A number of discussions arose at a meeting with colleagues today on the future of law firm legal researchers given changes in technology. It was hard enough twenty years ago (when I was still typing my law school papers) to imagine the impact of the Internet, the scope of online law-related information and other technologies that support legal research (e-mail, laser printing, scanning, etc.) [although twenty years ago I did have a Commodore computer that used a cassette tape deck as its memory – you had to fast forward the tape to get to different spots on the memory!.] Could . . . [more]

In reviewing the work of Eugene Garfield (of whom more anon) two points were fascinating.

Firstly that the idea of citation databases in the sciences came from Shepards Citations. See his 50 year old article Association of ideas techniques in documentation: Shepardizing the literature of science. I’d assumed that the legal documentation theorists drew from the mathematicians and information scientists, not the other was round. His article is worth reading.

Second the history of information science used to assume that techniques of organizing information were essentially from the Enlightenment, and the founding of the great national libraries, like the . . . [more]

The web democratizes information. But I just stumbled on a fascinating site with case law and articles for authors considering suing publishers. Check out http://www.akme.btinternet.co.uk/lawlibry.html which presents a model for decentralized subject specific information.

In a different more academic vein, we had occasion to look at restitutionary remedies on Friday and my colleagues were delighted with the depth of UCL’s restitution site at http://www.ucc.ie/law/restitution/restitution.htm
What other subject specific hoards do we use? . . . [more]

We’ve all heard of Wikipedia, the freely editable online encyclopedia, but have you heard of its sister site WikiBooks?

Wikibooks is a collection of open content textbooks, manuals, and other texts, with supporting book-based texts that are being collaboratively written. This site is a wiki, meaning that anyone, including you, can edit any book module right now by clicking on the edit this page link that appears in every Wikibooks module. Set up in July, 2003, volunteers have written around 12,294 book modules in a multitude of books.

I fully admit I am no expert in IP, but . . . [more]

The Royal Society urges caution over open-access publishing. See
Polly Curtis, education correspondent, Thursday November 24, 2005, Guardian Unlimited

One of the most prestigious scientific academies today warned against a rush to “open-access” publishing, saying a change to the current system of releasing research could have “disastrous” consequences for science.
The Royal Society today published a position statement urging caution against radical reform, in a move which will anger academics and universities who have been pushing for a replacement to the current costly system.

The row over how to publish research centres on the role of the biggest academic publishing

There is a good article in the most recent issue of the CBA National for October-November starting at page 31 called the “Legal Research Roundtable”, in which SLAW is given as one of the websites.

At the same time as I was reviewing this article, which stresses the importance of legal research skills for law practice, I received notiifcation from WestlaweCarswell about their new certification programme:

http://www.westlawecarswell.com/lawschool

I use this as a refresher for upper-year law students. I’d be interested in hearing about other experiences and uses of the ecarswell certificate.

nc . . . [more]

A recent Reuters article reveals that Cybercrime proved more profitable than drug trafficking in 2004.

A somewhat dubious milestone, but it casts another light on various efforts to rein in Cybercrime. . . . [more]

Musing in the rain this morning on the nature of reported Vs unreported decisions and wondering just what the distinction means any more.
In the ‘old days’ (Simon C set me off on this train of thought with his recent posting) the distinction was very clear. Reported, print decisions were all you had access to. Finding information about recent, unreported decisions was very difficult. Doing any sort of comprehensive search was impossible. Of course we had a lot less to read! But now? When researching anything, and I’m not alone in this, I look at reported or unreported decisions, making . . . [more]

Once in a while, one needs to be reminded of just how partial the electronic tools are, and how much we’ll continue to need old-fashioned libraries.

Let’s get away from the grand abstractions and make this very concrete.
Here was the issue. We had to consider whether a contract was binding. It had been made on April *, 200*. But we discovered that one of the parties named in the contract hadn’t been incorporated until May *, 200*. If it wasn’t yet in existence, could it validly contract?

If this were just involving Canadian parties, the answer would have been . . . [more]

A provocative interview with Microsoft’s Chairman and Chief Software Architect, William H. Gates, in the latest Information Week, in which he discusses work being undertaken by MS’s research campuses, including one in Bangalore.

What struck me was not so much the ‘we’re overtaking Google’ rhetoric, but how they were thinking about large domains of ill-connected information. The focus was on scientific information, but it was interesting that the model he discussed was pulling together astronomical data.

A couple of quotes:

We’re seeing fields of science that have so much data that without our ability to data mine and [manage]

Thanks to our own Ted Tjaden, seen here looking distinctly suave, the CBA’s National mentioned Slaw in an article on legal research in the October/November issue [pdf].

Slaw features in a list of nine sites where readers can find more about legal research, putting us in the same company as LLRX, Access to Justice, the Great Library, and LibraryCo. Not bad for a venture that’s not yet half a year old. Thanks, Ted — and the National. Congratulations Slawyers.

. . . [more]

1. NYT: NCSU, Personal Portals
2. ZDnet: Microsoft ECMA/ISO move
3. Microsoft Watch: Will Open XML Really Be Open?
4. ZDNet: RSS + OPML/ SSE = Really Simple Synchronization
5. Wired: Who’s Afraid of Google? Everyone
6. BBC News: Google extends searching offline
7. Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada
8. PR Newswire: Digital Study guides
9. VitalSource: Digital Study Guides
10. HeinOnline
11. Tom Davenport
12. Larry Prusak
13. The Babson Knowledge Blog
14. The Babson Knowledge Blog: inaugural post
15. The Babson Knowledge Blog: RSS Feed
16. KM World and Intranets 2005: Tom Davenport’s keynote
17. KM World and Intranets 2005: Bill Ives on Tom Davenport’s keynote
18. InterAlia: lawyers and RSS
19. Ray Kurzweil bio
20. MIT
21. Kurzweil, “The