Last night’s energetic keynote address from John Willinsky was humorous and engaging, and offered several interesting insights on the history and future of OA. Under the title 10 Years After, he recapped the history of the PKP, which started out as a “project” he expected to last a few months in 1997 and morphed into the much larger body of works and research that it is today. I won’t try to recap the details of that history, but I’ll report some of the current statistics that show the success and variety of the PKP Open Journals System (OJS) software. Currently . . . [more]

Tired of Facebook yet? Its only going to get bigger….

The UK Research Information Network blog has two interesting posts about Facebook:

–new stats on its staggering growth
–reasons why Facebook will grow and outlast myspace

The Globe and Mail also has a recent story on Facebook that focuses on the young founder and controlling shareholder Mark Zuckerberg. . . . [more]

Canadian legal publisher Irwin Law has just published The Laskin Legacy: Essays in Commemoration of Chief Justice Bora Laskin:

“This book is a collection of seventeen scholarly articles and personal reminiscences that examine the life and career of the late Bora Laskin, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. The essays are written by family members, judges, law professors, and lawyers whose recollections about Laskin flesh out the life of a man ‘at the summit of Canada’s political and legal life,’ with commentary from some whose paths crossed his. The book includes examinations of Laskin’s contribution to

aideRSS is a Canadian startup that’s on the point of beta release. It looks like one to watch, because it promises a way to get you the “good stuff” from your feeds through something they’re calling Postrank filtering (see the screencast).

[via Rob Hyndman (who’s drowning in feeds and needs ideas about survival…)] . . . [more]

I’m attending the Public Knowledge Project‘s PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2007, and I’ll be entering brief descriptions of the events and my impressions over the next few days. Here’s the conference’s self-description:

The conference will provide opportunities for those involved in the organization, promotion, and study of scholarly communication to share and discuss innovative work in scholarly publishing, with a focus on the contribution that open source publishing technologies (such as, but not restricted to, PKP’s OJS, OCS, and OA Harvester) can make to improving access to research and scholarship on a global and public scale.

Major keynote

Along with my other life changes, my 2007-08 campaign will also include a new role, that of VALL President. While I’ve done my stint as the co-chair for BCLMA’s KM group, this is actually the first time I’ve led a larger Association — a little over 100 members. I know, I know, nothing like stringing all your ‘firsts’ together!!

Now I know many of you have played this role, and some of you many times. So let me ask, what really shakes things up in a modern Association? I’m just back from an Executive changeover meeting, and these are . . . [more]

Today’s Orange Mag is reporting on the acquisition by Lexis/Nexis of Nashville-based Juris Inc, a leading provider of time, billing, and accounting software for mid-sized law firms.

The expansion beyond legal information fits in with the Thomson West strategy that we blogged on earlier. . . . [more]

Dans un récent billet, consécutif à un long congès d’écriture sur mon blogue, et sur slaw, je soulevais certains doutes, et certains doutes seulement, quant à la pertinence d’un blogue, individuel, principalement en français, en droit, en amérique du nord. Encore une fois, si l’outil, comme formule d’apprentissage intégrée à un cours est, j’en suis convaincu, fort efficace, il demande, comme toujours, à être considéré dans son ensemble vis-à-vis de ses objectifs.

Élément symptomatique, on commence à trouver des sites juridiques qui se posent la question de la stagnation. Pour preuve, un billet sur le très bon blogue collaboratif . . . [more]

I was going to add what follows to the numerous comments posted in response to the posting by John Swan on 28 June 2007 called “Judges and Electronic searches”. Instead, I decided to start a fresh posting.

The issue is trying to predict when a court or taxing officer will award costs to the winning party for their disbursements of charges for searches of online databases such as Quicklaw or WestlaweCARSWELL.

The minutes of the June 2007 meeting of the Legal Research Section of the CBA BC Branch refer to a recent decision in BC where Quicklaw charges were . . . [more]

I read a refreshing, but somewhat provocative article on the work and social life of librarians, including some law librarians, in the Sunday New York Times under the title “A Hipper Crowd of Shushers”. It had some interesting things to say about the changes in the profession and its image. I gather the article has sparked some debate, so some of you may have seen it. It has a link to a discussion on librarian.net.

I like the part of ordering drinks according to Dewey decimal classification, maybe because I’m just back from holiday; I wonder if this would . . . [more]

Okay, search freaks: there are a few more frills to try out courtesy of Google Labs. The folks with the bubbling beakers have introduced a timeline search, which disports your results along a timeline depending, it seems, on dates located within the results — though I imagine the algorithm is a tad more sophisticated than that. Here’s a search for “charter of rights and freedoms” in a timeline view. A timeline might be useful if you’re doing a quick bit of history.

Then there’s a map view of search results. This one is going to need more work. . . . [more]

We’ve been known to worry about language here on Slaw. And so I thought that our readers might enjoy Language Log, a blog by linguistic profs Mark Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum. They offer an enjoyable mix of science and popular culture, applying humour or scorn depending on the requirements of the occasion.

They talk about law from time to time, as in “The Supreme Court Fails Semantics,” where they criticize the U.S. Supreme Court’s analysis in Morse v. Frederick [PDF], the “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” case, or “The right to do process,” in which they . . . [more]