Last week I mentioned a survey about the proposed UK 3 strikes law that concluded that it would not significantly deter filesharing behaviour. And added my views on why such laws are not a good idea.

Here’s a Reuters article that starts off by saying:

U.S. Internet service providers, including Verizon Communications Inc, Comcast Corp, Time Warner Cable Inc, Cablevision Systems Corp and AT&T Inc agreed to alert customers, up to six times, when it appears their account is used for illegal downloading. Warnings will come as e-mails or pop-up messages.

If suspected illegal activity persists, the provider might temporarily

A favourite quote of mine is by Fred Bartlit at the 1994 ABA Techshow

We experiment with software. We buy, we try, we fail. The key to making it all pay off is in the re-engineering process — that is starting off with a blank slate and working from there.

With evaluation periods becoming commonplace, maybe Fred would now say, “we try, we buy, we fail”. Regardless, desktop and smartphone apps are now so abundant and relatively inexpensive that it is all too easy to head down a path of dependance on a program without realising it.

While your main . . . [more]

We’re pleased indeed to tell you that John Papadopoulos has joined Slaw as a regular contributor. As many of you will know, John is Chief Law Librarian of the Bora Laskin Law Library at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. A law graduate, he teaches legal research methods at both the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Information at U of T. He is a co-author of The Practical Guide to Canadian Legal Research 3rd ed (Carswell, 2010). Prior to joining the University of Toronto John worked at a number of Toronto law firms as a reference librarian. . . . [more]

Recently, the Quebec government released a report entitled “La présence syndicale au Québec en 2010“. It revealed that the unionization rate of Quebec’s total labour force is of 39.6%. This is the highest rate in North America (by a decent margin). More than 1.3 million workers in Quebec are governed by a collective agreement. The report also mentioned that in the last decade, there has been a decreasing trend of union across North America. Even Quebec’s rate decreased from 40.9% to 39.6%.

How is unionization trending in your area? . . . [more]

Some of you may know that I am celebrating the unboxing of the Mireau family treasures onto library shelving that travels most of the length of my new house. My husband and I are getting up extra early these days to enjoy our reading time before the work day begins. The alarm ringing at 5 is obnoxious but the extra minutes spent with a novel is lovely. I am secretly hoping that it continues to rain so that I can read novels for my vacation next week rather than landscape.

A few of the novels read in the past couple . . . [more]

One minor consequence of the recent phone hacking scandal in England is an increase in the use of the term “blagging,” new to me. Thus, in The Register today:

News International journalists from multiple papers persistently tried to get gossip on the former prime minister Gordon Brown by ‘blagging’ access to his bank account, legal documents and even his son’s medical records, it has been alleged.

According to the Oxford dictionaries, to “blag” is essentially:

1. trans. To obtain or achieve [something] by persuasive talk or plausible deception; to bluff, to dupe or deceive by bluffing; to scrounge, esp.

A lot has been written about the positive impact to the bottom line when corporations include more women on their boards. At it’s most simplistic, corporations recognize the value of a woman’s different life experiences in corporate decision making, along with a greater understanding of what types of services or products would interest female clients. However, the research goes much further than this to include the different and complimentary ways that women process information and make decisions. A recent Harvard Business Review article “ Defend Your Research: What Makes a Team Smarter? More Women” examines the impact that including . . . [more]

With a hat tip to my colleague Ben Keen, who spotted the story below on the Torstar website.

“Internet Archive Canada, a small non-profit company, fired 35 of its 47 employees on Wednesday due to a massive drop in donations. Most will leave Aug. 12 unless a white knight appears soon”.

It’s difficult to find out exactly what the issue is – the website offers no explanation.

The story ends:

“The loss will be felt by more than those who will be out of work.”

Here they all are – they’ve made a major contribution in digitizing Canada’s . . . [more]

Fellow law library consultant Kathie Sullivan and I have been working together to track new collaboration tools and document the challenges that groups face in using them. New project management platforms such as Basecamp, collaborative mindmapping, and wireframe/mockup tools like Mockingbird and Balsamiq join familiar tools like wikis and Google Docs to make teamwork easier, regardless of where everyone is located. We are specifically interested in how these might be used in library and legal settings.

We are building a wiki that will document the tools and related stories (still to be made public), and will be speaking at two . . . [more]

Google’s new black navigation bar is the first outward-facing component of a massive social networking project the company’s been working on for over a year: Google+. I’ve been using Google+ during its “field test” (what we’d normally call a beta I think, but Google has forever ruined the public’s expectations of a beta), and I’ve come away impressed. It may be the first social networking tool I use, and enjoy using, on a daily basis.

While I have a personal Facebook and Twitter account, I find I rarely use them. Yes, Facebook’s endless privacy follies have given me cold . . . [more]

Here’s an interesting question, arising out of a case before a Colorado court: may the state require a defendant in a criminal trial to enter the password that will decrypt a computer drive with full disk encryption? The Electronic Frontier Foundation has entered a brief in the case of US v. Fricosu arguing Friday that to require the defendant either to hand over the information on the drive or to provide the password enabling the prosecution to get access to the data would infringe her constitutional right against self-incrimination. Apparently the authorities have offered a limited form of immunity to . . . [more]

For those who do public speaking, I recently attended two webinars which provided great tips on organizing your presentation, choosing the best delivery method, creating relevant content and connecting with your target audience. The first webinar “Creating & Organizing your speech”, was hosted by LexBlog and Faith Pincus on May 18^th. The second, on June 7^th, was a webinar for upcoming speakers for the 2011 ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) Conference. I am speaking at this conference on a panel about “Next Generation Intranets” and will consider many of these tips and recommendations in planning and . . . [more]