I came across a fascinating article in Monday’s Toronto Star. “Archivists embrace digital page” highlights the University of Toronto’s digitization contributions to the Internet Archive. Located on the seventh floor of Robarts Library, this local scanning operation digitizes mostly old rare books into five different formats. The scanning centre’s production numbers are impressive:

If you haven’t seen the video of computer engineer Jeff Han demonstrating his multi-touch computer screen, you’ve missed something quite spectacular. The movie’s available as one of the TED Talks I blogged about a few weeks ago. Apple’s iPhone apparently makes use of a similar technology, but only entails two finger touch control, as opposed to Han’s full ten.

It’s not easily grasped how this will have an impact in legal technology. The re-sizable virtual keyboard is one likely inovation that everyone will use to enter text if typing it in is still the practice. And the visual display of . . . [more]

A new research guide has been published on the GlobaLex website at the Hauser Global Law School Program at the New York University School of Law.

Entitled Research Guide on Transboundary Freshwater Treaties and Other Resources, the document provides information about major global and regional treaties, databases of international, regional and bilateral agreements, non-treaty instruments, NGOs and intergovernmental organizations, international water commissions such as the Canada-US International Joint Commission as well as sources of caselaw.

“Approximately 260 of the world’s river basins, with a majority of the world’s freshwater flow, cross or create international political boundaries. 145 countries, with

A group of former editors of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) has launched today an open-source, peer-reviewed medical journal that hopes to avoid what they say are editorial biases in traditional journals having to do with the important role research played by drug and medical appliance companies. (The CBC has the story.)

Open Medicine makes its articles freely available to all and might just function as a model for an open source legal journal. And truly in keeping with the times, there’s a blog [feed] on the website as well.

Avail yourself of the opportunity to visit . . . [more]

In an Internet age, the public library system is as healthy as ever, according to a report from the ALA released today.

“Far from hurting American libraries, the Internet has actually helped to spur more people to use their local libraries because it has increased our hunger for knowledge and information,” Loriene Roy, president-elect of the American Library Assn., said in a statement.

According to the ALA’s State of America’s Libraries report for 2007, the number of libraries offering free Internet use increased 400% from 1994 to 2004, with 99% of libraries providing such a service. Visits to libraries increased

I and others have posted a few times about the mission and goals Alouette Canada and its relation to legal information. At a lecture yesterday at UVic, by Brian Bell, the Director of the Open Digital Initiative, that they have a test site up and running. So far, most of the material is archival in nature, but there are a number of legal sites, and it is worth looking at to get a preview of the scope of Alouette Canada and what it hopes to accomplish, as well as trying out their search engine. . . . [more]

In looking up a judgment of the European Court of Justice I wound up in the (Luxembourgeois [delicious word]) European Navigator (ENA), which:

provides high quality research and educational material on the history of European integration on a single website: www.ena.lu.

ENA is a multilingual, multisource and multimedia knowledge base that contains more than 12,000 documents on the historical and institutional development of a united Europe from 1945 to the present day.

This “knowledge base” is acessed through an extremely sophisticated front end, the “Multimedia Content Explorer,” written in Flash. You’re presented with at least three different integrated panes, . . . [more]

THE HAGUE, 16 April 2007. Today, as its sixtieth anniversary year draws to a close, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, launched its new website.

This user-friendly tool, which has a powerful search engine, contains five times more information than the old site, particularly on the 136 cases which the Court has dealt with since 1946. Easier to use, with its improved navigation, the site complies with international accessibility standards established for web users with visual impairments, who will thus be able to access the full range of content.

The new website

Couldn’t get access to the Federal legislation and regulations at the official site, either yesterday or today, either through IE or Mozilla. Does anyone know what’s happening? . . . [more]

Just stumbled on a wonderful blog on legal translation, at the same time as Deborah Cao at Griffith has published a major monograph on Translating Law. . . . [more]

[this post is the last of a series covering the Leg@l IT Conference]

The last session of the day was the much awaited panel on the topic of e-discovery, featuring Justice David J. Waxse, USA District Court of Kansas City; Me Patrick L. Oot, Verizon Communications; Mr. Robert M. Gerbrandt, TD Bank; Mr. Rafael Gonzalez Caloni, PSS Systems; and Me Dominic Jaar, Bell Canada (Beaudin Legault).

Mr. Caloni put some numbers on the potential importance of e-discovery, noting that in the Verizon v. Vonage case, during 9 months 100 lawyers billed 53,000 hours, 232GB of data as involved, . . . [more]