I receive between 100 and 1,000 business-related e-mails per day. Out of necessity, over the last few years I’ve developed a numbers of systems that help me manage my inbox effectively. This is the third in a series of posts describing the systems I utilize to stay on top of my inbox.

Keeping on top of e-mail on your smartphone helps you maximize productivity during “down time”on the road and minimize the amount of time you’re spending managing your inbox when you’re at the office. A smartphone keyboard, however, is only really suitable for composing short messages, so you want . . . [more]

The Pew Internet homepage is noting a new section addition (or rather, subdomain) that aggregates Pew publishing on digital libraries. See: libraries.pewinternet.org

Pew Internet has maintained a category dedicated to digital library trends for a few years now, so the site hosts a reasonable volume of material. It also includes a blog. The new site’s About page is unfortunately a copy-over from the main website; but with any luck, someone will add that background context soon.

If you don’t regularly visit Pew’s work on Internet trends, I highly recommend it. And for the law library crew here at Slaw, . . . [more]

Very shortly, at 7 pm ET, a presentation on Orphan Works and Digital Libraries will be live-streamed. The stream will be available at http://tfisher.org/hls1x-copyright.html.

For later viewing, the presentation and discussion will be archived in about a week at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Events_2013.htm.

The speakers are top-notch: Brewster Kahle, John Palfrey, and Robert Darnton. It seems likely their discussion will be set in the context of the Digital Public Library of America, which launched last week, and with which all are connected. Copyright themes likely will focus on US law.

More information on the DPLA is . . . [more]

Earlier this month, Kirk Makin of the Globe and Mail scooped an announcement of a major set of Reports on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, an inititaitive that started with the Chief Justice’s challenge to the Canadian Bar Association last summer.

The four Reports from Working Groups chaired by Justice Thomas Cromwell were officially released this morning:
Backgrounder
Report of the Court Processes Simplification Working Group
Report of the Access to Legal Services Working Group
Report of the Prevention, Triage and Referral Working Group
Report of the Family Justice Working Group

And a background literature review: Family . . . [more]

Legal researchers and law librarians have long worried about the lack of a coherent strategy in Canada to ensure the digital preservation and archiving of legal and governmental information. A case in point is Louis Mirando’s Slaw.ca post of Feb. 15th , 2013 on Library Budgets and Priorities: A New Year and a New Normal:

(…) when will we begin an organized, comprehensive preservation/digitization project for our historical law collections? Preservation must procede hand-in-hand with digital access. The Internet Archive and Hathi Trust (for monographs), and JSTOR and Ontario’s Scholars Portal (for journals – unfortunately not open-access) are a start,

Prof. Larry Lessig gave a superb talk, “Free Culture,” this evening at Harvard Law School. The talk is one of a series of special events Harvard Law professor and Berkman Center for Internet & Society director Terry Fisher organized for his 2013 Copyright course, in which I’m lucky enough to be participating. Like all the special events, Prof. Lessig’s talk was presented in person to Prof. Fisher’s Copyright law school class, via webinar to online course participants (including me), and to the public via archived webcast.

I took a few notes during Prof. Lessig’s engaging and stimulating talk, and . . . [more]

These are notes from a panel discussion by Ron Deibert, Professor of Politcal Science and Director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, David Lashway, Partner, Baker & McKenzie, Washington, DC, John Woods, Partner, Baker & McKenzie, Washington, DC and moderator Theo Ling, Partner, Baker & McKenzie, Toronto on April 15, 2013 at the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association National Spring Conference 2013 in Toronto. Note: these are my selected notes from this session; any inaccuracies or omissions are my own and . . . [more]

We’ve touched on the afterlife of digital assets here at Slaw on many occasions. Google has just announced a new service that adds an interesting direction: allowing users to pass along the data behind (rather than the password to) their various Google services.

A new group of settings under Google accounts will allow for these directions, called the Inactive Account Manager. Users will have the choice of destroying their data after a set period of time, or to pass along their data to a trusted contact or contacts. Google will also try notifying you by text or your alternate . . . [more]

A not-new UK law was given regulatory effect this week and enables the British Library to archive the .uk web, just as it already receives legal deposit of UK print materials. The import of the new regulatory changes in effect April 6 is, I gather, that the archive can built by automated crawl, rather by permission for page-by-page grabs.

As the British Library explains, legal deposit of UK publications to identified libraries is, of course, a practice of long standing. The new regulations extend and entrench the program for UK digital materials:

Legal deposit has existed in English law

It’s astonishing how much has changed in my five years of attending ABA TECHSHOW.

At ABA TECHSHOW 2008, Rian Gauvreau and I launched the beta of Clio, which at the time was not only the first of a new generation of web-based practice management systems, but the one of the first of any web-based product to be exhibited at TECHSHOW.

At this first TECHSHOW, Clio prompted both admiration and fear among attendees: half the visitors to our booth were thrilled about the prospect of putting their data in the cloud (by the way, back then “the cloud” wasn’t even . . . [more]

The UK newspaper The Guardian has published a series of articles on Internet privacy – the right to be forgotten which addresses many of the issues surrounding the (occasionally embarrassing) traces we leave as we use online services.

Reading some of the articles got me feeling a little bit paranoid:

The internet has a long memory. But what if the pictures, data and personal information that it can pull up about you appear unfair, one-sided or just plain wrong? More and more people are claiming they have a “right to be forgotten” and are even trying to delete themselves from

I love this time of year: many companies traditionally announce some of their more “out of the box” improvements right at the end of the first quarter or beginning of the second quarter. Here are just a few I noticed in my mailbox; you will see Google is the real leader in 2nd quarter upgrades:

Google Fiber to the Pole

Making the Internet more accessible when you are on the road. . . . [more]