A post by John Davis last week — Open Text Mining Interface — led me to a service called (unhappily) CiteULike. It’s a kind of del.icio.us for scholars: you find a scholarly article you like and “send” it to your CiteULike account. Automatically a citation is formed and stored, along with an abstract where available and your own tags. Others can then see the material you’ve uploaded if the tags you’ve used interest them.

There is a host of features I haven’t yet plumbed: watchlists, interest groups, the capacity it seems to upload a pdf from your hard drive, . . . [more]

We’ve been running Slaw for over 9 months now, and it’s time to ask the Slaw community – how are we doing?

We’ve designed a three minute web survey for you to let us know what you like – and don’t like – about Slaw.

Please give us 3 minutes to make Slaw better.

You can start the survey here, or cut and paste this URL into your browser: http://www.zoomerang.com/survey.zgi?p=WEB225A88KCLPE

Thank you

Slaw . . . [more]

I’m delighted to announce that Kim Nayyer is joining Slaw as a core contributor. Kim is an associate at Miller Thomson LLP and is their National Research Lawyer. Her bio gives you an indication of the depth of her experience:

She has taught legal research for the Bar Admission Course in Alberta as well as to first-year law students at the University of Alberta.

In addition to other presentations on legal research, Kim worked with the Edmonton Law Librarians Association to initiate an educational program for legal research and analysis for articling students in Edmonton. The program was well-received and

. . . [more]

Slaw-ers, In case you were not aware, our friends at Jurist are neck and neck in voting with Court TV for a 2006 Webby Award in the Law category. (Let’s push to get Slaw nominated next year). If you wish to vote you can either visit Jurist and click on the Webby banner near the top of the page or go directly to the Webby Awards.

To lend a little partisanship, Jurist is the only law school/law-student powered entry in this particular horserace.

Just doing my part for Web-democracy… which is supposed to be a good thing… right? And . . . [more]

I just finished writing a paper for the Computer Aided Legal Instruction Conference (CALI) in June, called “Research in a Digital World -or- Personal Knowledge Management for Legal Researchers“. From the executive summary:

The increasing volume of digital information with which researchers work is making the task of finding, capturing, organizing and eventually collaborating with digital data more difficult. Electronic information in multiple formats sitting in multiple silos of data present a challenge to researchers who have difficulty finding a specific piece of information in a timely fashion.

The two major benefits that come from effective

. . . [more]

I’m sure this has long since dawned on all the really smart people, but it’s really starting to become fifty-foot-letters-of-fire-in-the-sky obvious: if you’re sending anything across the Net, why would you ever send it uncompressed?

Check out the newly designed official introductory page on the site for Canada.

De gustibus non disputandum and all, but… to me it resembles a dog’s breakfast: far too many things going on in far too many guises. And to turn the site to partisan purposes, with the Conservative blue and Conservative slogans, is in poor taste I think. All in all, right for WalMart, maybe, but not for our front door. Oh, and the “pick-your-language” splash page that used to have a close-up of a wavy flag, now has jet fighters.

If you’ve forgotten what the old site looked . . . [more]

It seems that whenever I link to AustLII I discover something new, which always surprises me, although it shouldn’t by now. Today’s surprise was to link to the SAFLII site (Southern African Legal Information Institute) and to see just how much has been placed on the Web since I last looked, quite a while ago. As well as legislation and cases from the major courts, there is also a plethora of information from the various provinces, material from law journals and the South African Law Reform Commission and government information. Decisions from the Supreme Court of Namibia frm 2005 are . . . [more]

As many of us are on the ‘verge’ of the CALL conference later this week, and in particular, the KM pre-conference session, let me point to one of Connie’s recent Tao of Law Librarianship articles on LLRX.

In her latest installment, titled Librarian on the Verge of KM, Connie talks about the role of the Librarian in KM efforts, and how many Librarians now have an opportunity to expand their firm presence. As expected, I’d have to agree. And to go a bit further, I’d say that with a supportive firm culture and strong firm relationships, you may . . . [more]

Living the Future is a conference for collaborative thinking about the future. The participants are those directly involved in planning, challenging, and living the future. The 6th conference was held in April at the University of Arizona. The conference proceedings can be found at:

http://www.library.arizona.edu/conferences/ltf/2006/proceedings.html . . . [more]

This is simply a quick note to say that Slaw’s first Theme Week must be counted a success. Guest posters Michael Geist and David Vaver gave us generously of their talent; all posts were interesting and helpful; and the comments came not just from regular readers but also from a few we haven’t heard from before. In the next little while I’m going to be gathering up the copyright material into a handy package and I’ll put a link to it in the sidebar when I’m done. Thanks again to all who contributed. . . . [more]

Is about to arrive and law librarians and research lawyers will soon be delivering advice by the bucketful of how private practice differs from law school. Compare the view from the academy with the view from outside, the Top 10 Things Law Librarians Want New Associates to Know.

But these are American views: what practical bits of research advice – both positive and negative – do you want to pass on to the summer bunnies via Slaw? . . . [more]