I hope that this is not a new theme emerging: privacy proceedings in limbo.

Last week I wrote about how the recent vacancy of the Information and Privacy Commissioner’s office in BC could have placed all pending files on hold. Now, this week, we have a decision [PDF] from the Alberta Court of Appeal that suggests the Commissioner there, Frank Work, may have lost jurisdiction over at least 180 pending cases.

The legislation in issue requires the Commissioner to follow certaint timelines, which can be extended by the Commissioner. From the Personal Information Protection Act:

50(5) An inquiry into a

. . . [more]

On May 1, 2009, 23 library partners, including the Paul Martin Law Library at the University of Windsor went live with Evergreen – an Open Source integrated library system. With only 2 – 3 developers to take it out of the box (originally packaged for the public library world), development has literally happened on the fly for the past 10 months.

It has been hectic, but we have a project we can all be proud of. To top it off, yesterday we heard that OLA has awarded the Project Conifer partners with two Divisional Awards. All awards will be presented . . . [more]

On the afternoon of Friday January 29, the University of Texas at Austin will host a conference on judicial biography, as a tribute to Roy Mersky, who was the subject of an earlier Slaw post.

At 2 PM Texas time the discussion will turn to International Jurists, featuring Philip Ayers on Chief Justice Owen Dixon of Australia’s High Court, Philip Girard on Chief Justice Bora Laskin of Canada, and Pnina LaHav on Shimon Agranat of Israel.

We seem to be in golden age of judicial biography. Any recommendations from the readership? . . . [more]

Two completely different spheres have my thoughts overlapping like a Venn diagram. A recent interview with Arianna Huffington in the Financial Post and links from the Law Librarian Blog (among many other sources) showing an Inside Look at the WestlawNext and “New Lexis” Platforms.

Both these articles touch on monetization of web delivered services and how content producers may reap the rewards of their labours.

The Huffington Post model:

The Huffington Post is committed to the link economy and our business model is advertising-supported. The Greek philosopher Herodotus … said you cannot enter into the same river twice, and

. . . [more]

Yesterday, two members of Slaw were given an in-depth look at the most profound re-engineering of a legal research system since the migration to the Web. In Thomson Reuters’ impressive Eagan facility we had a briefing on the new Westlaw – to be launched at New York LegalTech next Monday under the name WestlawNext.

WestlawNext is the culmination of five years of research and development and a massive amount of customer research into how legal research is actually carried out. . . . [more]

Are there any concerns from a risk management / liability perspective over the following warning/error message on the e-Laws website I noticed just now:

NOTICE OF ERROR
From December 18, 2009 to December 29, 2009, the e-Laws currency date should have been December 14, 2009.

See the screenshot here:

Do you review all of your legislative research from December 2009 within this time period?

Part of me says “no” since the Legislative Assembly adjourned on December 10, 2009, (to resume on February 16, 2010) and there appears to have been only 2 proclamations gazetted during the time period in question. . . . [more]

Plastic grenades alarm clients. That’s one of the examples in this interesting Dallas lawyer’s blog about some (U.S.) law firm marketing campaigns that pushed the envelope, perhaps a bit too far… . . . [more]

Rise Up. Creating your own stable financial future

My column this month is dedicated to personal finances. I greeted the New Year like so many other people I know – with a financial hangover that no aspirin was going to cure. Instead of the doctor I called my new neighbor on Salt Spring Island, financial planning guru Karin Mizgala, MBA, CFP, to share her best tips on how to put money woes to rest for good. Karin co-founded the Women’s Financial Learning Centre and has a financial planning column with the Financial Post.

The foundation to a stable financial future

. . . [more]

I realize we are not likely supposed to promote products here on SLAW but I really, really like both IrfanView and the Microsoft Snipping Tool as revolutionizing the ability to visually explain things in an HTML email (and I realize I am likely behind the curve on this one).

I am a visual learner and like to see things in a picture. Since there is often insufficient time for in-person training, it helps to be able to visually explain to someone in an email where to click on a program or what words to input into the database. Both of . . . [more]

I learned recently that the University of Alberta has been digitizing microfilm or microfiche from the collection of Canadiana.org and placing the scans on the Internet Archive. (There’s a PowerPoint presentation online that will give you some sense of U of A’s digitization projects.) At present a search for [contributor:(canadiana.org)] turns up over 22,000 items. Of these, just under 800 are tagged “law” in some respect.

There is no attempt to catalog these items in any useful way, which means a researcher must rely on searching — not the easiest thing on the Internet Archive. (For example, . . . [more]

While doing my monthly domain name shopping, I stumbled upon what might be an interesting blog: http://www.ontariorulesofcivilprocedure.com/ It was created only 3 days ago and has no content, except the logo of the law firm behind it: Fraser Milsner Casgrain. Can someone tell me what is the big red square on top of their logo?

The Hollywood Reporter writes: Facebook is back in the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s doghouse. According to the Privacy Commissioner’s news release of January 27, 2010, another investigation of Facebook has been launched in response to a new complaint – filed over changes made by Facebook in mid-December 2009, which required users to review their privacy settings. (See my previous posts part I, II and III looking at these changes.)

The complainant alleges that the new default settings would have made his information more readily available than the settings he had previously put in place. . . . [more]