All is well at the Faculty of Information Studies at the University of Toronto. I was a guest lecturer at the FIS 2133 Law Librarianship and Legal Literature course taught by colleague John Papadopoulos.

I was very impressed at the class’s willingness to discuss and debate issues surrounding knowledge management and the role that librarians can play, particular in a law firm environment.

We discussed such things as: (i) document management, information management, records management and knowledge management and whether and how they were different; (iii) the role – good and bad – that technology plays in knowledge-sharing and . . . [more]

I’m on a two-week trip to Cornell Law Library courtesy of the New England Law Library Consortium (NELLCO). I’m here to check out how they do their work, to learn a little about US law and collections, and to smuggle the ideas back across the border. Just to prove that I’m actually here, and not pulling your collective leg, here are a few snaps:

That’s the law school in the background. Here’s a better shot of the main building, Myron Taylor Hall:

and here’s one of a student at work in the Gould Reading Room:

I’ve got a . . . [more]

Legal blog watch notes the continued use of footnotes in blogs by *some* lawyers.

And guess what? We have the footnote blog plugin enabled here on Slaw! Now, it’s mainly used by the senior members (and by senior, I mean those members way more knowledgeable, experienced, pleasant & nicer looking than myself. [Enough sucking up? – nah, this is Simon & Simon we’re talking about here. They’re nice guys! ] But this could have been footnoted, couldn’t it? oh, but I digress… ).

Ok, Fess up!! Who actually uses that footnote feature! We are in so much trouble… . . . [more]

Back in the 70s, then Professor ((pre Dean and pre President)) Harry Arthurs touted Osgoode Hall as the best law school in the Commonwealth.

I’ve just read an extraordinary newsletter from Oxford which lists such an extraordinary range of academic, comparative and pro-bono activities that I wonder whether any other law school could match it.

Whether this is due to the new (Canadian) Dean of the Faculty Timothy Endicott (whom we have saluted before) or just that for the first time, the whole seems larger than its collegiate parts, but page after page manifests intellectual energy and engagement.

And . . . [more]

Google Docs has announced that as of today, they’re rolling out an offline capacity. (I’ve checked my account and I’m not one of the lucky ones — yet.) If you’re among the favoured, you’ll see the word Offline in the top right menu, as in this graphic, taken from a simple video demonstrating how it works. You’ll have to have Google’s Gears installed to make it work.

This is a Good Thing, I suppose: any increase in functionality is valuable. But at the same time it does seem to be a bit of a zag after so much Web 2.0 . . . [more]

That’s the question raised in a webcast from Outlaw, consisting of an interview with BAILII executive director Joe Ury.

The article based on the Interview, announces that Bailii will shortly publish the 3000 most important decisions in the English common law:

Bailii approached academics at universities all over the UK and asked them to list the most important rulings in their area of expertise. It then sought permission to publish those rulings one by one.

“It’s been a long slog,” said Ury. He said that the project was returned a list of 2,600 judgments, and that it has . . . [more]

We’ve discussed the transition of the Canada Law Book Company caselaw materials from Lexis-Nexis to a new BestCase product providing electronic access to almost all the caselaw that CLB has ever produced ((Due to licensing restrictions in the arrangements that CLB has with Thomson-West, the Canadian Patent Reporter is excluded)).

Today it launched. Tomorrow Lexis-Nexis’ Canadian materials will have an entirely new set of source materials.

Along with the other Toronto research lawyers, I had an advance look at the interface last week.

The good news is that in an amazingly short period of time, CLB has managed to develop . . . [more]

An article in today’s London Free Press by David Canton of eLegal talks about the concern the European Commission for Justice, Freedom and Security has about tracking dots that some colour laser printers leave on printed material. From David’s article:

Printer makers are able to encode the serial number, manufacturing code and the date of printing through a series of small yellow dots interspersed on the printed paper. These dots are invisible to the naked eye…

Xerox has admitted it provided tracking dots to [the U.S.] government. At present, only select enforcement agencies have the capacity to read the codes.

Last week Simon Fodden caught all of us up on the issue of “throttling” of web access by Bell Canada that broke in the news in his post When It All Goes Peer Shaped. This issue has continued to be the talk of the tech industry all week with no indication of letting up.

The crux of the story is that Canadians are being denied access to certain aspects of the Internet with ISPs Bell and Rogers making the decisions as to which parts are denied, including access to peer-to-peer downloads of CBC TV episodes to which Canadian taxpayers . . . [more]

Tscript.com is in the business of putting litigation transcripts online and so making them accessible at any time from anywhere. It seems that sometimes when a public body holds an inquiry the transcripts are made generally available on Tscript, something I discovered when I was exploring the Ipperwash Inquiry. Every word in a transcript is indexed and linked to the pages where it occurs, the index appearing in a frame to the left of the document. (This might make searching awkward, depending on your browser; Safari searches both the text and the index; but if you have difficulty, you’ll . . . [more]

What do you get when you cross Davos, Business Week, IBM and Global Workforce? An interesting article with implications for KM practitioners and researchers alike that doesn’t use the term ‘knowledge management’ once; but is teeming with KM ideas.

There was an interesting article in the January 17th issue of Business Week. It was buried in a Davos Special Report and more specifically in a series focused on Managing the Global Workforce. What caught my eye was an article on IBM (“International Isn’t Just IBM’s First Name“). In this article, without a singular explicit reference to Knowledge Management, . . . [more]

I may be the last to realize this, but Google’s Advanced Search page has been AJAXified nicely, such that as you fill out the boxes that filter your search, you can see the search terms appear correctly formatted in the uppermost text box. This is, I suppose, a way of letting you correct whatever might have been wrongly entered, but also, I suspect a way of instructing people who want to learn how to build a complex search without the help of a form or a wizard. . . . [more]