Occasionally a single appointment can signal everything. Today, Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan announced the long-awaited replacement for Harry S. Martin, who has been director of the Harvard law Library ((Which is the most extraordinary law library I’ve ever used, with due apologies to Ruth at the Bodleian and David at the Great Library)) for 27 years. Martin’s contribution deserves a post in its own right for his service as Henry N. Ess III Librarian and Professor of Law at the Law School and his seminars on Art and the Law.

But let’s focus on the new . . . [more]

You’ll have noticed that on the revamped Google Advanced Search page there’s a link that will expand into a drop-down menu, letting you select whether you want results from pages that have been indexed for the first time — i.e. pages newly discovered by Google, which will likely be brand new pages but needn’t be, of course — in the last day, week, month etc. (See the Research Buzz post from a year ago for more on what the dating means.)

You can customize your searches by altering the date range component at the end of the search string. The . . . [more]

I wrote a few months ago about labour unions gathering in Second Life for a virtual protest against IBM. Well, the the trend is continuing, this time in a more celebratory fashion.

The Trade Union Congress in London has been organizing virtual May Day celebrations in Second Life. Participants can learn about the campaign for a minimum wage in Germany, get training on using Second Life for online organization, or – and this just seems a little bizarre to me – chat with other virtual activists in a virtual bar over a pint of virtual beer.

You can check . . . [more]

The archive of Nazi concentration camp logs and other German war documents are now available to the public. Administered by the Red Cross since the 1950s, this archive containing information about Holocaust victims was accessible only by Red Cross staff. Historical researchers, survivors and relatives had to wait for replies from Red Cross staff to find out about missing persons or to obtain records supporting compensation payments. The decision to make the 50 million pages in the archive open to the public was made in November after the 11 countries that oversee the archive ratified an accord.

Reported in The . . . [more]

As academics might be said to live and thrive by consideration of fair use, we need to perk up when this vital legality goes to court, and all the more so when it is a good knock-down case of goliath celebrity taking on struggling Davidesque scholar. As most readers will know, with works of “criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research,” to use the example of the U.S. legal system, authors can in the name of fair use reasonably cite others’ published work without violating copyright.

Fair use, in this sense, represents the larger society’s recognition that learning . . . [more]

On 30 April 1993, the European nuclear research lab CERN put the web in the public domain, meaning that the protocols of the World Wide Web would be non-proprietary and could be used by anyone free of charge.

To mark the occasion, the BBC talked with web luminaries about their vision for the future. . . . [more]

A little bit of fancy stuff for mid-week:

iGoogle has introduced themes by a whole bunch of famous designers, artists and charity figures — Jeff Koons, Michael Graves (pictured above), Robert Mankoff (pictured below), Akira Isogawa and more than five dozen others, so you’re bound to find something that appeals. This is eye candy with some power to nourish.

. . . [more]

There has been some recent debate (on one of the legal community’s discussion forums) on the merits of SharePoint, Microsoft’s portal product. Our firm launched its SharePoint portal earlier this year (although we are still migrating content from our old intranet, and adding features and functions).

Even at this early date, we are enjoying two of the important benefits that led us to implement SharePoint in the first place – “one stop shopping” is not far from reality and distributed content contribution is taking place.

“One stop shopping” is the short-hand we use for our efforts to deliver all the . . . [more]

The Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge maintains a list of law reform commissions around the world that have some downloadable material (in English) available. As they note, the British Columbia Law Institute maintains a law reform database that provides information on a much wider selection of reform documents whether or not they are available online. But, and this is a little surprising, there’s no simple list of the various websites available on the BCLI site.

The Cambridge site is missing the newly re-instituted Law Commission of Ontario site (I’ve emailed them), which now contains their Report on . . . [more]

As posted earlier today on the VLLB, the BC Courthouse Library Society is seeking feedback from BC Lawyers to help plan their online future.

Part of their overall web strategy and service planning, the BCCLS is looking for input from practicing British Columbia lawyers via this short 3-minute web survey.

Participants will also be entered to win one of two 8G iPod Touch devices.

If you or someone you know fits the demographic, please help us spread the word! Help from Slaw readers who are also BC law bloggers would also be greatly appreciated. . . . [more]

Hate speech laws have always come in for criticism, balancing as they do on the slack wire between freedom of speech and violence to others. The brouhaha involving Mark Steyn, MacLeans and some law students is only the latest wobble on the wire, and one that I won’t go into here. But I thought Slaw readers might be interested in a provision in the Alberta Human Rights, Citizenship and Multiculturalism Act that the venerable (and very pro speech, shall we say) LanguageLog poked fun at today. The provision is found in section 3(1) and the part that attracted their attention . . . [more]

The iPhone is coming to Canada. For sure. Ted Rogers issued an announcement today that Rogers Communications has struck a deal with Apple:

We’re thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada later this year. We can’t tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned.

No word on any of the details, such as how big the mortgage on all you own will have to be to pay for the service. . . . [more]