I wonder how Google is choosing the material that it reports it is OCRing from scanned material save to the web?

In the past, scanned documents were rarely included in search results as we couldn’t be sure of their content. We had occasional clues from references to the document– so you might get a search result with a title but no snippet highlighting your query. Today, that changes. We are now able to perform OCR on any scanned documents that we find stored in Adobe’s PDF format. This Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology lets us convert a picture (of a

The American election season has almost come to an end, leaving in its wake a large volume of creative expression by the campaigns and by citizens. Viral videos have been created and circulated by candidates and their supporters since the primaries, but a recent video provides an interesting lesson in intellectual property management.

Many would remember the series of “wassup” advertisements put out by Budweiser starting in 1999 (YouTube – Wassup). You may have completely forgotten about it until this week, when a video supporting Barak Obama circulated over the internet (YouTube – Wassup 2008). It . . . [more]

A recent article in Library Journal caught my eye: “Living Library” Debuts in Santa Monica ((Library Journal, 10/20/2008)) As the article explains the living library movement invites library users to ‘book’ meetings with individuals with special interests, beliefs or experiences.

Though I can’t find proof of this in her written work, Connie Crosby once said that she pays attention to trends in public libraries that could apply to law library services. This memory glimer (hopefully I am attributing the credit correctly) says to me: how would the construct of a living library help my firm? What would that look . . . [more]

For my first post, I’ll keep it brief. We’re in the early stages of planning our second Intranet project, using SharePoint 2007. With a renewed focus on the importance of customization, effective search, intuitive navigation, and metrics, we’re clear on the new direction we want to take. What’s not clear at this point is governance – who should own it? Library/KM? IT? Administration? Everyone? Who “owns” the Intranet in your firm? . . . [more]

Teresa Miguel at Yale Law Library’s Foreign and International Blog posted her review and endorsement for the International Law Video Library yesterday. A very interesting project, and great use of video to capture content, knowledge and history.

Teresa’s post also included the following excellent examples from the collection:

• Thomas Buergenthal, Judge at the International Court of Justice, speaks about reservations to treaties.
• Phillippe Kirsch, President of the International Criminal Court, sat down for an interview in September 2005 in which he introduced himself, and went on to give the historical background of the creation of the International Criminal

In view of our election just past, and the one next week of our neighbours to the south, I thought it opportune to raise the topic of election laws, and more specifically, absentee voting.

Several weeks ago, I received in the mail an absentee ballot from the Board of Elections in Lorain County, Ohio. I dutifully filled it out, put it in an envelope, and mailed it in: voilà, my franchise duly exercised. No one asked how long I’d been in Canada (sixteen years), or if I intended to return to the U. S. (unlikely, at this point). As a . . . [more]

The new federal Cabinet is just being sworn in. A few notes from CBC: the Cabinet has expanded from the previous Cabinet (11 more ministers than last time), there are a large number of female ministers, and The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq is the first minister from Nunavut.

The Right Honourable Stephen Joseph Harper
Prime Minister of Canada

The Honourable Robert Douglas Nicholson
Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada

The Honourable Jean-Pierre Blackburn
Minister of National Revenue and Minister of State (Agriculture)

The Honourable Gregory Francis Thompson
Minister of Veterans Affairs

The Honourable Marjory LeBreton
Leader of the Government . . . [more]

A U.S. company, CrimeReports.com, takes statistics given to it by various police departments and geolocates the instances on a Google map. So far as I can tell, Ottawa is the only Canadian city to enlist the company’s services. The Ottawa crime map sets out markers for various crimes — breaking and entering, theft, etc. — the nature of which can be controlled by a selection panel, so that, for instance, you could look at the location of all thefts from a vehicle. You can, as well, adjust the area, the date and the number of instances you wish to . . . [more]

A thanks to colleague Brenda Wong for letting me know of two new “social network” search engines mentioned at a recent SLA event she attended. I was not aware of either. They are: Spokeo and me.dium.

However, maybe I am getting too old. Both seem geared towards the “younger crowd”, at least based on their own descriptions of their products but the first may help with due diligence type of investigations and the second appears to be taking advantage of the “wisdom of the crowd” philosophy.

Spokeo, for example, features a picture of teenage girls whispering in each other’s . . . [more]

The text of Ontario’s Bill 118, Countering Distracted Driving and Promoting Green Transportation Act, 2008 is now available online. There’s also a PDF version.

Display screens visible to the driver are prohibited, except for dedicated GPS devices and a few others. The “money” provision reads as follows:

No person shall drive a motor vehicle on a highway while holding or using a hand-held wireless communication device or other prescribed device that is capable of receiving or transmitting telephone communications, electronic data, mail or text messages.

With the proviso:

a person may drive a motor vehicle on a highway while

As reported on the front page of today’s Ottawa Citizen, the federal government has launched its own internal version of Wikipedia to which all federal public servants will be able to contribute:

“At the annual Government in Technology (GTEC) conference, taking place at the Westin Hotel in downtown Ottawa, federal officials took the wraps off the government’s internal version of the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia, which it calls GCpedia.”

“The service will allow federal employees to post, comment and edit articles placed on GCpedia by their peers (…) ”

“For example, information about climate change policies could be posted

Govtrack.us is a site aimed at shedding light on the often byzantine operations of Washington. And it seems remarkably useful for doing so. It’s a portal to a comprehensive database of legislation that is either in the works or recently passed.

Each legislator has his or her own page with personal info and a list of all of the bills they have recently sponsored. For instance, Sen. Ted Stevens’ page shows that he sponsored Bill S. 94, the Gasoline Consumer Anti-price-gouging Protection Act, which was introduced in January 2007, while Sen. Barack Obama was sponsoring the Oil SENSE Act . . . [more]