From last week’s leet to Latin this week, the language of law’s tags and maxims. Wikipedia again does it right, having a fine set of articles on Latin from various angles. The full list of Latin phrases is a good place to start. From a bene placito“from one who has been pleased well” Or “at will”, “at one’s pleasure”. This phrase, and its Italian derivative beneplacito, are synonymous with the more common ad libitum (“at pleasure”). to vox populi“voice of the people”, with a hundred or so phrases in between, there’s plenty here to amuse and arm yourself for . . . [more]

Well, there you go, another outdated technology bites the dust. This article in Variety announced the death of VHS: “After a long illness, the groundbreaking home-entertainment format VHS has died of natural causes in the United States. The format was 30 years old”.

However, there is some relief – the same article happily points out that Toy’R’US will still carry “Barney” VHS cassettes. . . . [more]

Want to know what Library 2.0 is? Well, you soon may not be able to find that answer on Wikipedia. On Wednesday someone earmarked the Library 2.0 article to be considered for deletion, citing the phrase as a neologism unsubstantiated by secondary sources. Ironic, since we had a room of 50+ people here in Toronto talking last night about what Library 2.0 is and how they can adapt some of the technologies in their own libraries!

Read the discussion here: Delete Library 2.0 from Wikipedia?. Before you weigh in on the subject, make sure you read the Wikipedia . . . [more]

This was brought to my attention earlier this week; apparently one is able to buy scholarly articles on Amazon. When publishing to a journal, one should make sure that they are not giving up rights to your original work. To quote:

An investigation by The Times Higher has found that American Amazon has arrangements to sell academic articles via companies that secure the rights to the content of journals from thousands of publishers worldwide. …Amazon.com told The Times Higher: “We license content from various content aggregators, some of which secure rights to content from thousands of publishers.

On a . . . [more]

Google Book Search makes use of a new e-book reader that the engineer who designed it talks about on Google’s blog. My initial reaction to it was ho-hum. We’ve all been used to Adobe’s Reader for years now, so being able to alter magnification and flip pages is nothing new. And although it’s something of a feat to have duplicated these abilities using DHTML and JavaScript, the fact remains that for the end user the impact is less than astonishing. On the upside, the Google “browser” loads in no time at all and is likely available wherever there’s an . . . [more]

Check out the site on the collaborative book being written online by people with a connection to Wharton Business School, MIT Sloan School of Management, Pearson and Shared Insights:

The central premise of We Are Smarter Than Me is that large groups of people (“We”) can, and should, take responsibility for traditional business functions that are currently performed by companies, industries and experts (“Me”)…

While they extol the power of communities, [recent books] were each written by only one person. We’re putting this paradox to the test by inviting hundreds of thousands of authors to contribute to this “network book”

I’ve only now noticed that with some searches Google invites me to “refine” the results and pick a class of pages. It seems to work for a travel destination (I tried with success New York, Toronto, and Vienna [thumbnail]) and for a medical matter (success with arthritis, gout[!], and diabetes [thumbnail]).

It doesn’t work, though, for law. I tried contract and tort and came up empty-handed, so to speak. Trickier to refine, I guess, and not nearly as popular as Paris or the common cold, even in a notoriously litigious society. . . . [more]

The Toronto Chapter of the SLA is presenting Library 2.0 in Action: How Special Librarians are actually using the latest tech tools:

Blogs, RSS Feeds, RSS Readers, Podcasts, Wikis and more…Hear how your colleagues are using the latest information tools in their special library settings. Learn some tips and tricks for dealing with firewall issues and budget constraints, etc.

Our own Connie Crosby along with Amanda Etches-Johnson (blogwithoutalibrary.net), Carolyne Sidey (Carolyne’s pages of interest) and Dave Hook (The Industrial Librarian) are asking the hard questions and giving a whole lot of useful answers. . . . [more]

In September, I viewed an excellent Factiva webinar “Transforming the Future of Search with Visualization” with Greg Merkle, Factiva’s Associate Vice President, Product Design. Viewers were shown examples of new visualization technologies on the Web, how corporations and other organizations are using them, and emerging trends and themes. . . . [more]

Happy Thanksgiving to our American readers! And congratulations on getting the really long weekend that goes with it — something that we should emulate here.

I’ve provided you with a Canadian turkey because for some odd reason Google isn’t displaying any Thanksgiving artwork today (yet?). You can see last year’s American Thanksgiving logo here; but the most recent logo this year is for Halloween.

  . . . [more]

UN Pulse, a blog created by the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library in New York, has compiled a list of RSS feeds from various UN bodies and specialized agencies.

There are feeds from a wide variety of sources:

• Food and Agriculture Organization
• International Atomic Energy Agency
• International Labour Organization
• Integrated Regional Information Networks (UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)
• Relief Web (also UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs)
• UN High Commissioner for Refugees
• UNICEF
• UN Population Fund
• World Bank
• World Food Programme
• World Intellectual Property Organization
• World Tourism Organization

Cross-posted to Library Boy . . . [more]

The blawg.com site reports that blogs maintained by law libraries are one of the largest categories in its directory.

Bill Gratsch, author of the site, comments:

“(…) just in reading through the postings from this group, it is readily apparent that they are offering a valuable service to the legal community at large. Both in pointers to new research resources and in general legal news and updates. For example, attorneys could clearly benefit from subscribing to the content from their local law school’s or bar association’s library blawg. These research professionals are often well-versed in recent legal developments in the