The following is by guest bloggers Jim Suderman and Hannelore Dekeyser.

Jim Suderman is a member of the Canadian research team in the UBC-based InterPARES 2 research project directed by Dr. Luciana DurantiHe has worked as an archivist for over twenty years in Manitoba and Ontario, and with electronic records for the past eight years. He is currently manager of records management services for the City of Toronto.

Hannelore Dekeyser is a legal researcher at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Law & ICT (K.U.Leuven, Belgium) where she has been working on the legal aspects of digital archiving since 2002During this . . . [more]

Authenticity is a concern in courts, where any document offered as evidence must be free of tampering. Inasmuch as GL might be evidence, it would also need to be authenticated in some way. . . . [more]

The following is by guest blogger Susan Salo, head of CISTI’s London NIC (NRC Information Centre)Susan has been on the CISTI’s Electronic Resources Committee for three years, and is also on the Collections Advisory Committee.. Theme week leader Michael Lines asked Susan to comment on how Science and Technology GL is collected at CISTI, so that we in the legal world can learn by analogy from those fields, both in terms of the actual sources of GL that have been established, and where possible the policies and background that has made Science and Technology a leader in access to . . . [more]

In my view, the definition of grey literature should include one too often overlooked source of research about the law, namely the reports of law reform institutes.

The Diana M. Priestly Law Library at the University of Victoria in British Columbia has a page of links to law reform commissions in various countries. The University of Calgary Law Library provides a slightly different list.

Among the finding tools are:

• The British Columbia Law Institute has created a searchable law reform database that indexes over 7000 law reform materials from common law jurisdictions around the world
• The WorldLII Law

For this part of the discussion, I want to outline my approach to finding GL, which I hope will make a little more concrete what I mean when I talk about the semi-archival quality of GL.

Some of this goes back to the creation of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice, which came out of a CBA effort, the final report of which is a fine example of GL.

Recommendation 52 advocates setting up the Forum, in part to “[collect] in a systematic way information relating the system for administering civil justice” (p.78), which basically turns out to me a . . . [more]

I’m linking, I hope, to a story about Google having won the competition (over Yahoo and MSN) to provide search services to the most popular site on the web – myspace.com. How one CNN Video “links to the CNN Video on the topic is a matter I haven’t worked out.

Better to read Business Week . . . [more]

Rejoice all you BlackBerry users:

CanWest MediaWorks and Rogers Wireless today announced the launch of bbTV, the first media player to deliver content for BlackBerry® in Canada. bbTV will offer Rogers Wireless customers access to near TV quality synchronized audio and video files of leading CanWest MediaWorks content, including breaking and daily news from Global News, Global National, Global Morning and the Financial Post. In addition, bbTV will provide daily sports information and commentary from Rogers Sportsnet, Canada’s number one regional sports service.

To help bring this new technology to market, CanWest has partnered with Rogers Wireless to provide the

Periodically Technorati surveys the state of the Blogosphere. The pictures here are amazing, but the summary tells its own story of amazing growth.

Technorati is now tracking over 50 Million Blogs.
The Blogosphere is over 100 times bigger than it was just 3 years ago.
Today, the blogosphere is doubling in size every 200 days, or about once every 6 and a half months.
English language blogs have recaptured the linguistic lead – last survey, Japanese blogs were in the lead.
About 175,000 new weblogs were created each day, which means that on average, there are more than 2 . . . [more]

Next month in San Francisco, the College of Law Practice Management will meet to consider some interesting empirical studies on why law firms – especially in North America – seem so slow to innovate.

The working paper published this month seeks comments.

I’ve been spending part of my summer on a research project looking at innovation in US law firms, or the lack thereof. According to the interviews I’ve been conducting with lawyers, consultants, and law practice administrators, law firms may be some of the least innovative organizations in the US economy.

This is partially due to the nature of

Michael Lines and Kathryn Arbuckle have both pointed out the difficulty of collecting print copies of much grey lit, and yet library users are reluctant to pore over screeds on screens. Might it not be sensible to explore print on demand as at least a partial solution. (I’m referring to the abililty of libraries or other information centres to quickly print and bind digital material, not the many “vanity” presses that now offer authors inexpensive print runs of their works — those these, too, may have their place: think about a well-done law school casebook printed off site.)

All the . . . [more]

The postings on grey literature are great so far. I’m not sure it has specifically been covered in the postings and comments that I have read, but the control of grey literature in academic institutions is included in the concept of institutional repositories. This is really related to the changing nature of the academic publishing paradigm away from printed journals to e-journals. The aim is to capture everything produced by a university or research institution before publication, to preserve the knowledge, as well as to make the knowledge available to other researchers and scholars.

In law, this has taken . . . [more]

The various postings on grey literature have been highly interesting and informative. I don’t know whether it comes within the definition (such as it is) but I find regular reading of news magazines an extremely useful current awareness sources, as well as a treasure trove of all sorts of information about interesting developments in the law. Presiding over a major academic law library (and its acquisitions budget) gives me an advantage here in terms of the range of titles we can sunscribe to (and to me in that I get them routed to me first for subway reading) however I’d . . . [more]