Shel Holtz and Neville Hobson point out in the May 29th FIR Cut of their public relations and technology podcast For Immediate Release: The Hobson and Holtz Report that the Canadian government has a contract with Open Text to develop social networking tools for its quarter of a million employees.

The May 27, 2008 news release on the Open Text website indicates this a renewal of their enterprise content management (ECM) system currently used by 58 federal government departments and agencies. What is new are the implementation of Web 2.0 capabilities:

The contract will also enable the Canadian Federal Government

Information overload. Yeah, yeah. But infogreed at the same time, right? The Globe didn’t arrive outside my hotel room this morning and that stressed me; the wireless connection I was using in the room decided to lock me out, adding another stress. But when I managed to get online I had three hundred and change new posts in my RSS reader and an annoying number of emails…

What is a datafella to do? Well, filter is one pretty good answer. Filter and aggregate. This is what Steve “StemLegal” Matthews always advises. But I never seem to have/take the time to . . . [more]

I was chatting recently with a friend and fellow librarian, and mentioned that my 16-year-old niece is considering librarianship as a career alternative. “Really?” my friend replied “I don’t know that I would encourage that –- in fact, I’m not sure I would go into it myself now. Is librarianship still relevant?”

That conversation, coupled with the invitation to contribute to SLAW, has given me a chance to really think about the relevance of librarianship. Is there a future for the profession?

According to the New York Times, librarians have never been cooler. Friends in the know at UWO . . . [more]

Montenegro’s new top-level country-code domain — .me — is coming available in stages, so if you’re interested in acquiring something nicely narcissistic in the way of URLs, you’ll need to be on the alert. Phase 4, the period when anyone, whether or not in Montenegro and whether or not with a registered trademark, can apply for a domain, begins on June 6. The goodies get given out on a first-come first-served basis.

[via Rouse & Co. International] . . . [more]

One of the highlights of this year’s CALL conference was the presentation by Darlene Fichter on Web 2.0 which kicked off our conference program Monday morning. I was privileged to introduce Darlene, who is Coordinator of the Data Library Services at the University of Saskatchewan and Advisor on Emerging Technologies, as well as consultant and project manager on various website, portal, library and intranet projects. Her talk was delightful. These slides which she posted to Slideshare for us only partially capture her lively presentation.

I love those gophers! During her presentation Darlene identified that . . . [more]

Simon noted last year the sources available for legal researchers on Microsoft’s Live.com book search.

However, an announcement on Microsoft’s blog on Friday indicated that the project is over and that this field has now been yielded entirely to Google. . . . [more]

What do law librarians get up to. Some wonderful images from AALL’s Day in the Life Competition in which the third prize combines my dear friend Ricki Andersen‘s passions for cats and statutes: . . . [more]

Good news!

According to online chatter, a recent patent application filed by some Apple employees hints that the company is working on making its mobile devices, like the iPod, solar powered. MacRumors.com briefly discusses the advantages and challenges of doing this. . . . [more]

It might just be if no-one can find it using the conventional search engines. That’s why it’s great to see Mark Kuiack’s PracticeLink page contain a great article by Sharon Nelson on Search Engine Optimization techniques, designed to educate lawyers.

Everyone responsible for a law firm website should be looking at this closely. For the non-legal community, Wikipedia is still a useful source. . . . [more]

Following up on Simon’s post last week and a supplementary comment by David Fraser concerning that international agreement on Anti-counterfeiting under negotiation that would permit ex parte searches for allegedly infringing materials. This raises the spectre of customs and border enforcement authorities searching laptops, ipods and other electronic devices.

All of the relevant technical discussion has been usefully gathered here.

I think the answer is to just give up travelling. . . . [more]

Today’s Dayton Business Journal describes a shake-up involving our friends at Lexis, as Reed Elsevier continues its process of moving jobs from Ohio to India.

The plans are to move a quarter of the jobs over the next few years. It’s been a forty year linkage between Dayton and legal research since the Ohio Bar started the work on automating legal information.

In a presentation given in Toronto late last year, former Reed Elsevier plc officer Sanjay Viswanathan gave a presentation that showed the LexisNexis parent company restructuring through 2010. The presentation shows the company will shift 900 jobs

Section 1 starts: . . . [more]