A few months ago, in connection with a project to create a research “desktop” for the faculty and graduate students, I interviewed a number of my colleagues at Osgoode Hall Law School about how they do their research. I was particularly interested in how often and how well they used online databases, those to which the Osgoode library subscribes or the two commercial giants (which are free for academic use). I can’t say I was surprised by my informal findings, which can perhaps be best summarized by saying that faculty members use these databases far less than one might suppose . . . [more]

Statistics Canada has just released the “Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), Canada, 2000”. This is the Canadian effort to match the U.S. CIP, which was first developed in 1980. These classifications may have a variety of uses beyond that for the collection of statistics.

Law as a “field of study” is listed under “Academic and Occupationally-Specific Programs” and is identified, as are all fields of study, by a double digit, in this case 22. That field is further broken up into:

• Non-Professional General Legal Studies (Undergraduate)
• Law (First Professional Degree)
• Legal Research and Advanced Professional Studies (Graduate Level)
• Legal

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Out of the Jungle: Thoughts on the present and future of legal information, legal research, and legal education is a new group blog founded by Jim Milles (Director of the Law Library at SUNY Buffalo), Billie Jo Kaufman, and Linda Ryan. It’s going to have an American focus, but as we are all facing more or less the same IT issues, I thought Slaw readers would like to know about this blog.

Jim Milles wrote a provocative article “Out of the Jungle” for the February 2005 issue of AALL Spectrum whereby he advocates that librarians focus more on . . . [more]

On July 27th I spoke about the Competition Heating Up With Corporate Filing Services, and spoke only of LIVEDGAR from GSI and DisclosureNet from XP Innovations.

Eric Leduc has kindly pointed me to a third contender, Corporate Retriever from Micromedia ProQuest. Back in the pre-SEDAR days, Micromedia was THE company we went to for filings. They published the OSC Bulletin for the Ontario Securities Commission, and made corporate filings available in paper and microfiche formats.

I have not yet tried out Corporate Retriever, but would like to do so. I’m interested to hear from anyone who has already done . . . [more]

As recently reported on the VLLB, the Alberta Queen’s Printer has announced RSS feeds for both their website and QP Source Professional.

Sheldon Staszko, Director of Alberta Queen’s Printer, made the announcement via the Calgary Law Libraries Group listserv on July 27th. Alberta’s QP is the first to deliver this type of service via RSS in Canada. How long until the rest of Canada follows suit, either Nationally or Provincially, is anyone’s guess. Regardless, this is a great first step and definitely one in the right direction. . . . [more]

Osler Hoskin Harcourt appeared to be the first major Canadian firm to employ RSS feeds from its website.  It has been using RSS to deliver newsletter articles from its various practice groups for the last several months.

Now Osler goes audio (their tagline, not mine) with podcasting from its website.  See:  Osler Reports .

Aimed at potential business clients, and discussing the latest trends in business, the first installment released this month runs about 7 minutes and discusses cross-border mergers and acquisitions.  Trends are identified using the experiences of their own clients as examples. 

Production value of the first podcast is very high, with . . . [more]

Since we are getting close to the dog days / silly season:

‘Free’ Danish beer makes a splash
By Clark Boyd
Technology correspondent

The Danes love their beer, but increasingly they are looking beyond the old Danish standby, Carlsberg, to quench their thirst.

The beer draws its inspiration from the open source movement
Students from the Information Technology University in Copenhagen is trying to help by releasing what they are calling the world’s first open source beer recipe.

It is called Vores Oel, or Our Beer, and the recipe is proving to be a worldwide hit.

The idea behind the . . . [more]

Ever since the creation of the Canadian online corporate filings system SEDAR in 1997, the race has been on to develop a commercially viable service to provide more sophisticated search capabilities than allowed by the free website. First to bring itself forward to law firms was

One of my partners just alerted me to a posting on The Deal about Blog Searching:

If you need any more evidence that search doesn’t end with Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc., look at the blog search engines. Technorati Inc., the self-proclaimed leader, IceRocket, Mark Cuban’s new venture, and Feedster Inc., another blog search pioneer, are just a few of the examples of a segment within search poised for growth.

Scott Rafer, CEO of Feedster, told me that Google and Yahoo! go about search in completely different ways. See the video interview for more on that. He added that search

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This via ResearchBuzz: the Canadian Census from 1911 is now online. It may be of only tangential relevance to law, but historians and perhaps even property lawyers will find it interesting.

Tara Calishain, who is ResearchBuzz, called up some place in Yukon — you can only search by geographic location. I, being Toronto-centric, tried a more or less random page for Toronto. Here’s a small snapshot of a very small section from the middle of one of the Toronto pages. Lots and lots of Scots and English and Irish…

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