You might already be familiar with Darlene Fichter, but if you’re not, I think she’s someone you should know about. Since I’m the lone Saskatchewan Slaw contributor for the time being, I think it’s high time I promoted some local talent.

Several years ago, I attended an “Introduction to blogging workshop” at which Darlene presented. She is a front-runner in all things to do with libraries and technology. In fact, Darlene was one of Library Journal’s 2002 Movers & Shakers: The People Who Are Shaping the Future of Libraries.

Darlene Fichter is Data Library Coordinator at the University . . . [more]

I’ve long wanted to be able to let a reader of Slaw see all the posts by a particular author, and a number of you have asked me for this function. Until today, however, I couldn’t seem find the tool I needed. Now, as you’ll see if you look at the “post post” material, I’ve disovered what was needed.

I’ve got to do a bit of work on the styling of the Author Archive page, and that will happen in due course.

As always, let me know if you experience difficulties with this feature. . . . [more]

Slawyers will notice that I’ve added a way of subscribing to comments via email. There has been an RSS feed for comments for a while, but because some readers are more comfortable with email, I’ve added the new function.

The new subscription box is in the sidebar to the right. Please let me know if you experience any difficulties with it. . . . [more]

In my last post, I briefly described my pragmatic approach to taxonomy creation at our law firm. Of course, the comments were more interesting than the initial post – the key issue being whether someone like me should “share” my taxonomy with fellow SLAW participants.

There is precedent, at least in Toronto, for the collaborative development of legal material. For example, the “Toronto Opinion Group” meets monthly to share ideas (and even drafting) on common issues in third party legal opinion transactions.

It strikes me that Simon F identified the two key issues – does a firm perceive some competitive . . . [more]

Slawyers will be interested in a report on the Australian Law Librarians Group website about issues relating to Lexis in that country and the disappearance of the local platform “Butterworths Online” in favour of a global platform. I refer in particular to this paragraph: “LexisNexis businesses in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, New Zealand, Canada and Austria are currently working through a similar process of retiring their original, locally-developed online legal research platforms (where they existed) and moving their entire customer base and online legal content libraries to the same platform that you know as LexisNexis AU. In New Zealand . . . [more]

From: News.Release.@Supreme.Court
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 1:50 PM
Subject: News release – Communiqué de presse

Ottawa – March 1, 2006 – The Right Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada, welcomes the appointment by Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein to the Supreme Court of Canada. “Justice Rothstein brings to the Court superb experience, both as a lawyer and a judge, and he has a profound commitment to the rule of law,” said Chief Justice McLachlin. “I look forward to the contribution that this distinguished jurist will make to the work of the Court. And I . . . [more]

Many of us see blogs as just the first driver for everyone to be able to read syndicated feeds on their computers. The next major wave of syndication will be one-way business communications, some of them personalized.... If we're lucky, it will even be digitally signed, and possibly encrypted (although that will probably take years to get right).

The lead article in the February Canadian Lawyer Magazine is a piece by Philip Slayter...who, curiously, refers to himself in part as having been “a dean of a law faculty”: a bit on the generic side, I'd say, for a tiny place like Canada. The law school in question was the Faculty of Law at the University of Western Ontario.

By way of the CanLII listserv, Principal Editor Ivan Mokanov has just announced that the first two hundred Supreme Court of Canada decisions prior to 1985 have been digitized and published on the CanLII website.

If you surf to the SCC decisions page above, you can see that the years 1976 to 1984 have been fleshed out and are ready for more material. It’s good to see that while the decisions are scanned, they are also OCR’d and made available (and searchable) in full text format.

A great project, and very necessary… Encore CanLII, Encore!!! . . . [more]

I’m going to what looks to be a fantastic ABA conference on law school facilities: “Bricks, Bytes and Continuous Renovation” in Seattle in late March. Its very timely for us as Osgoode is hoping to engage in a major renovation programme in the next couple of years, and the library will be a verybig part of that. My question for Slawyers – all of you use law libraries I’m thinking – use your imaginations and tell me what features you’ve always wanted to see in a library. I’ve got a lot of ideas of course but it would . . . [more]

Mr. Justice Marshall Rothstein of the Federal Court of Appeal has been nominated by Prime Minister Harper to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court of Canada. The Office of the Commissioner of Judicial Affairs has put together a website on Mr. Justice Rothstein that contains a good deal of information about the person and his professional work.

However, upon further examination of the website, we at Slaw felt it could and should be improved upon. Accordingly, we present:

The Marshall Rothstein Pages . . . [more]

As all the world (nearby) likely knows by now, Mr. Justice Rothstein will attend at a meeting of an ad hoc committee made up of members of Parliament in order to answer their questions concerning… exactly what, we’re not yet sure. This will happen on Monday afternoon, February 27.

Here’s the deal: What question would you like the committee to pose to its guest?

Slawyers, write in over the weekend — via comments — with that all-important question, and we’ll do what we can on Monday morning to make them available to, well, all the world. Remember, only one question. . . . [more]