Information literacy is a well-established principle in library and information studies. Ensuring that their target population – users of their libraries and information centres – are information literate is a key goal of librarians and information specialists. The concept requires that library users know (or know how to determine) the questions they need to ask, how to find (or seek assistance in finding) the information they need to answer their questions, and – crucially – how to critically (and perhaps skeptically) examine and understand that information.

This goal applies equally to the specific context of legal analysis and legal research. . . . [more]

Have you ever had the experience of working at something fairly important only to have your attention hijacked by a jot, a mustard seed, a thing so insignificant as to be an absence, even? The memo is due by the end of the day and along about 3 p.m. it strikes you that there’s this blemish on the “k” key; you can feel it with the tip of your ring finger, you swear you can; and it’s… irritating. What you really need is a Q-tip and maybe some nail polish remover. You go looking…

As I’ve mentioned a couple of . . . [more]

From the Torys Speaker Series at the University of Ottawa Law and Technology:

Facing up to Facebook
A panel discussion on social media and social networking

Please join the Law & Technology group as Professors Jane Bailey, Jeremy de Beer, Michael Geist, Ian Kerr, and Valerie Steeves discuss legal issues arising from Facebook and related social media technologies.

Date: Wednesday, March 12, 2008
Time: 11:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Place: Fauteux Hall, room 351
Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa

Please RSVP to techlaw@uottawa.ca.
Join the Facing up to Facebook event page.

Note about this event . . . [more]

Good news for the weekend: I’m delighted to be able to say that Cecilia Tellis is joining Slaw as an occasional contributor. Cecilia is a law librarian at the University of Ottawa’s Brian Dickson Law Library where she is primarily involved in the coordination of the legal research programme. She received her MLIS degree from McGill University in 2004, and a B.A. in French Language and Literature from the University of Toronto in 1999. Cecilia previously worked as a Liaison Librarian at McGill’s Nahum Gelber Law Library. She was also a sessional lecturer at McGill’s Graduate School of Library and . . . [more]

This week’s fillip is about malware — and the tip comes from Mr. Bonware himself, Michael Lines.

Malwarez is a project of Alex Dragulescu and takes what is wretched and makes it fascinating, if not beautiful. The idea is — Wait, it’s Friday for heaven’s sake: I’ll let Alex tell you about it and save my breath for the snow-shovelling that is the new normal here in Snowronto:

Malwarez is a series of visualization of worms, viruses, trojans and spyware code. For each piece of disassembled code, API calls, memory addresses and subroutines are tracked and analyzed. Their frequency, density

The following article from the NY Times takes an interesting look at the respective websites of Candidate Clinton and Candidate Obama: Is Obama a Mac and Clinton a PC?

There are subtle and not-so-subtle differences between the two sites; but what message do the sites send? Are those messages intentional? Read the Article and then judge for yourself.

Clinton Website

Obama Website

Once that little comparative exercise has been completed, have a bit more fun by comparing them to the website of the Republican nominee and then try to figure out what McCain might be:

McCain Website . . . [more]

From Library Stuff, we learn that Zotero has outperformed all other citation software tested at Citefest 2008, sponsored by Northwestern University Library and Academic Technologies. They tested CiteULike, Connotea, EndNote, NoodleBib, RefWorks, and Zotero. Now we just need a Canadian legal citation style. . . . [more]

Statistics Canada’s February 2008 Health Reports has a study “Getting a second opinion: Health information and the Internet” that explores Canadian adults’ use of the Internet to find health information. Using data from the 2005 Canadian Internet Use Survey, the study found:

• more than one-third of Canadian adults, over half of them women, used the Internet to find health information
• about 38% reported that they had discussed their findings with a doctor or other health care professional
• of the estimated 15 million Canadians who used the Internet from home in 2005, 58% went online at some point to

Google has quietly introduced a search feature it calls “teleportation.” They’d cottoned on to the fact that increasingly people don’t bother learning and using a site’s URL, but rather put the site’s name into Google and use the result at or near the top to get to their destination. But often people who do that don’t just want the front page of a site but need to find something on an inside page. So for some big-name sites Google has introduced a search box in the results that will let you search within that site. Here’s a graphic of that . . . [more]

CCH Canada was kind enough to let me write a column in their monthly e-newsletter for Canadian law students. I had not realized though that it was possible to get a free archive of these (and other CCH newsletters) online and to register to receive them. The articles (not mine!) are quite good and I assume (or hope) that students can benefit from the newsletters.

My column last month was entitled “Managing Legal Knowledge: KM Demystified.” Although most of my columns focused on legal research, I thought it important to introduce students to formal law-related KM since . . . [more]

When you go to the CanLII splash page — http://www.canlii.org — you have to choose between the French and the English version of the site. I noticed today that there is now a tick-box that will cause your browser to remember your choice. This feature may have been there for a while, but I don’t think so, since I’ve been relying on CanLII pretty heavily in recent weeks for judgments for my teaching materials. At any event, this is a small but welcome change, and shows that the great folks behind CanLII are bent on continuous improvement of the service. . . . [more]

The Women’s Court of Canada launches this week. (See the story in the Ottawa Citizen.) The WCC is a group of women academics and practitioners who combined to rewrite six Supreme Court of Canada decisions to take a full and proper account of women’s equality. The affected decisions are:

• Symes v. Canada, [1993] 4 S.C.R. 695
  deduction — child care expenses — women — taxpayer — income
• Native Women’s Association of Canada v. Canada, [1994] 3 S.C.R. 627 ((The citation is misprinted in the Majury article referred to below.))
  funding — freedom of expression — women —