Good Riddance to You, Mr. Leap Day

Wish I could say 'happy leap day', but thanks my local ISP, this is the first time I've been online for more than 10 minutes today. I did make the most of it by doing my banking this morning. Guess it was a smart move, considering I've got all this free time on my hands.

And as for you, Mr. February 2008, I have to say good riddance as well. I'm just finally getting over the worst flu I've had in the past five years. I will definitely be booking in for a flu shot this fall...

Ok, grumbling completed.... But thank God March starts tomorrow.

Really Simple Competitive Intelligence

If you've enjoyed my posts on law firm RSS here on the VLLB in the past, I'd like to recommend you go read Dennis Kennedy's Really Simple Competitive Intelligence published in the upcoming March issue of the ABA Journal.

Dennis hits some important points. Lawyers need inexpensive and easy technology to deliver targeted content about their clients, and about their practice. Whether that's done via RSS or a Google email alert, it really doesn't matter... the results are what count.

JD Supra is Now Live!

As noted over on my Stem blog, JD Supra launched this morning, and is now open for business!

Please drop by & check things out. And please help spread the word! It's not just lawyers who benefit from work product sharing. Librarians also benefit from great repositories like JD Supra. Any website that provides access to authoritative legal documents, filings, decisions & research is another wrench in the law librarian's toolbelt!

As Bonnie Shucha mentioned a while back, websites that take document ownership seriously also provide a mechanism for authority evaluation & trust. Having the opportunity to see the lawyer or law firm that's behind a shared document certainly helps in that manner.

And finally, feedback from Law Librarians is definitely welcome & wanted! If you see a feature that could be added, a helpful addition, or something that isn't working quite right, please let me know!

thanks,
Steve

VALL Workshop on Screencasting

Just announced... the topic for this year's Vancouver Association of Law Libraries (VALL) annual workshop to be held on March 27th will be Screencasting in Libraries!

This year's program will be very practical in nature. A little less listening, and a lot more doing! BCCLS's Alex McNeur & Drew Jackson will be conducting a hands-on tutorial. The computer labs at Robson Square have been reserved for the two sessions (morning & afternoon), and the software (camtasia studio) will be pre-installed before people walk through the door. I've been assured that everyone gets the help & hand holding required to come away with new skills in screencasting technology!

Please note: This workshop is NOT limited to VALL members. In fact, VALL would like to extend an invitation to members of SLA-WCC, BCLA, UBC SLAIS & Langara Students, or any other member of the greater Vancouver Library community.

So download the registration form & sign-up soon. Deadline is March 21st!

Quickscribe Launches BC Legislation Portal!

After a few months in the Steve Matthews garage, I'm happy to announce that Quickscribe's new BC Legislation Portal is now ready to start tracking the latest changes in BC Law!

The primary goal of this site is to provide a quick and easy place for anyone in British Columbia to watch the latest updates to provincial law. As soon as amendments come into force, this website will automatically publish a summary. Visitors will also be able to scan the most recent updates, review the monthly archives, and search for changes by the name of an Act or Regulation.

And for Quickscribe Online customers, there's an added bonus. If you're already logged in, you're a click away from seeing each paragraph in full text, before and after the amendment. This part works the same as I described in my blog about their RSS updates.

To get the site launched, we back loaded about six months of changes. As the number of changes grow and time passes, I'm also hopeful the search functionality will provide a quick way to identify if outdated print copies are still reliable. As in, 'I have a year old copy of that Act, is it still ok?'

If you're in the BC market, please check out the site! Your thoughts & feedback are definitely welcome.

Library Laws Are Meant to Be Broken Up?

Blogging Partners Tom Boone & Joshua Brauer who have collaborated for the past couple years on Library Laws are Meant to Be Broken have decided to move on to solo efforts.

Their new blogs respectively are at:

• Tom Boone dot com; and
• Adding Understanding (Joshua Brauer)
  

Good luck to Josh & Tom. Let's call it an evolution, alright? I'll presume you two are still talking. :)

Law.Librarians = KM micro-blogging?

Many VLLB readers will be familiar with twitter, the micro-blogging application that requires users to document ideas in less than 140 characters. Like my lack of blogging here, I admittedly haven't had the time to commit to my twitter account lately, and my non feed-based postings have been down. ... Yes ok, I'll be back on the bandwagon soon, but follow me here...

If you've been watching the law librarian blogoshpere recently, you may have picked up on the new law.librarians website. There's a bunch of us involved, but basically we're exploring micro-blogging outside of the twitter service using a new twitter-esque template - prologue.

So my question... Given that this type of service would be easily replicable (wordpress + prologue) behind the firewall, how useful would it be to get your practice or industry groups sharing 'bite-sized' KM & news? The group's skill set would have to be accounted for, but I can't imagine a faster application.

The forced brevity might also be a welcome addition. ;) ... Any thoughts out there?

Martindale Hubbell's Cheezy Non-Blog

Terrible. Horrible. Make them stop. Please!

Oh where to start... No blogroll, no trackbacks, required login to post a comment, no photos, no 'about page', no categories, and no blogger profiles. On the plus side, they do have a nice link to the company's history, plus all those great 'Products and Services' pages!

If this was anyone else, I might accuse them of linkbaiting. It's kind of like rubber necking on a bad traffic accident. You shouldn't look, and you regret it afterwards, but it's human nature and difficult to resist.

Worst corporate blog ever? Go look and honestly tell me you're thinking any different.