Back to the serious business of law libraries. (Are you kidding? Late on a Friday afternoon?)

I’d like to take a few moments to commiserate (not to be mistaken for whining) with other librarians, particularly solos, who bravely bear their burdens alone.

Here’s my last couple of days (you’ve had days like this, too, I know) …

I’m slugging my way through an uncommonly large backlog of information and research requests. I’m thinking that I might almost have it under control by the end of the week if I really work my butt off and sequester myself away. But then . . . [more]

[Cross posted on the VLLB]

After our recent kudos for the BCCLS website, I’m happy to announce that they are now offering yet another hidden gem from the BC legal market, this time for your RSS reader!

I just received an email from Mandy Ostick, Virtual Library Manager at the BCCLS, announcing that the What’s New blog (& the source for news items on the BCCLS homepage) is now available via RSS. While the feed is becoming less and less of the story here (see also UBC’s recent announcement), what’s more important is the source . . . [more]

The last few years, with the rising number of television channels and the phenomenon of reality shows, I would jokingly tell my friends it was only a matter of time before we’d all have our own shows. Amusingly enough, I wasn’t that far off. It is, however, television in a different form–the video blog or video feed–that is quickly becoming the new alternative to mainstream broadcasting. Especially with the number of Video iPods that people purchased this past Christmas, this is definitely not something we can ignore. There are no limits to the number of channels when you select the . . . [more]

If I were in the dating market, this would be more intriguing to me than some of the other options out there.

“Basically it’s speed-dating, but in a new setting—with books,” is how Belgian librarian Eric Van der Straeten describes the “lib-dating” service he created with fellow librarian Danny Theuwis that pairs readers in a comfortable setting—a library. The duo already have played matchmaker to numerous couples and are now training librarians from as many as 300 facilities to set up their own dating service. Theuwis told the AP he places flowers, candles, and wine on each table, and pairs

. . . [more]

Posts have been a little thin on the ground this week, mainly because a bunch of us contributors were sidetracked by working on a project to put up as much useful information as we could about the new Supreme Court appointment. Originally an idea of Simon Chester’s, a number of us signed on to go like crazy at the last minute to use our research skills and show everyone how it’s done.

Well. First of all the short list got leaked, and so we had rather more time than we’d expected — and rather more targets. Like most everyone else, . . . [more]

The Prime Minister’s Office announced this morning that the Honourable Mr. Justice Marshall E. Rothstein, currently a member of the Federal Court of Appeal, is the candidate to be interviewed as nominee for new member of the Supreme Court of Canada.

News Release – PMO – February 23, 2006

For an excellent (and I do mean excellent) summary of Justice Rothstein’s career to date, see this page on the Office of the Commissioner of Judicial Affairs website:

Justice Rothstein

It includes curriculum vitae, extensive lists and links to his many written decisions, examples of his written decisions at the . . . [more]

Lawyers are knowledge workers. I fundamentally disagree, for semantic reasons, with the proposition that "lawyers are not knowledge workers". I do not take issue with the laudable characteristics that should be associated with "lawyers as knowledge workers".

Maybe I’m slow, but it seems to me that the Open Access movement and IP Law bloggers have remained mostly unconnected in public fora. IP lawyers tend to blog on a range of substantive IP issues, and OA proponents, where they discuss the law, tend to focus on copyright. But today Peter Suber of Open Access points to this article by James Boyle, an IP professor and OA proponent, in the Financial Times which seems to bridge some of the gap. These two older articles are also worth reading: one, two. The latter outlines how, in the WIPO . . . [more]

I fully concur with Neil Campbell in lauding LLMC – no praise is too much. I’d also like to support his comments about the preservation of the legal heritage – something I was also talking with Balfour Halevy about this afternoon. We at Osgoode are currently developing plans for a major expansion of our ‘knowledge management’ capability over the next year or two, investing heavily in state of the art software that will enable us to take on some really large scale digitization projects. I’ve mentioned before projects that I have in mind like a collection of Confederation-related documentation, but . . . [more]

I’ve just finished reading the lastest Law Library Microform Consortium Newsletter (#17, February 2006), in which I found out that LLMC itself is 30 years old, and the digital project is now 3 years old this February.

I’ve sung the praises of LLMC before on SLAW but again I ugre SLAWers to take a look at what they are up to, particularly the digitizing of Canadian titles at http://www.llmc.com.

I particulary note their work with the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) to develop an online, universally-accessible database for the tracking of hardcopy preservation copies of legal and law-related print . . . [more]

I don’t know if Slawyers ever heard the wonderful comedy sketch by the ’60’s English group Beyond the Fringe (Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller) in which a coal miner bemoans his fate, and opines: “Yes, I could have been a Judge but I never had the Latin. I never had the Latin for the judgin’.”

Seems that some parliamentarians are going to get to see whether Prime Minister Harper’s nominee for the Supreme Court has the Latin, all in front of TV cameras so we can judge the coal miners for ourselves. ” ‘These are public . . . [more]

1. Yahoo! Publisher’s Guide to RSS
2. RSS Specification
3. RSS Specification: “5 Reasons Why Your Site Needs to Publish a News Feed”
4. RSS Specification: “What is RSS – for Marketers”
5. RSS Specification: “Steps to Create & Promote RSS Feeds”
6. RSS Specification: RSS Articles
7. Canada Law Book
8. CCH Canadian Ltd
9. Federal Publications
10. Federal Publications: “What’s New”
11. Federated Press
12. Carswell: areas of interest: business
13. Carswell: areas of interest: international
14. UTF-8
15. Webmonkey
16. Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations
17. First Monday February 2006
18. Law Librarian Blog
19. Alberta Historical Law Collection
20. Alberta Historical Digitization Project
21. The British Columbia Reports
22. LLMC Digital
23. Vancouver Island flag
24. Saltspring Island flag
25. moiré

. . . [more]