CLawBies 2010 Nominations

It's CLawBies Season - Canadian Law Blog Awards. Time to reflect on my go to resources for insight into Canadian Law.

Law21.ca Jordan Furlong offers deep and thoughtful insight into Law as and industry, trends, and law practice management. Jordan's blog makes me think about where the industry is going. More importantly, at least to me, he makes me think about what I can do as a knowledge manager and law librarian to make sure my organization is prepared for the future.

I am surprisingly intrigued by ipblog.ca, my new colleague Richard Stobbe's blog. Richard joined our firm in 2010 and I confess that I was unaware of his blog until this year. I say surprisingly intrigued, becasue until I started reading Richard's blog, I didn't have an engaged personal interest in Intellectual Property. I am nominating Richard for a CLawBie because I find that I don't skim his posts, I read them.

All About Information by Dan Michaluk is another of the "read rather than skim" blogs on my favourite go to list. Dan offers great case summaries and his engaging personality comes through in his posts which always makes me read to the end to see if there is a surfing reference or a note about his family.

I find CLawBie nominations really difficult. There are so many great reads in the Canadian legal blogging scene. Thank you to all of the lawyers, librarians and technologists who take the time to share their knowledge with Canadian law blogs, especially Simon Fodden at Slaw.ca, Connie Crosby, and Steve Matthews.

Ordinary meaning

I've been following the Dalai Lama on Twitter for a few weeks now. A little inspiration and a reminder that we live in a world with others is never a bad thing. I had a chuckle over todays message:

Achieving genuine happiness may require bringing about a transformation in your outlook and way of thinking.

I chuckled because I read "outlook" as Microsoft Outlook. I will not opine here on how welcome a transformation of my inbox would be.

Have a little fun

As Bozo the Clown would say "just keep laughing".

Those of us in law firms are very aware that what we are working on is often a persons largest problem. The worry, that if untended, that can consume all energy. Sometimes, knowing the impact of our work on our client, law firms have an over serious tone. I believe that worry can make people counter-productive.

Jane Symons, Library and Payroll Assistant at Field Law in Edmonton made a great sign to help "lighten the load" this week.


The note says:
Temporary library cart
People: You may return your books here
Books: Don't get used to having leather to sit on

It is Jane's birthday on December 10. Feel free to send her a happy birthday note. jsymons at fieldlaw dot com.

My birthday wish for Jane: "just keep laughing"

Digital Archives

I am comforted this morning by an email cross posted to a number of email list services. The message that digital content specific to my industry is being preserved is something that is too important not to share.

December 1, 2010, Bloomington, IN – Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) and Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) are pleased to announce that they have partnered to create the Law Review Preservation Program: the first comprehensive long-term archiving solution for law reviews published online.

With funding and support from LIPA, law reviews published on bepress’s Digital Commons platform can be automatically archived in CLOCKSS, an international dark archive for long-term preservation. Law reviews will join thousands of journals in CLOCKSS, from publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, and Nature, as well as all Berkeley Electronic Press journals. The first law schools to join the program are American University, archiving American University International Law Review, The Modern American, and Sustainable Development Law and Policy, and Boston College, archiving Boston College Law Review.

Margaret Maes, Executive Director of LIPA, said “We are pleased to support the preservation of electronic law review content in a dark archive through this partnership with bepress and CLOCKSS. This is another step in our efforts to find long-term solutions to the problem of digital preservation of legal information, and we hope that Digital Commons subscribers will take advantage of the program by making their law reviews available through the Digital Commons.”

Content in CLOCKSS is preserved with award-winning LOCKSS technology. In the event that a law review is no longer available from any university or publisher, it will be triggered from CLOCKSS under an open-access Creative Commons license, guaranteeing that law review articles will remain in the public domain forever. The CLOCKSS archive is distributed across twelve geographically and geopolitically diverse archive nodes, located at major libraries across North America, Europe, and Asia, and is governed by the community of participating libraries and publishers.

Berkeley Electronic
Press CEO and President Jean-Gabriel Bankier said, “We feel strongly that law reviews deserve the same state-of-the-art preservation as all digital publications, and are very pleased to partner with LIPA and CLOCKSS on a program that brings preservation within the reach of all law reviews.”

About LIPA

The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) is a non-profit consortium of academic, federal, state and public law libraries working on projects to preserve print and electronic legal information. It provides the opportunity for libraries to work collaboratively on preservation projects at lower cost and to take advantage of the partnerships created by the organization.

http://www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa

About Berkeley Electronic Press

Founded by professors in 1999, Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) publishes peer-reviewed electronic journals and develops software for the next generation of scholarly publishing. The bepress journals collection, ResearchNow, redefines what scholarly journals can do today, with fast and high quality peer review at sustainable prices. The bepress open-access institutional repository platform, Digital Commons, is the world's leading hosted IR, featuring an innovative suite of publishing and software services that empowers scholarly communities to showcase and share their works for maximum impact.

http://www.bepress.com/

About CLOCKSS

CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not for profit joint venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.

http://www.clockss.org/

My sincere personal thanks to all those in academic and public institutions (and others) around the world who work toward preservation of knowledge.