This fillip is about law, oddly, but a law far more profound than any made by parliaments. I speak of Muphry’s Law.

Well, no, actually, I didn’t, but thanks for asking. Muphry’s [sic] Law was created sixteen years ago by John Bangsund in The Society of Editors Newsletter and given expression thus:

(a) if you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written; (b) if an author thanks you in a book for your editing or proofreading, there will be mistakes in the book; (c) the stronger the sentiment

Law library podcast The Law Librarian is set to continue recording next Friday, August 8th at 3 pm CST. The show is hosted by Richard Leiter and Brian Striman, and we first made note of it back in May.

Today’s guest is Margie Maes (some readers may know her as Margie Axtmann), Executive Director of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, a committee of AALL. Margie is also an active CALL member; I first met her on a CALL Vendor Liaison Committee panel a number of years ago when she was serving on AALL‘s equivalent . . . [more]

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation has made available free a 138 page e-book, “THE FBI: A Centennial History, 1908-2008.” You may read it online (HTML format) or download the PDF files for each chapter or for the book as a whole; I’d recommend PDF if only for the photographs throughout, which are absent from the HTML version. The various chapters are as follows:

Dedication/Foreword
The Nation Calls, 1908-1923
The FBI and the American Gangster, 1924-1938
World War, Cold War, 1939 to 1953
And Justice for All, 1954-1971
Crime and Corruption Across America, 1972-1988
A World of Trouble,

I’ve just released a new blog watch website over at Stem; this time tracking 54 different law blogs on the topic of DUI law.

A while ago here on Slaw I published a Yahoo pipes tutorial, and tried to show how we can take a set of authoritative feeds for a particular topic and mix them together as a current awareness tool. This new site is a good example of a subject-based feed mix. It’s also a good example of how feed mixing might help for the development internal collections; not simply because it pulls together like subject . . . [more]

Title says it all. But a good piece on Law Librarians’ Blog that should resonate outside the US.

If students didn’t take the optional advanced legal research course taught by law librarians, they will leave law school ill-equipped for real world research. The problem is systemic and nationwide; the typical 1L legal research and writing program just doesn’t get the job done.

Nothing much will change until private sector employers and their law librarians demand improvements in legal research instruction. It won’t happen internally. The traditional legal research and writing program and its instructors are simply too entrenched.

I was off for a couple of weeks and am quite proud to say that I did not access my email for 10 days, which is up there with my personal bests. I did have 266 messages in my inbox when I returned but it was worth it. I still find it nice to know that there are places where wireless signals aren’t bouncing off of me and I can’t plugin.

Upon getting plugged back in this week, it has been interesting to watch the goings on with Facebook, Scrabulous and Hasbro. I find it curious that Hasbro has . . . [more]

Here’s a warning, from the circumspect medical establishment south of the border, that Slawyers especially should heed! Via Techdirt. . . . [more]

Law firms struggling with e-discovery tend to lack leadership, not technology. Litigation clients deserve to be represented by knowledgeable litigators who can provide good strategic advice, follow well-defined practices for ensuring the admissibility of evidence, and use modern technology effectively to reduce costs and improve the quality of advocacy.

Corporate clients expect a high level of competence especially in areas of high potential risk such as electronic discovery.

But where to start? When we consider the complexities of ESI, the long legacy of paper-based discovery rules, and the unwillingness of some lawyers to embrace technology, how can a firm even . . . [more]

It’s been a while since I made any use of Google Notebook — mostly, I think, because I’m not much of a note-taker unless I have a project in the works, and then I’ll probably use a desktop app. But I may revisit the online application because the Official Google Notebook Blog tells us they’ve added an export function that lets you:

• Export this notebook to Google Docs.
• View this notebook as a web page.
• Get updates from this notebook in Google Reader.
• Get updates from this notebook as an RSS feed.
• Save this notebook as an Atom document. This

The Library and Information Technology Association (LITA), a division of the American Library Association (ALA), conducted the Top Tech Trends panel at the 2008 ALA Annual conference in July. Consisting of ten library technology experts, including two virtual participants, the key topics discussed included:

• Open source software and APIs
• Increasing demands on bandwidth and infrastructure from streaming audio and video
• Growing usage of mobile devices
• Future of bibliographic control

The full audio of the Top Tech Trends panel is posted at the LITA blog. . . . [more]

Google is rolling out a new feature that will use some of your data to “improve your search experience.” According to the Official Google Blog, we can expect to see a notation appearing in the upper right hand corner of search results pages that state “Customized for the [your city] area.” Using the location of your ISP, Google will give prominence to results that come closest to that location. You will have the ability, apparently, to dictate which address is used for the location customization.

What is not made clear is whether you will be able to turn this . . . [more]

Fee Fie Foe Firm Canada is a new custom search engine in beta for searching across Canadian law firm websites.

It indexes content from all manner of law firms, big and small. This includes practice group and individual profiles, press releases, news releases, case analysis, and publications such as newsletters.

I have commented on the Library Boy blog on a few other sources for finding law firm newsletters:

• We need a central repository for Canadian law firm newsletters and bulletins (March 8, 2005)
• Tracking Law Firm Newsletters With Linex Legal (July 31, 2007)
• Mondaq – Another Service For Tracking Law