UBC Archives has digitized and published online a collection of 52 letters by Charles Darwin.

“As far as we know, this project marks the first time that digital images of these Darwin letters are available online,” says Chris Hives, University Archivist.

The letters include correspondence between Darwin and John Scott Burdon Sanderson (1828-1905), involving research that Darwin and Burdon Sanderson conducted on the digestive powers and leaf movements of insect-eating plants.

In addition, UBC students are transcribing the digitized letters, and transcriptions will be added to the Archives site as they become available later this year.

“This project offers UBC

Diary of Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive. Hosted by the British Library and featured in a New York Times article today (February 7, 2007). . . . [more]

The Lewis and Clark Law Review volume 10:4 (Winter 2006) is devoted to papers from a symposium for open access publishing and the future of legal scholarship. One of the lead articles by Michael Carrol, “The Movement for Open Access to Law” describes the development of the open access movement that gave rise to CANLII and WorldlI but wishes to see this go further and argues that the “time is ripe for legal scholars and scholarly legal periodicals to fully join this movement for open access to law” (741). While most Canadian law reviews are members of the Legal Scholarship . . . [more]

Exhibit 1

Exhibit 2

And a tip of the hat to LibraryBoy who got there first . . . [more]

La question m’a été récemment posée par un collègue : un blogue, pour un professeur, à quoi cela sert ? Cela me permet aussi de faire un lien avec un tout récent billet d’un de mes non-juristes favoris, Bruce Schneier, spécialiste en sécurité, s’intitulant « Bloggers on Blogging ».

Et bien, il me semble que l’intérêt premier, en ce qui me concerne, et de très loin, est académique. Académique quoiqu’un tantinet iconoclaste d’avec la forme traditionnelle d’enseignement. Surtout dans mes cours de maîtrise, il est parfois difficile d’inciter les étudiants à faire leurs lectures à chaque semaine ; . . . [more]

I love a clever headline. Sadly, I’m better at enjoying them than I am at creating them but every now and then, genius strikes me and you can bet I want to headline it! Largely, though, it has worked in my favour that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) frowns on the pithy headline. The trade off? B-O-R-I-N-G!! I post every day to our law firm’s internal blog and what’s even more challenging than creating a clever title for a post is creating a clever title that is also clearly descriptive of the content. Mostly, the headlines run to the latter.

I . . . [more]

Captain Copyright is no more. Challenged by just about everyone, especially the Canadian Library Association, the Canadian super-hero for children thinking about copy-theft has been taken offline and replaced by a statement by an unnamed person or group that finishes with the wish:

We truly hope that there will come a time when the copyright community – including educators, librarians and copyright collectives – can work together to provide a unbiased teaching tool that provides teachers and students with a balanced view of copyright.

There’s a move afoot to get rid of the www that graces the front of almost all web URLs on the very sensible ground that it’s unneccesary (the nifty word for which in geek speak is “cruft”). no-www.org, which, you’ll note, itself lacks the sextuple-u prefix, is encouraging folks to arrange things such that their sites take traffic on the bare domain name — which Slaw does, by the way. I almost always find it best, when giving out this blog’s URL to say simply slaw.ca; and the CBC does it without fail.

Try it yourself when entering a . . . [more]

It would seem that Google is about to launch a presentation creator service to compete with Microsoft’s PowerPoint. The buzz is that this new app is to be called Presently, which is cute and about which a bit more, well, presently. I gather that this was discovered by some resolute geeks who are able to mine the Google Docs server — and let that be a warning to you that nothing online is secure. The hackers say that with Presently you’ll be able to convert documents into presentations, which can have themes, and the whole will have a zoom capability. . . . [more]

Because it’s Friday (and thus a duly licensed day of silliness on Slaw) and because it’s Munro Day, here is a quite extraordinary experiment that Penguin Books are carrying out.

Can a crowd – a very large crowd – write a piece of creative fiction?

To see how the experiment is going visit the experiment’s website. The experiment is being monitored – and blogged about – and is now getting ten hits a second. Looking at the history of the last two days, it looks as if very many fingers have been over the prose.

A team of editors . . . [more]

Because I hate to feel left out of anything, and love how blogs, podcasts and photos via the web allow us to feel almost like we’ve been there, I’ve found a few more links regarding LegalTech that took place in New York this week:

• Thomson West podcast – this week with Monica Bay, editor-in-chief of Law Technology News from American Lawyer Media, talks about LegalTech (also check out Dennis Kennedy’s predictions for law tech in 2007);
• Monica Bay also covers LegalTech in her blog The Common Scold;
• PureC, communications blog, had a bit of coverage: Interview with Monica Bay

Munro Day in Nova Scotia it may be. But it’s also Groundhog Day. Here in Ontario the good news is that Wiarton Willie, depicted above (yes, the image is “shadowed”), didn’t see his shadow; and in Nova Scotia Shubenacadie Sam, a resident of the eponymous town, also failed in the same way.

The rodents in question (properly Marmota monax, cousin to squirrels, rats, marmots and the like) are featured along with their U.S. cousin Punxsutawney Phil on a brief CBC news video.

This is indeed good news, but a little nuts, no? Well, there’s a history of sorts . . . [more]