The digitalization of legacy report series continues! A new joint project involving both UBC Law Library and the BCCLS has been launched to make The British Columbia Reports (1867-1946) available electronically:

http://stikine.library.ubc.ca/bcreports/index.html

Clipped from the collection website:

The British Columbia Reports is a law report series that was first published in 1884 by the Law Society of British Columbia, with judgments dating back to 1867. The series ceased publication in 1948. This collection includes the full text of all decisions published in the series.

The Reports, as a body of work, contains important social and legal history of this

The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging by Ellyssa Kroski, is an overview piece on tagging that might be useful if one had to explain it to someone who doesn’t travel the web very often. I still think that tagging is worth thinking about from within law, though I don’t yet see how it will come to be.

The piece (referenced in Current Cites), is the first item in a new weblog by the author called Infotangle. Kroski is a reference librarian at Columbia University and a technology consultant. Worth watching, perhaps. . . . [more]

Fascinating discussion by Jakob Nielsen on One Billion Internet Users of the growth of the Web and the implications of having passed the billionth user.

The Internet is growing at an annualized rate of 18% and now has one billion users. A second billion users will follow in the next ten years, bringing a dramatic change in worldwide usability needs.

Nielsen’s report is worth reading in full, but a few Timbits:For our readers outside British North America, the cultural reference to Timbits is explained here in the Wikipedia, which for once is reliable. There are even pictures of this . . . [more]

Distressing piece in Information Week about weaknesses in the new version of Mozilla Firefox.
Has anyone faced these problems? . . . [more]

Well, I got curious after that last post and soon discovered that there is a Wikilaw at http://wiki-law.org/.

According to this website, its mission is “to build the largest open-content legal resource in the world.” The site encourages all law professors, practitioners, and students to share their knowledge.” The founders of the site appear to be two graduates of a New York law school.

There does not appear to be a lot of substantive content on the site. For example, under the “treatises” section for “contracts” there is a table of contents with headings but no content – see: http://wiki-law.org/mwiki/index.php?title=Wiki-Treatise:_Contracts. . . . [more]

One of the most frequent questions law students ask about legal research is whether the “McGill Guide” is online. Of course it is not. There is, however, an online “American” citation guide – Peter W. Martin’s Introduction to Basic Legal Citation at http://www.law.cornell.edu/citation/– but this does not have Canadian content.

In checking out Wikipedia on various legal research related topics, I see that they have a good article entitled “Case Citation” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Court_citation which, although emphasizing US case citation, does provide examples of Canadian, British, Australian and NZ case citations. Unfortunately, there is a comma missing in . . . [more]

I saw a reference earlier today to Dennis Kennedy’s “Legal Technology Predictions for 2006: Small Steps for Most Firms, Giant Leaps for a Few Firms” (December 17, 2005) published on LLRX.com. Worthwhile reading; most of his predictions seem spot on (e.g., wikis overtaking blogs, increased RSS publications by law firms, the ongoing need for better time management technology tools for lawyers, etc.). . . . [more]

I saw a note on the ALLG listserv this morning from a Lexis rep announcing the availability of the NZ Law Reports and Queensland Law Reports in PDF. I’m not sure but I think this may be a first for Lexis, although Westlaw was there some time ago with the National Reporter System and of course we’ve had the wealth of resources from Hein and LLMC and Gale available in that format for a long while now. Its clearly a growing trend and a welcome one – I’ve always found it a useful ‘persuader’ for those who still resist giving . . . [more]

Well the wire services are reporting the top legal stories of 2005, as graded by the legal experts:
1. Katrina
2. Rehnquist-Roberts transition
3. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act

A touch insular, perhaps.

In the wider world, what were the top issues?

I’m tempted to list some of the huger mistakes that courts have made, ranging from the RIM saga [of which the New Yorker has a great piece today] and the collapse of the BCCI brought by Deloittes on behalf of BCCI investors against the Bank of England, which collapsed after 12 years. . . . [more]

We noted last month the Cornell wiki that required that experts be validated.

Today’s Register has a venture that builds beyond similar scepticism about the reliability of an encyclopaedia on which anyone can post.

$10m for a Wikipedia for grown-ups

The Register notes:

Digital Universe aims to garner the best of both worlds: harness wide public input, but with acknowledged experts acting as stewards.

The project has a long list of institutions signed up, including the National Council for Science and the Environment, the American Museum of Natural History, the World Resources Institute, the UN and UCB.

Material will . . . [more]

http://www.michaelhyatt.com/workingsmart/2005/12/the_death_of_tr.html

At this time of year, I indulge in one of my favorite pastimes: browsing bookstores. The theory is that I’m looking for gifts for friends and family, while the reality is that I also end up at the till with books for me. Guessing that most of us are bibliophiles, I thought you’d be interested in the above article. The link is to a publisher’s view of the future of the book publishing industry. The link takes you to “The death of traditional book publishing”; there is a link from there to another post by the same publisher, which . . . [more]

This morning an announcement from four information technology companies, seven American universities and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation that Higher education and the IT industry address open software research

ARMONK, N.Y. and KANSAS CITY, MO., December 19, 2005 — Leaders from four information technology companies, seven American universities and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced today that they have adopted guiding principles to enable open collaborative software research.

Summit participants developing and adopting these principles include the Kauffman Foundation, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Stanford, University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign,