On March 6, the Society of Computers & Law (UK) hosted an event at the Royal Society in London to hear a lecture by Professor Richard Suskind on the way in w hich legal services will develop over the next 10 years. Susskind is an independent advisor to government and the private sector on IT, lectures internationally, is a columnist for the Times and has written and edited several books on It and the Law.

To extract from the SCL email, he posited a world changed by exponential increase in processing power and where commoditisation is an inescapable part of . . . [more]

A colleague alerted me to the March 2006 “Canadian Policy Brief” of ARMA International entitled “New Supreme Court Judge Could Have Big IP Impact” that comments on recent speeches made by Justice Rothstein on intellectual property. . . . [more]

Today’s law students have keener eyesight than fogies, but I had to wonder about an experiment being conducted at the University of Melbourne. Students are using hand-held computers in a trial to evaluate the effect of mobile technologies on student learning.

Today’s students, the article claims, “combine work with study, they have competing demands on their time, they are multi-tasking by nature, and they have been dealing with technology since they were born – they shop on-line, research on-line, date online and expect to study on-line.”

“As part of a trial of mobile learning technologies, the students were given

. . . [more]

A piece in today's Globe Technology section got me thinking again about plagiarism. Seems Mount Saint Vincent has ruled against the use of a US product called Turnitin, an anti-plagiarism device.

From the Supreme Court news releases:

Ottawa – March 8, 2006 – The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada, announced today that The Honourable Marshall Rothstein will be sworn in as a justice of the Supreme Court of Canada on Thursday, March 9, 2006 at a private ceremony. The official welcome ceremony for Justice Rothstein will take place at 10:00 a.m., on Monday, April 10, 2006, in the Main Courtroom of the Supreme Court of Canada. On this occasion, it is expected that there will be remarks by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, and representatives of the Government of

. . . [more]

Further to Simon’s post yesterday on this topic, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries passed a resolution sometime ago recommending the appointment of a National Law Librarian. In recommendation # 8 in my recent LLM thesis (available online on SLAW at https://www.slaw.ca/resources/tjaden-thesis/), I supported this recommendation in the following terms:

As mentioned in Recommendation #1 above, the Access to Information Review Task Force has recommended “a co-ordinated government-wide strategy be developed to address the crisis in information management” including “partnerships among the agencies with primary responsibility for information management” such as the National Library and other government institutions.

. . . [more]

10.10 March 8, Great Library, Law Society of Upper Canada, Osgoode hall, Toronto

Slit. Rip. Toss.

The sound of buckram leather bindings being sliced from the American collection in the Great Library. Dust settling in the big bins where the paper is going off for recycling at a few dollars a ton. Workmen with exacto knives attack the old West Law Reports.

What’s happening? The Great Library is embarked on its biggest discard operation. American caselaw is going the way of all flesh. Why should libraries squeezed for space keep the books, which no-one wants? It’s all on Westlaw . . . [more]

Charles W. Bailey, Jr. of Current Cites has just made his What is Open Access? available. As the notice says, in it he “…explains and summarizes the “Open Access” movement within the scholarly and research communities of higher education.” . . . [more]

National Library of Australia Launches Libraries Australia Portal“Libraries Australia, a service that enables anyone with an Internet connection to select from more than 40 million items held in over 800 libraries across the nation....[was] launched at 12.30pm Monday 27 February at Parliament House, Canberra by Senator Helen Coonan, Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.... Libraries Australia, developed by the National Library of Australia, is an e-ticket to a world of information consisting of books, journals, newspapers, theses, pictures, music, manuscripts, maps and much more. Many online resources such as digitised images and full text government publications can also be accessed immediately online.”

I want to bring to everyone’s attention that CALL/ACBD has posted a new and streamlined website at the following URL: http://www.callacbd.ca/.

For more information: Info re: new website

Some new functionality will be especially noticeable to CALL/ACBD members and there will also be new features debuted in the near future as well. . . . [more]

This is a text of a message I received last Friday which should be of interests to SLAW:

Access Copyright and Creative Commons Canada Announce Public Domain Registry
Ground-breaking project will feature globally searchable catalogue of Canadian culture
Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency and Creative Commons Canada, in partnership with Creative Commons Corporation in the US, today announced the development of a Canadian public domain registry. The ground-breaking project – the most comprehensive of its kind in Canada – will create an online, globally searchable catalogue of published works that are in the Canadian public domain.

“Canada has . . . [more]

When we have some full-time permanent reference librarians here at Osgoode (soon) I’m going to be seriously looking into
online/chat reference, perhaps in cooperation with other libraries around the world so as to offer a 24/7 service. I have concerns though about how we would limit such a service to our own Osgoode or York University community and those of other partner institutions. Obviously we don’t want to be flooded with queries from all and sundry at the expense of our primary clientele. Do other Slawyers have experience with this kind of thing? I’d be very interested to hear. As . . . [more]