I just finished writing a paper for the Computer Aided Legal Instruction Conference (CALI) in June, called “Research in a Digital World -or- Personal Knowledge Management for Legal Researchers“. From the executive summary:

The increasing volume of digital information with which researchers work is making the task of finding, capturing, organizing and eventually collaborating with digital data more difficult. Electronic information in multiple formats sitting in multiple silos of data present a challenge to researchers who have difficulty finding a specific piece of information in a timely fashion.

The two major benefits that come from effective

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I’m sure this has long since dawned on all the really smart people, but it’s really starting to become fifty-foot-letters-of-fire-in-the-sky obvious: if you’re sending anything across the Net, why would you ever send it uncompressed?

Check out the newly designed official introductory page on the site for Canada.

De gustibus non disputandum and all, but… to me it resembles a dog’s breakfast: far too many things going on in far too many guises. And to turn the site to partisan purposes, with the Conservative blue and Conservative slogans, is in poor taste I think. All in all, right for WalMart, maybe, but not for our front door. Oh, and the “pick-your-language” splash page that used to have a close-up of a wavy flag, now has jet fighters.

If you’ve forgotten what the old site looked . . . [more]

It seems that whenever I link to AustLII I discover something new, which always surprises me, although it shouldn’t by now. Today’s surprise was to link to the SAFLII site (Southern African Legal Information Institute) and to see just how much has been placed on the Web since I last looked, quite a while ago. As well as legislation and cases from the major courts, there is also a plethora of information from the various provinces, material from law journals and the South African Law Reform Commission and government information. Decisions from the Supreme Court of Namibia frm 2005 are . . . [more]

As many of us are on the ‘verge’ of the CALL conference later this week, and in particular, the KM pre-conference session, let me point to one of Connie’s recent Tao of Law Librarianship articles on LLRX.

In her latest installment, titled Librarian on the Verge of KM, Connie talks about the role of the Librarian in KM efforts, and how many Librarians now have an opportunity to expand their firm presence. As expected, I’d have to agree. And to go a bit further, I’d say that with a supportive firm culture and strong firm relationships, you may . . . [more]

Living the Future is a conference for collaborative thinking about the future. The participants are those directly involved in planning, challenging, and living the future. The 6th conference was held in April at the University of Arizona. The conference proceedings can be found at:

http://www.library.arizona.edu/conferences/ltf/2006/proceedings.html . . . [more]

I’d been unaware of the new web-based publication, Law in Firm which was released last week by the Village-Justice portal, and an article by Pierre Breese on the protection of scents by copyright, spring from a January appellate court decision involving Oreal and Bellure. Perfumes are creative works, and their authors are entitled to protectionLest you think that scents are trivial Dr. Alan Hirsch of the Smell and Taste Research Foundation in Chicago claims that women’s bowling scores can be increased 27% by the smell of jasmine..

This follows an earlier Dutch decision in Lancome v. KecofaLancôme . . . [more]

This is simply a quick note to say that Slaw’s first Theme Week must be counted a success. Guest posters Michael Geist and David Vaver gave us generously of their talent; all posts were interesting and helpful; and the comments came not just from regular readers but also from a few we haven’t heard from before. In the next little while I’m going to be gathering up the copyright material into a handy package and I’ll put a link to it in the sidebar when I’m done. Thanks again to all who contributed. . . . [more]

Is about to arrive and law librarians and research lawyers will soon be delivering advice by the bucketful of how private practice differs from law school. Compare the view from the academy with the view from outside, the Top 10 Things Law Librarians Want New Associates to Know.

But these are American views: what practical bits of research advice – both positive and negative – do you want to pass on to the summer bunnies via Slaw? . . . [more]

The timing is exactly right: I discovered the brand new TaxHeat on the next to the last day of the tax year.

TaxHeat is a weblog about researching primarily Canadian tax topics and issues.

Targeted at librarians who engage in quick and in-depth tax, legal, or business research, TaxHeat has two purposes:

• to inform readers of new developments concerning tax issues, legislation, and research, and
• to teach readers new tax research skills and sources.

Agnese Caruso, whose blog this is, works as a librarian in a corporate tax library in Toronto.

The feed for TaxHeat is http://taxheat.typepad.com/taxheat/index.rdf . . . [more]

1. TaxHeat
2. The Gavel Store
3. Gavel bouquet
4. China.org.cn: Shanghai Courts Start to Use Gavel
5. Silk Robes and Sou’westers: Scene 4: The Supreme Court of Newfoundland in session
6. The Green Bag: J. Wright, “An American Visitor to a Canadian Court” [pdf]
7. Canoe: Judge’s own “Da Vinci Code” cracked
8. The Guardian: Books: How judge’s secret Da Vinci code was cracked
9. WorldLII: Free Access to Law Movement: Declaration on Free Access to Law
10. SPARC
11. Larry Downes
12. CIO Insight: L. Downes, “Why Johnny Can’t Stop Sharing Files”
13. Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data
14. O’Reilly Radar: Open Text Mining Interface
15. Nascent: Open Text

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I’ve recently finished working on part of a website that makes use of icons to symbolize certain concepts — pretty stock stuff on the web. Except that it isn’t easy to find appropriate symbols, at least those that can work as icons, for abstract notions or large social institutions (which may be the same thing, now that I come to think about it).

How do we symbolize law in a tiny picture? Court? A lawyer? For the last, the best I could do was draw a mini-person and hope that it was clear the person was a lawyer because of . . . [more]