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

. . . [more]

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]

The digital revolution has hit academia with equal, if not more, force than it has elsewhere, however no heads have rolled with this revolution. I'll leave it to you to decide if that is a good thing.....

Given that this week’s theme is ‘Copyright’, I went back to a recent article I had read in CIO Insight, in January, by Larry Downes, Associate Dean of the UC-Berkeley School of Information Management and Systems and the author of Unleashing the Killer App and The Strategy Machine.

In the article titled “Why Johnny Can’t Stop Sharing Files”, Larry postulates that: “Copyright is effectively dead, despite the entertainment industry having won the Grokster case—or maybe even, in part, because it did. The consequences of ignoring the that change are dire.”

He makes several key points, . . . [more]

Not quite a copyright issue, but still and all a question of free access and control:

We would like to announce the launch of a new online space for Canadian civic engagement – Citizens for Open Access to Civic Information and Data (aka: CivicAccess.ca). CivicAccess is being founded by librarians, civil servants, academics, lawyers, free- and open-source advocates, geomatics professionals and community planners from across Canada. We are motivated by the belief that open civic information and data are necessary for being engaged citizens in an “information society”.
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Nous souhaitons vous annoncer le lancement d’un nouvel espace en

. . . [more]

A couple of days ago, I came across a note by Tim O’Reilly concerning the Open Text Mining Interface (OTMI). O’Reilly described it as a “copyright hack.” It seems this initiative was started by Timo Hannay, who has also blogged about it on the website of his employer, Nature magazine. The initiative itself is an attempt to respond positively to requests from indexers and data-miners for full-text versions of articles, but without at the same time making human-readable versions of the articles readily available free to non-subscribers. OTMI, an XML format, consists of “word vectors” plus “snippets” which amount, more . . . [more]