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]

A week later a field report from Project Rothstein.

Firstly, I’m delighted that the Slaw community really came together. Indeed Simon F and Simon C (who are old friends and colleagues) had the pleasure of consuming a bottle of Montepulciano with Connie Crosby Whom neither of us had ever met actually, yet we felt as if we’d collaborated for ever. Thanks to Connie and Simon for their introduction to writely.com, a Linux based collaborative word processing programme. It permitted us to work together on the same document, sometimes at the same time.

In addition, Mark Lewis compiled case law, . . . [more]

The publication of John McCamus’sSee his other professional biography. wonderfully thoughtful Law of Contracts a few weeks ago led to reflections about the market for Canadian legal publications.

There had always been hesitations about recommending specific texts on Canadian contract law (there being nothing with the clear stature of Anson on Contracts or Sir Gunter Treitel’s monograph); of course Waddams was scholarly (though one might end up wondering what the law was), Fridman was a bit formalistic (though with helpful footnotes, especially for smaller jurisdictions) and Jean Côté’s An Introduction to the Law of Contract (Juriliber, 1974) was stimulating . . . [more]

Representing Children Worldwide is a project of Yale Law School that attempts to catalogue “how children’s voices are heard in child protective proceedings” in an advertised 250 countries in the year 2005. This is an interesting, potentially useful, flawed project. Any data arrived at through a decent research method for such a spread of jurisdictions has real potential to help teachers, legislators and lawyers who find themselves working across legal boundaries.

The project seems to have run out of money, though, before it was completed. Thus, there’s nothing whatever on Canada, a jurisdiction that could have yielded up its various . . . [more]

I am surprised to appear to be the first SLAWyer to post the news that the Blackberry patent dispute appears to have been settled, as per this CBC news story. This is major news. I assume because the settlement was reached late Friday night that more discussion of the settlement will not occur until the open of business on Monday. . . . [more]

Further to Simon’s recent post on the possible establishment of a “public domain” registry/database: I think this is great news if it happens. I have been quite silent as a SLAW poster due to research I am conducting on early Canadian ragtime sheet music (circa 1899-1920) and have been trying to assess the possible public domain status of several pieces of sheet music. The US has a relatively simply rule (roughly, anything before 1923 is public domain, although the rule is not that simple). My limited understanding of the Canadian rule is that the Canadian rule depends on the . . . [more]