The day before yesterday Google released Translate, a new search tool that lets you use your mother tongue to search for results in other languages, using machine translation of course. It currently works for 12 languages: English, Arabic, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (Traditional), and Chinese (Simplified). The new tool is introduced in this press release from Google.

To test it out go to http://www.translate.google.com/translate_s. (Using simply http://www.translate.google.com will take you to http://www.translate.google.com/translate_t, which is Google’s plain translation page.)

In true Canadian fashion I asked it to mediate between our two official languages, using the . . . [more]

Sun Microsystems holds some patents that might be trespassed on by the folks developing open ID software. So what are they doing about it? They’re promising never to rely on the patents, thus freeing developers from the anxiety of a possible future lawsuit, and that by a particularly large gorilla. Evidently this is not the first time they’ve taken this open source route, and Simon Phipps, one of their own, has blogged about ten reasons why this approach is sometimes the best way to go and why others should adopt it.

The covenant is brief and intelligible:

Sun Microsystems irrevocably

A nice piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education from Todd Gilman a senior librarian at Yale about how to succeed as a librarian – and what habits are essential.

Granted the advice is framed with reference to faculty – but the lessons wouldn’t be lost on law firm partners either.

Openness

Responsiveness

Collaboration

Communication . . . [more]

A piece in the Library Journal paid tribute to the ever-amazing Sabrina Pacifici who spoke at last year’s ALA Conference in Montréal. It reveals the secret that many of us had wondered about: granted that she’s a mover and shaker – how does she find the time.

The answer is that sleep is a foregone option.

. . . [more]

For those of you who already love Facebook, Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School is also raving about it. Read his praise for Facebook’s privacy and disclosure controls, its very social software features, and its many channels and platforms for interaction. He also goes on to write about Facebook’s lessons for Enterprise 2.0: its unique features can be useful for employees within a company. Allowing employees to build social networks in Facebook style may encourage them to use collaboration technologies adopted by their company. . . . [more]

From our friend lo-fi librarian:

The British and Irish Association of Law Librarians is blogging! Contributors include: Angela Donaldson, Fiona Durrant, John Franssen and James Mullan of LI Issues.

The BIALL Blog

And once on the BIALL blog, I found out that ALLICE (Association of Law Librarians in Central England) has a new blog up as well.

Congratulations to both groups, and best of luck! . . . [more]

While I’m on search engines (see my prior post about Google’s universal search), I recommend that you take a look at hakia, a new search engine still in beta. It seems to be a project that began in Turkey and that now has its base in the U.S. It’s aiming for the higher end research market, it would appear:

hakia’s capabilities will appeal to all Web searchers – especially those engaged in research on knowledge intensive subjects, such as medicine, law, finance, science, and literature.

(This is the first time I’ve ever seen law mentioned as a target discipline . . . [more]

“We want to help you find the very best answer, even if you don’t know where to look.”

Sounds like something a librarian might say. But it’s Marissa Mayer, a Google V.P., talking about that fact that Google’s many search options — news, video, images, blogs, etc. — might be confusing for people. Last week Google announced it was initiating “universal search,” the aim being to “blend content from Images, Maps, Books, Video, and News into our web results.”

Some searches throw up images or videos, others yield news reports, in addition to the usual mound of web page results. . . . [more]

The Canadian Judicial Council has released Justice Matters, its 2005-2006 Annual Report.

“In 2005-06, the Council approved several important initiatives created by its committees to support judges in improving access to justice. These tools include principles for dealing with self-represented litigants, model policy on access to court records, research into alternate models of court administration, and jury instructions designed to minimize the risk associated with dismissed cases”.

“The Council also continues to carry out its important mandate of reviewing complaints against federally appointed judges. Canadians expect and deserve the highest standards of conduct from their judges, and the Council

A recent posting on the CALL-L discussion list points out that some of the presentations from the recent Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference 2007, held earlier this month, have been posted to the CALL web site here. Similarly, readers may be interested in taking a look at presentations and materials for some of the Legal Division sessions for the forthcoming Special Libraries Association Annual Meeting 2007, available here. As that meeting (usually engaging and interesting, in my experience) is still a couple of weeks away, additional materials may yet be posted. . . . [more]

Via Quillblog: As part of the selling off that’s being going on at Thomson, the educational publisher, Thomson Nelson, has been sold to Apax Partners and OMERS Capital Partners, the former an American company, the latter a Canadian pension plan provider. The story is on PR Newswire.

Thomson Nelson has a substantial list of books aimed at paralegals. . . . [more]

On the very weak basis that if it’s to do with government then it’s related to law, I’m bringing the Canadian Ice Service to your attention, an agency I’d not heard of until I read about it in a recent BBC story about Ayles Ice Island, a collosal piece of our frozen north the size of Manhattan that’s been floating further and further away from its Ellesmere Island home since it calved two years ago. (Okay, an issue for legal research: what if the thing floated so far towards Greenland that it trespassed into what had been Danish waters? Could . . . [more]