Are we ready for a cyber-Katrina? How vulnerable is our electronic backbone?
Serious issues raised in a report released today.
PRESS RELEASES
Release Date: 6.23.06 Contact:
Tita Freeman
(202) 496-3269

Business Roundtable Issues Warning on Lack of Preparation to Recover The
Internet Following A Catastrophic Cyber Disruption

Analysis Finds “Significant Weaknesses” that Could Impact Homeland and
Economic Security

Washington, DC – The United States is ill-prepared for a cyber
catastrophe, with significant ambiguities in public and private sector
responses that would be needed to restore and recover the Internet
following a disaster, according to a new Business Roundtable report
released . . . [more]

Entitled “Hasn’t the Dewey Decimal System Been Invented Already?” the latest instalment of Jim Milles’ podcast Check This Out! was posted last night. In this episode, Jim has a few clips that examine, among other things, the changing role of the librarian. My contribution as “Canadian correspondent” discusses the Ark Group conference on KM held last week. I give an overview of the sessions plus mention a few things I learned. Please note Jim has changed the posting schedule from Mondays to Fridays. Probably because he is so busy travelling to conferences on the weekends!

I’m particularly thrilled . . . [more]

This from Sharon Wang, Reference Librarian at Osgoode Hall Law School:

Last week, a public letter [pdf] was released by CLA at its annual meeting held in Ottawa. This letter was addressed to Minister Bernier and Minister Oda regarding possible amendments that will be made to copyright legislation. In the letter, CLA “recommends caution and reflection.” Any future changes made to the copyright regime should keep the balance among the needs of creators, rights holders, and users.

The letter addressed two important issues: technological protection measure (TPM) and fair dealing. CLA believes that “TPMs present significant barriers to access to

Opera, the third cross-platform browser, has released version 9. I know how hard it is to move away from what we’re used to in a program that creates and surrounds almost everything we do on the web, but give this thing a try; it’s fast and loaded with features that would make your browsing life easier:

• tabbed browsing, of course, but with the neat ability to show you a thumbnail of what’s behind the tabs when you hover over them;
• session saving, either when you choose it at closing or when you re-start the browser;
• the ability to add

Shout out to the other Simon for a solid mention in a short feature in June’s CBA National on what to do with all those boxes that are left when your library downsizes or your personal shelf-space shrinks. . . . [more]

I’ve previously posted about Project Alouette on Slaw. Here is an excerpt about the project from today’sChronicle for Higher Education

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

AlouetteCanada Hopes to Pluck Scattered Digitization Efforts Into a Central Portal
By SCOTT CARLSON

Librarians and archivists in Canada are hopeful that a new nationwide online project, scheduled to go live today, will pull together digitization efforts across the country and make them easily accessible to the public.

The project, AlouetteCanada, is named after a French-Canadian children’s song. It is intended to be a portal site for boutique digitization projects at various colleges and museums. . . . [more]

In Deutsche Bank Securities Inc v Montana Board of Investments a the New York Court of Appeals held that a Montana seller (of bonds) fell with New York’s “long arm” jurisdiction statute when selling via IM and email to a buyer there.

See Law.com for an analysis.

[via E-Tips, Deeth Williams Wall LLP] . . . [more]

Here’s one of the better web tips I’ve stumbled across…

Have you ever linked to a webpage that had an anchor in it? For example, the link url would end in ‘something.htm#part1’, and the user would be taken to an exact spot in the webpage. This is accomplished by placing an anchor tag at the desired location of the landing page. Following this example, at some point in the landing page HTML you would find the tag ‘<a name=”part1″>’.

Did you know that you can do the same thing with an Adobe PDF file? Only with PDFs, there are no . . . [more]

Big anouncement yesterday from the International Digital Publishing Forum, which is a consortium of major players in the digital book industry.

The fear driving the consortium is that the potential growth of the market could be frustrated if different companies adopted proprietary standards. For example, despite the growth of .pdf files, customers can’t read a Palm e-book on a Microsoft Reader.

Major software companies and device manufacturers have announced plans to support new electronic book standards developed within the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The companies will support these standards in their next generation software and devices, alleviating many

EDGAR is the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system, and is one of the larger text-storage databases maintained by the US government. It has long been a gold mine of information on public companies in the US, but a very frustrating gold mine…a deep and valuable resource, on the one hand, but on the other, the lack of full-text searching made it hard to find that needle in the haystack.

SEC’s beta text search, which they slipped in quietly, is a major breakthrough in EDGAR access, and provides a feature which, until now, was only available in

The Spring 2006 Issue of Perspectives contains two short but helpful articles. Thomas Keefe’s “Teaching Taxonomies” reviews the author’s experiences in trying to explain to law students why they should think twice before relying on full text searching. Rather than merely lamenting the reliance on electronic over print, the author suggests a focus on the benefits of structured sources.

Stephen Armstrong and Timothy Terrell’s “The Perils of E-Mail” is a very practical look at how to send emails that are likely to be read by the recipient.

These articles will, of course, join my rather voluminous file on “articling student . . . [more]

I came across the Pacific Islands Treaty Series (with the wonderful acronynm PITS) this morning and I thought it would be of interest to SLAWers. The collection covers the 21 countries and territories in the Pacific. There are 14 countries, namely, Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Republic of Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Northern Mariana’s, Papua New Guinea, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu and 7 territories which are New Caledonia, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna (territories of France), American Samoa, Federated States of Micronesia, Guam (territories of the United States of America) and Tokelau (territory of New Zealand).

For . . . [more]