What follows is an exchange of emails (some excerpted) that preceded the launching of Slaw. I asked the group of core contributors about taxonomy — coming from “blogging,” I felt the need for categories. You can see how vexed the matter of taxonomy is and how interesting the discussion was getting to be, when, too anxious about ushering my baby into the light of day, I let a few days’ radio silence signal the end of the exchange, and imposed my own views.

Connie Crosby, as you’ll see, had the bright idea to post the exchange. It will act as . . . [more]

Just stumbled on a publication called Jungle Law, aimed at law students, which had a cute miscellany page:

herewith:

20 Random Bits of Lawyer Knowledge

We found them. Use them to your advantage.

1. U.S. Presidents Who Were Also Lawyers
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
James Monroe
John Quincy Adams
Andrew Jackson
Martin Van Buren
John Tyler
James Polk
Millard Fillmore
Franklin Pierce
James Buchanan
Abraham Lincoln
Rutherford B. Hayes
Chester A. Arthur
Grover Cleveland
Benjamin Harrison
William McKinley
William Howard Taft
Woodrow Wilson
Calvin Coolidge
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Richard Nixon
Gerald Ford
William Jefferson Clinton

2. Oldest . . . [more]

How ubiquitous, embedded, transparent and animated can the internet gets and what will happen then.  That was the topic of the plenary session at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Law Libraries last Wednesday.  It’s adapted from the article Jerry Kang, the presenter (a UCLA law professor), co-wrote with an architecture professor:

Jerry Kang and Dana Cuff, Pervasive Computing: Embedding the Public Sphere, 62 Washington and Lee Law Review 93 (2005).

I enjoyed his presentation a lot, but could not help being distracted by the fabulous software program he used in his presentation.  Instead of using the rather static PowerPoint, he used . . . [more]

Researchers at Stanford University have developed a browser extension that:

transparently converts a user’s password into a domain-specific password. The user can activate this hashing by choosing passwords that start with a special prefix (@@) or by pressing a special password key (F2). PwdHash automatically replaces the contents of these password fields with a one-way hash of the pair (password, domain-name). As a result, the site only sees a domain-specific hash of the password, as opposed to the password itself.
Web Password Hashing

 
This is aimed at those of us — most of us, perhaps — who use one . . . [more]

Of note to many, the Vancouver Association of Legal Administrators (VALA) is now to be known as the British Columbia Legal Management Association (BCLMA).

If you haven’t passed by as of yet, the Knowledge Management sub-section is in the process of setting up a blog. It’s mostly my posts to date, but I’m hoping for more contribution from others in the coming year.

Steve . . . [more]

The concern over C-60 involves a section of the bill that deals with remedies open to copyright holders. That section contains the following language: "…the owner of copyright in a work or other subject-matter is not entitled to any remedy other than an injunction against a provider of information location tools who infringes that copyright by making or caching a reproduction of the work or other subject matter."

This from a decent piece last week by Elinor Mills, a staff writer at CNET News.com. Presumably the bad drafting will be straightened out before it gets debated in the Fall. . . . [more]

You may have wondered what exactly Lexis is.  Here is a found poem on the subject

Here is the explanation that Googlism provides at http://www.googlism.com/index.htm?ism=lexis&type=1:

 Googlism for: lexis

lexis is our professional content management
lexis is the study of vocabulary in
lexis is no more available
lexis is an online service that provides a wide range of full
lexis is focus
lexis is available to all law students
lexis is closed or phone line is bad
lexis is a library with newspaper
lexis is available via the web for students at www
lexis is http
lexis is a . . . [more]

The attached URL is to an interesting post on the Google Library project in which the blogger makes the interesting comment that

In spite of their inherent slowness, organizing information is a job that’s still best done by people, and in most places those people are called librarians. I admit librarians can’t begin to sort all the available information, but at least for them preserving, categorizing, and creating access to the information that people need is a higher priority than content–targeted advertising. The insistence of librarians on continuing to use what might seem like arcane and antiquated systems — such

. . . [more]

Biblioacid is a French weblog, in French, natch, on IT and libraries. In its own (English) words:

Biblioacid is a weblog focused on libraries and technologies, led by 2 French librarians. We aim to inform our French colleagues about what’s going on in librarianship abroad today, to give our opinion about the changes occuring in the library world, and (why not?) to give French-reading librarians abroad an insight of librarianship from a French perspective. Biblioacid is combined with a pdf-formatted e-zine issued every other month (more or less).

All comments, suggestions and contributions are most welcome…

It’s always a . . . [more]

Juru, an exprimental IBM development from Haifa written in Java, is a

full text search library written in Java and dedicated to small/mid-size collections where precision is a must. It efficiently applies state-of-the-art search algorithms producing highest-quality search results.

Apparently it’s already inside WebSphere Portal, but an implementation called Tamnun Juru Desktop search puts a browser interface over the search facility, "tamnun" meaning "octopus" in Hebrew. One of the good things about this, apart from its independence from the expensive WebSphrere, is that unlike Google Desktop to date Juru searches Notes.

I’m not sure if it’s commercially available, but . . . [more]

Those of you who subscribe to beSpacific will already have seen this. But just in case: Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas at Austin, one of the great law libraries, has created a website on "Current copyright literature." Tobe Liebert, the creator of the service, says the site will likely be updated a couple of times a week. No RSS feed, alas.

UPDATE: August 7, 2005
Tobe Liebert writes to say that there’s now an RSS feed for the service. The URL is: http://web.austin.utexas.edu/law_library/copyright/rss.cfm. . . . [more]

Yahoo's research labs have come up with a product called Mindset (“Mindset: Intent-driven Search”).