Google News has added a quotation feature. According to the Google News Blog, entering a person’s name into the News search box will bring up a recent quote above the search results — provided, of course, that person has been quoted by an indexed news source. If you then click on the highlighted name of the person (beside the lead quote) you’ll go to a page full of quotes from that speaker.

Here, for instance, is a bit from the 117 quotations from Stephen Harper:

It seems that Google News can recognize a person’s name. At least, a search . . . [more]

I’ve happened on a paper published last year by Graham Greenleaf, Philip Chung and Andrew Mowbray, Co-Directors of AustLII & WorldLII, “Emerging Global Networks for Free Access to Law: WorldLII’s Strategies 2002-2005” on SCRIPT-ed – A Journal of Law, Technology & Society.

SCRIPT-ed is an online journal out of the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh, and is associated with the AHRC Centre for Research in Intellectual Property and Technology Law there. . . . [more]

In recognition of National Library Week, Entertainment Weekly has posted a photo gallery of movie scenes featuring libraries.

Thanks to Nicole Engard for first spotting it.

 Enjoy! . . . [more]

A big congratulations to the BC Courthouse Library Society for launching a new series of legal research video tutorials, including a new YouTube channel for sharing these gems via the firm Intranet!

This announcement comes in the wake of VALL’s fantastic screencasting workshop put on by the BCCLS’s Alex McNeur & Drew Jackson a few weeks back. I hope a few law firms (especially in BC) will take advantage & re-publish these internally. It doesn’t get much easier than cut-n-paste!

Please drop by & check it out. Sample below:

Congratulations to Drew, Alex and everyone at BCCLS! . . . [more]

I am a total sucker for this kind of stuff.

This week is National Library Week for our American friends.

Many commercial database vendors and aggregators are marking the occasion by providing temporary free access to their products.

For example:

• Greenwood Publishing is providing free access to database products as diverse as Praeger Security International Online, Reader’s Advisor Online and ARBAOnline (thousand of reviews of reference works). You have to register first.
• Gale is allowing free access to a long list of popular and academic collections like Literature Criticism Online, Science Resource Center, and the Gale Virtual Reference Library

The New York Times has a story on the copyright infringement lawsuit by J.K. Rowling against the proposed publisher of a Harry Potter Lexicon, created by Steven Jan Vander Ark, a librarian. Unable to resist some of the stereotypes associated with librarians (e.g. the very opening line: “Shhh! The librarian at the heart of…”), the Times reports that Rowling got emotional enough to cry during testimony Monday, and Vander Ark wept yesterday.

And in case you’re interested, it comes from the horse’s mouth that the “unlocking spell” Alohomora! does not come from Aloha, as Vander Ark had surmised, but rather . . . [more]

Boing Boing gives us Carl Malmud’s report that U.S. free access sites Justia and Public.Resources.Org have received take-down letters from the Oregon Legislative Counsel in connection with their publishing of Oregon’s laws. Apparently West Publishing, which has also reproduced Oregon’s laws without a licence from the state, will not receive a similar demand.

I know that Canada and Ontario claim Crown copyright in our laws but explicitly permit copying if the material is reproduced accurately and that copyright is acknowledged. . . . [more]

Like all of us, I sometime lament the state of legal writing, particularly of the academic sort. It is often so laden with detail (each one meticulously footnoted) that the reader can’t find the main point. But I think I may finally have stumbled on the culprit.

Philip Parker, a business professor, has developed a computer program that crawls through the internet gathering information from publicly available sources, and puts the information into book form. He then prints the books on demand and sells them through amazon.com. So far he’s generated more than 200,000 books.

Not surprisingly, the reviews . . . [more]

Not long ago we reported Harvard faculty’s important decision to make all their members’ research open access. Now some students are joining the movement. The Harvard College Thesis Repository, just established, allows those undergraduate students who wish to upload their senior theses to a database accessible by everyone. At the moment there are perhaps a dozen theses there all told; but I imagine that in time this could prove to be a useful source of research in a variety of academic fields (none of which is law, strictly speaking). If you haven’t read a senior thesis from a good . . . [more]

Adam Kolber, who teaches law at the University of San Diego School of Law, and who is currently teaching at Princeton University, studies neuroethics. You might well ask. Well, folks have always been trying to mess with our heads one way or another — just ask any of my students — and now there needs to be some greater discussion of ethical standards to hamper, if not to restrain, some of the more enthusiastic and direct neural intruders. And we need to think about how to understand and use what we’re learning about neural functioning.

His blog, the Neuroethics . . . [more]

June Callwood was a prominent journalist, author and social activist. The 2nd annual June Callwood Lecture in her memory is coming up in Toronto as follows:

Friday, April 25, 2008
7 p.m.
Toronto Reference Library
789 Yonge Street

Justice Denied: the Wrongfully Convicted in Canada
Guest Speaker: James Lockyer,lawyer and social justice advocate

James Lockyer is a founding director of the Association in Defense of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC), a Canada wide organization which advocates for the wrongly convicted. Called “a tireless defender of the underdog,” Lockyer has been involved in exposing many wrongful convictions in Canada, including the

What Cornell manages to accomplish in library-based legal education is definitely the most arresting and challenging aspect of what I’ve learned here. They outline their activities on their teaching page. . . . [more]