Bar Association’s Canadian E-Discovery Case Law Digest. . . . [more]

Those of you who prefer RSS feeds to email list might like to know that The Court, which I’m managing at the moment, has taken an email subscription to each of the Supreme Court services — Bulletin and New Judgments (via LexUM) , and News Releases — and turned them into RSS feeds. You can subscribe by clicking on the appropriate feedicons, or by going to The Court and checking the sidebar.

You may be interested in how we did it: We created a blog in Blogger for each of the email lists; we then activated the ability . . . [more]

A blidget is a widget that will take your blog content and make it into a widget that can be used anywhere to display your sites content.

Simply enter your site’s url, give your blidget some style with the layout, theme color and title etc and then publish your Blidget. If you aren’t already registered with widgetbox, you’ll be asked to register before your Blidget will be published. Once published, you can promote your blidget on your site with a button or just leave it at widgetbox for people to grab.

Check it out at Widgetbox.

Here’s what a . . . [more]

“Steve” is a collaborative research project exploring the potential for user-generated descriptions of the subjects of works of art to improve access to museum collections and encourage engagement with cultural content.

Steve asks you to tag works of art, hoping to develop from this folksonomy ways of making art and artifacts more accessible generally. Now this is a far bit from legal research, but it intrigues me because it invites mass tagging into a specialist’s area. A long time back, when tagging was newish, a number of us posted about it, doubting it’s applicability in law, where a . . . [more]

At tomorrow’s NYC Legal Tech, a discussion on an important theme I’ve not seen discussed outside AALL – the Law Librarian’s Role in Firmwide Strategic Issues.

This is part of an educational track on “The Evolving Role of the Law Librarian.” Major mergers bring all sorts of challenges such as maintaining continuity of information services, with attendant financial, logistical and organizational concerns.

“Law firm mergers are a fact of life in today’s economy,” says panelist Todd Erich Bennett, who has been through two major mergers that led to Thelen Reid & Priest forming in late 2006. “We . . . [more]

This past Wednesday morning when I came into work, I had an email pop out at me in my inbox. The subject line read, ‘Hello from Gary Price’. After my holy smokes moment, I proceeded to open it, and read a very nice introduction to a fellow Librarian whose career I’ve been following since at least 1996. Search Engine Watch? ResourceShelf? Docuticker? Yes, indeed, that Gary Price.

I remember reading when Gary left SEW to go to the new Ask.com, a time when the Jeeves butler was in the process of getting the proverbial boot, and thinking: . . . [more]

You’ve got a piece of text you want to share with others, and you want them to be able to comment on it. You could of course email it round and get comments back that way. And you could put it up on a website with a comment function — if you had one and if you knew how. Or you could use shortText.com.

This simple web application allows you to post up to 30,000 characters to a URL that it generates and that belongs only to you and your text. You can inform others of the URL at . . . [more]

I hope that some Slaw members will live blog from the conference this week, but if you can’t get there, our friends in Eagan have mounted a couple of podcasts with Monica Bay and Dennis Kennedy offering their predictions for what we can expect on the technology front this year. . . . [more]