Citizendium, the “expert-led, public participatory, wiki-based project to sum up human knowledge” is now open for business. They have roughly a thousand articles on tap at this point and will presumably increase that count regularly over time. There’s nothing on law, yet, that I could see, so the field’s wide open, people. They need editors and authors; signing up is easy.

For a test cruise, try hitting the “random page” button. . . . [more]

University of Ottawa’s uOttawa Centre for e-Learning and the Bellanet International Secretariat have created a nice animation showing how to use the “peer assist” technique in solving a problem. I was expecting it to involve electronic media to allow people to work together; however, in this case it describes bringing together a group of people face to face with a mediator to help in solving one problem. It also describes a rotating peer assist, wherein more than one problem needs solving so several groups of people are brought together and the mediator and person with the problem rotate through the . . . [more]

Bill Drew of the Morrisville State College Library has created a custom search engine that aggregates content from more than 200 reference sites.

The sites are those included in the 1999-2006 annual lists issued by the Best of Free Reference Web Sites Committee of the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA) of American Library Association (wow – I wonder what the committee president’s business card looks like!).

The search engine is built using Google Custom Search Engine. Essentially, it is now possible to create a search engine that only covers the specialized websites . . . [more]

No excuse for any of us, with web access to Les locutions latines et le droit positif québécois by Wallace Schwab, which is a brilliantly unconventional use of the Soquij and Canlii databases, to mine how Latin is still deployed in our law.

. . . [more]

My next door neighbour at Heenan Blaikie, Ryan Teschner lent me this morning a history of the Queen’s Law School at 50 – “Let Right Be Done”:
A History of the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University by Professor Mark D. Walters
I was very pleased to see 3 pages about the early days of computerized legal research in Common Law Canada, which all started at KingstonThe story of Datum/Soquij is for another day..
The Genesis of Quicklaw
In October 1972, it was reported that a sense of manic chaos reigned in the house at 140 Beverly Street, just one . . . [more]

Sounds like a surreal double-play in baseball (“Tinker to Evers to Chance“) but it’s simply the path of influence as charted by Mike Love using an application called Touchgraph. I’m fascinated by tools that visualize data, and moreso by those that reveal the relationships among parts. Mike Love’s Genealogy of Influence charts the ways in which 500 seminal thinkers have influenced each other over time; and the dynamic nature of the table lets you bring any particular thinker to the fore — as figure, with the others as ground. This sort of dynamic charting has been around for . . . [more]

This via the BCCLS What’s New Blog:

QP LegalEze has added a Field Search option to its previous search options of Quick, Advanced, and Boolean.

The new Field Search page allows you to focus your search on a specific area of a document, such as:

• Title
• Definition
• Chapter Number
• Regulation Number.

Currently field searches can only be performed on the following types of documents in QP LegalEze:

• Statutes
• Regulations
• Table of Legislative Changes
• Historical Tables
• Supplements
• Rules of Court and Related Enactments
• Private, Special and Local Statutes.

Yesterday’s The Globe and Mail had a brief (but very interesting) article about Microsoft offering to pay a blogger to modify technical articles about the company on Wikipedia. Although anyone can contribute to the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia’s group of volunteer writers and editors block anyone perceived as having a conflict of interest from contributing biased information. So as the article states, paying for coverage in Wikipedia is not tolerated. The article goes on to describe Microsoft’s response to the “online scandal.” . . . [more]

Perhaps I’m not wildly off topic when I hope that everyone knows about the Chicago Manual of Style’s Online Q&A, wherein folks submit style questions and the Manual editors supply often pert answers. Sample from the site today:

Q. As an editor of regulatory documents, I routinely come across sentences in which the subject is an inanimate object but the verb denotes something only a person can do. Examples are “this document analyzes the hazards” and “the analysis considers the environmental impacts.” Does this type of thing have a name? Inappropriate anthropomorphism or personification? Is there a rule I

Good piece in law.com on The Many Hats of a Law Librarian by Tricia Kasting, who I only knew because of her federal statutory research pathfinder, and her piece on how the Millennial generation of law students does legal research differently. . . . [more]

I hadn’t noticed until this morning that the Globe and Mail’s Law Page had articles that only appear on the website and have no print analogue.

I almost missed Jacob Ziegel talking about Class Actions.
. . . [more]

It seems like the interest in India and India law is now on the swell. I received notice today of another Indian online legal research company, this time commercial, which I was unaware of: Manupatra.

This is the company information from their website:

Manupatra.com is India’s largest and most comprehensive online legal & business policy database. Manupatra revolutionized the way in which people do legal research in India. Since a humble beginning in 2001, we have come a long way in being the pioneers in online legal research in India. With 100 people across 15 cities, the company is the . . . [more]