On Thursday law librarians in Toronto discovered that the Ontario Gazette from 2000 to 2002 had been removed from its website, whereas the website says:

This site is presented by Publications Ontario as a pilot project to make the Gazette available to the public on the Internet. It will allow you to view all issues of the Gazette, in PDF format only, from the beginning of January 2000.

Some libraries have come to depend upon the electronic version, expecting it to all be kept on the web from January 2000 forward. An email campaign protesting the change to Publications Ontario . . . [more]

I missed this announcement – it’s always good to have sites which are committed to public information about the law.

MONTREAL, Oct. 17 /CNW Telbec/ – Today, Educaloi unveiled the English version of its legal information website, www.educaloi.qc.ca/en , before a gathering of nearly 150 people at the Atwater Market Reception Hall. The Educaloi site contains over 1000 pages of free legal information and hundreds of information sheets on a variety of subjects, including court procedure, family law, employment, housing, criminal law and consumer rights.

Educaloi’s mission of providing Quebecers with clear and accessible legal information. “The Educaloi team has

Made somewhat easier this week because of SLinks:

1. THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO By David Gelernter
2. Merriam-Webster dictionary: new word “google”
3. Wikipedia: verb: to google
4. Googleblog: child named google
5. Oliver Google’s website
6. Legal Information Institute
7. Cornell Law School
8. Wex
9. Wex FAQ
10. zdnet: Microsoft Hits the Books in Britain
11. Blackstone on line
12. Coke on line [pdf]
13. Canada’s Digital Collections
14. Collections Canada: National Digital Inventory
15. Alberta Law Collection
16. Law Library Microform Consortium Digital Project
17. Early Canadiana Online
18. Libraries Information and Preservation Alliance
19. Fortune: Bill Gates is worried
20. zdnet: Web Office
21. gOFFICE
22. Writely
23. Box
24. Inter Alia
25. Time Tracker
26. BBC: happy birthday

With all of the preoccupation we have today with organizing the millions of files and documents we collect in our firms and organizations and on the web — and rightfully so, in my humble opinion — I often refer colleagues to a paper: THE SECOND COMING — A MANIFESTO By David Gelernter. In this paper, published a few years ago, David challenges many of the norms and mental models on which our current computing platforms are based.

Whether you agree with him or not on all or any of his 58 points, it is worth the read. David challenges . . . [more]

Where to from here? First, Google becomes a verb — as in: ‘I googled him/her/it’. Indeed, being ‘googled’ has its own meaning in today’s common language. Then like many great brands (such as Kleenex™) that become synonymous with the product they represent (e.g tissues) ‘Google’ has become synonymous with ‘search’.

Even the Merian-Webster dictionary and Wikipedia have definitions for the verb ‘Google’. Now we have a new use for the word. Google has been used as a name for a kid in Sweden born September 12th (Source: Googleblog). Oliver Google Kai was named by his search engine consultant father, . . . [more]

The Legal Information Institute and Cornell Law School are announcing Wex, “a collaboratively built, freely available legal dictionary and encyclopedia“.

From the Wex FAQ:

“WEX is a collaboratively-edited legal dictionary and encyclopedia. It is intended for a broad audience of people we refer to as “law novices” — which at one time or another describes practically everyone, even law students and lawyers entering new areas of law. No doubt purists will be quick to point out the differences between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. We deliberately blur the distinction, as we are interested in providing

The British papers are full of the British Library’s deal with Microsoft to digitize 25 million pages of material (100,000 books) that is outside the period of copyright protection: see http://news.zdnet.com/2102-9588_22-5933033.html?tag=printthis

I was surprised at how little the classics of the law are available from the regular search engines on the open web.

I did a small experiment on Google, Google Scholar, and Google Print, looking for the five great treatises of the English common law: Glanvill’s Treatise on the laws and customs of the realm of England, Bracton, Littleton’s Tenures, Coke and Blackstone, together with Sir John Fortescue’s De . . . [more]

“Let me have men about me that are fat, sleek-headed men and, such as sleep o’nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much, such men are dangerous.”
 

The coming thing in technology is “thin clients.” Bill Gates is worried that Microsoft will be left behind, and his hungry competitors
are legion, all of them investing like crazy in thin.

This might not be such a good thing for lawyers, having nothing to do with whether the wallets of the clients who come in the door are fat or lean. A thin client is . . . [more]

The BBC is announcing the thirtieth birthday of the Internet.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3280897.stm

Singing in unison. . . . [more]

As you know if you read Slaw with any regularity, on Fridays I compile a list of links used during the week by posters and those commenting. This is not as easy to do as it ought to be, and I’ve used various methods all of which are somewhat tedious. Then I happened across a “bookmarklet” — i.e. a small piece of Javascript that gets used like a bookmark, usually from the bookmarks or favourites toolbar — that went some way to easing the task. It strips links from a page and puts them, along with their associated text, into . . . [more]

Although not directly related to legal research, this post is related to technology and a phenomena I am surprised, in retrospect, did not happen to me earlier. Last week, I spilled a glass of cola on my keyboard and sort of panicked. Set out below is what I learned after the fact that I should have done in response to the spill. In case this information might benefit someone else, read on if interested. . . . [more]

What’s on your browser’s home page? I use a customized page that resides on my hard drive that has the following major links: case law, legislation, books (catalogues), search engines/reference tools, government, news, and international. There are also a number of frequently-accessed links, including links into library catalogues, journal indices, the commercial database login pages, the Oxford English Dictionary (via U of Toronto’s e-resources, password required), and CNN, CBC and BBC.

I imagine many lawyers make their law firm’s intranet their browser’s home page; if not, I recommend customizing your own. It is way more convenient than using “bookmarks” or . . . [more]