Thought I’d pass along this excellent resource that was featured in a message posted to the NCALL listserv today by Neal Ferguson of Borden Ladner Gervais LLP in Ottawa. It’s a PowerPoint by Catherine Best of Best Canadian Guide to Legal Research fame that was used at a presentation to the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries last month. It’s available here.

The CanLII interface is also reviewed.

This will certainly be useful for legal research sessions when people start asking why they should use one resource over the other…. . . . [more]

The UN Statistics Division has a search tool, UNdata, which is worth looking at. Drawing on 13 databases — environment, population, agriculture… but not law — UNdata provides a window on some 55 million records.

The search results are presented in a really useful format, as well. The results page offers you two tabs, Data Series and Table Presentations, that will give you documents or tables, respectively, in which your search terms appear. As well, in the Data Series tab you may choose whether to download the document, view it online, or preview it in a popup window.

[via . . . [more]

Mike Hoeflich, a professor at the University of Kansas School, has just created a blog called The Legal Antiquarian.

As he mentions in his intro post last week, the blog deals with “the various aspects of legal history having to do with the daily life of lawyers and judges, as well as to the sources, manuscript, printed, and otherwise preserved which can be used to help understand how law and the legal profession functioned in the past. Among the subjects I will cover will be the daily lives of lawyers, their practices, their offices, the books they owned and . . . [more]

After years of looking the same, the Google Advanced Search page has changed. For the better:

It looks simpler, more straightforward to use. As far as I can remember, the features I used to use still seem to be there. Is anyone else missing anything?

This was quietly changed (no mention on the official blog) following the implementation of Google Teleportation. Note that, toward the bottom of the Advanced Search form, there is an option to search any one specific website domain which has been available all along. If you don’t get the Teleportation option from the Google . . . [more]

Just a quick note to highlight the fact that Slaw’s own Dominic Jaar is featured on today’s lexblog Q&A.

This week’s interviews were all geared toward the upcoming ABA Techshow, but they were also very kind to Canadians. LSBC practice management advisor, and legal management blogger Dave Bilinsky was featured earlier in the week.

Congrats gentlemen! . . . [more]

There’s a story I recall about some famous and brilliant mathematician — perhaps Norbert Wiener — who rarely took his nose out of a book and who didn’t like to waste time: he would read while walking to and from the classroom (or perhaps his office) but have his arm out such that with a small part of his (very big) brain he could count the doorframes as they were ticked off against his hand; at the right count, his wrist would stiffen, and with his arm as a lever, rotate himself into the room still reading.

Now, that’s multitasking. . . . [more]

As Clay Shirky’s latest book makes clear, the internet’s reduction of publishing costs to effectively zero has critical implications for all the professions that are built upon the former reality of high publishing costs, librarianship and journalism among them. What will happen to libraries in the coming decades? Do libraries have staying power in the face of a total reversal of the economic reality they are predicated upon?

As the recent discussions on Slaw about changes at Lexis-Nexis Quicklaw and Canadian Law Book indicate, many expect primary legal resources in the digital age to be free of costs, perpetually available, . . . [more]

In the February 14 edition, the Economist printed a special report on how governments are using technology to better communicate with citizens. The report contained a number of fascinating examples of the creative uses of information technology, but highlights the fact that governments are light-years behind businesses in using communication technology to serve people more efficiently.

The report tosses around two key terms: “i-government” and “e-government” . The first refers to the basic process of using the internet to provide information to citizens, while the second refers to providing government services directly to people through the internet.

A second way . . . [more]

I just saw an excellent demo by Recommind of two of their products: Decisiv Email and Axcelerate eDiscovery.

A huge challenge for every knowledge enterprise is capturing email on a centralized document management system. This is particularly so for “sent” email.

The Decisiv Email product uses Recommind’s “smart” technology to anticipate which folder to file an email in, whether the email arrives in your Outlook inbox or is being sent by you from Outlook. As you type the subject and content of an outgoing email, for example, the software predicts which client folder the email should be filed in. . . . [more]

First Monday, that veteran academic web journal, has a sustained critique of the web in its current issue. Here are the titles of the articles, linked to abstracts, which will give you a feel:

• Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0
• Web 2.0: An argument against convergence
• Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0
• Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation
• The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0
• Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance

All of which is framed by a Preface . . . [more]

While Scrabulous is still dealing with various legal and copyright issues and two game companies are rumoured to be creating legitimate online versions of the game, one can easily forget about the joys of playing this board game for real. Yes, with real live people, pen and scorepad (and calculator for us mathematically-challenged), an agreed upon dictionary, and a few hours to kill, you too can spell your way to fun! But why not take it one step further and participate in Frontier College’s Scrabble Night in Canada:

The SCRABBLE® Friends and Family Challenge is a SCRABBLE® event that . . . [more]

Spring–wedding season–is just around the corner! This post is in response to a question that came to me via email this morning. Here are some key resources for those looking for information about same sex weddings in Toronto:

• City of Toronto – Registry Services – Marriage – details on obtaining wedding license
• Tourism Toronto – Wedded Bliss – includes details on wedding ceremony locations
• Gay Toronto Tourism – Same Sex Marriage
• Google search for additional wedding locations
• “Panel tackles same sex marriage in Canada” – March 7, 2008 Globe and Mail panel discussion on same sex marriage and