Upcoming Webinar on Using Yahoo Pipes to Create RSS Feeds for Legal Practice Groups

The Education Committee of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) will soon be holding another session in its CALL Webinar Series.

Michel Gamache of the firm Heenan Blaikie LLP in Montreal will be talking on Wednesday, November 16, 2011 about "Yahoo Pipes: Slicing and Dicing RSS Feeds for Legal Practice Groups". The webinar is at 1:00 -2:30 p.m. EDT.

The registration form and details regarding costs can be found on the CALL website:

"Yahoo! Pipes has been around since 2007, yet it doesn't seem to have caught the eye of many librarians. However, this is a valuable and simple tool that can be used in the context of web monitoring and information delivery."

"This webinar will help you understand what Yahoo! Pipes is all about. You will learn how to create, aggregate, filter and customize feeds. You will also learn how to create widgets so that the contents you manipulate can be made available on intranets."

CanLII Adds RSS Feeds for Caselaw Searches

CanLII, the free Canadian Legal Information Institute, announced search enhancements yesterday that include:

• RSS feeds for caselaw search results
• better search term highlighting when proximity operators are used: up to now, when proximity operators such as /n, /s or /p were used, all of the keywords used were highlighted in results. From now on, only those occurrences of keywords that match a query are highlighted. As the announcement states: "For instance, if your query is common-law /3 partners, only occurrences of 'common-law' and 'partners' that are separated by three terms or less in the document will be highlighted."
  

U.S. Legislative Info Service THOMAS Turns Fifteen

This week marked the fifteenth anniversary of the launch of THOMAS, the legislative information service of the American Congress.

The site has added many new features recently, including:

• a widget to save or share a permanent link via bookmarks, email, or social networking sites such as Twitter or Facebook
• a new RSS feed for bills that have passed both the House and Senate and have been sent to the White House for the President's signature
• a tip of the week on using the system
• more visible access to official Government Printing Office (GPO) PDF versions of bills

THOMAS is maintained by the Library of Congress and can be used to track bills and activities on the floor of the two houses of the American Congress and in committees.

European Court of Human Rights Launches New RSS Feeds

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg, France, has added new RSS feeds for its most recent judgments and decisions. One can subscribe to the news feeds by respondent state (there are 47 states that accept the ECHR's jurisdiction).

These have been added to the feeds introduced in 2007 for general news, webcasts of public hearings and monthly information notes on cases of particular legal interest.

The Court is an institution under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms that was drawn up by the Council of Europe. The Court website has excellent information about its history, structure and procedures.

Get Supreme Court of Canada Decisions on Twitter

Simon Fodden of Slaw.ca posted yesterday that he has created a Twitter feed for Supreme Court of Canada decisions at his CanCourts site.

The Twitter feed is based on RSS feeds from CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute.

New Site to Track Canadian Government and NGO Reports

I was just made aware of a relatively new site called Reports Canada that seeks to track "new reports released by federal and provincial government departments and committees, NGOs and other Canadian organizations involved with public policy."

There is a category for legal and security reports.

The site has an RSS feed.

Reports Canada is maintained by Carl Meyer, assistant editor of The Hill Times' DailyPubliNet, a news service in Ottawa that tracks federal parliamentary business.

United Nations Launches RSS Feed on Gender Equality

WomenWatch, the UN portal on gender equality, has launched a new online service known as the UN Gender Equality Newsfeed.

It automatically collects gender equality-related news from individual RSS news feeds from UN agencies and displays a combined up-to-date news list.

Participating agencies include the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the UN Program on HIV/Aids (UNAIDS), the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor Adds Topical and Country RSS Feeds

The Global Legal Monitor, published by the Law Library of Congress in Washington, is a publication that provides regular updates on legal developments from around the world on a vast array of topics.

Content comes from official sources, judicial decisions, and other legal news sources.

As of last September, it has offered an RSS feed for updates for all news stories.

It now also offers dozens and dozens of free RSS feeds broken down by topic and/or jurisdiction.

New Legal Research Tools from the UN

The United Nations Office of Legal Affairs is offering a number of new online resources:

• RSS feed for the Audiovisual Library of International Law
• UN Legal Publications Global Search
• Official Records of Diplomatic Conferences
  

RSS Feeds for Reference Questions Handled by Quebec Law Libraries

I found out today that it is possible to subscribe to RSS feeds from CAIJ (the Centre d'accès à l'information juridique or Legal Information Access Centre, a library network associated with the Quebec Bar Association). The feeds were launched in November.

All the material is in French.

The CAIJ network is composed of a few dozen courthouse libraries, regional libraries, and local service points throughout the province of Quebec.

There are RSS feeds for new library acquisitions, for legislative updates, and for news by topic.

The most interesting RSS feed for me is the one for new reference questions added to the JuriBistro Topo collection. Launched 2 years ago, JuriBistro Topo is a massive knowledgebase containing thousands of legal research questions along with their answers based on the queries local CAIJ outlets receive annually from lawyers across Quebec.

A typical answer will include links or references to the appropriate legislation or regulations, jurisprudence, textbooks and periodical articles, and may provide links to related JuriBistro Topo topics.

Format Changes to Library of Congress Global Legal Monitor

The Global Legal Monitor, published by the Law Library of Congress in Washington, is one of my favourite sources of foreign legal news.

It is a publication that provides regular updates on legal developments from around the world on a vast array of topics. Content comes from official sources, judicial decisions, and other complementary legal news sources.

It used to come out as a monthly publication. It now appears as a constantly updated news stream.

It is also browsable by topic, by jurisdiction, or searchable by any combination of fields.

The complete archive month-by-month from May 2006 to July 2008 is also available in PDF format.

It is also now possible to subscribe to an RSS feed of the publication.

Yahoo! Pipes Tutorial For Dummies

Steven Matthews has posted a tutorial on slaw.ca on how to use the Yahoo! Pipes tool to mix RSS feeds.

"Yahoo Pipes is a tool that we’ve covered a few times here on Slaw. And having fielded a few questions myself on its use for RSS feed mixing, I thought it might be nice to demonstrate how simple the process is with a tutorial."

"What you’ll find below is pretty granular in detail, with way too many screen captures. But if you like the KISS principle (a.k.a. Keep It Simple for Steve), a little hand-holding never hurts. So ... go over to Yahoo Pipes, create an account, click on the big blue Create A Pipe, and let’s get started!"

Library of Parliament Summaries on Food and Consumer Safety Bills

There are legislative summaries by the Library of Parliament for two consumer safety bills currently making their way through the federal legislature:

• An Act to amend the Food and Drugs Act (Bill C-51): "The bill essentially overhauls the existing Food and Drugs Act by restructuring its format and replacing pages of existing text with new text that does not necessarily relate in any way to the existing text. In addition to technical and consequential amendments, and the inclusion of new definitions, new regulation-making powers, transitional provisions and consequential amendments, the bill: creates new offences relating to food, therapeutic products (a new term used in the bill that includes drugs) and cosmetics; requires licences for importing food and for interprovincial trade in food; makes amendments to therapeutic product licensing; expands the powers of inspectors; adds new 'Administration and Enforcement' measures, including mandatory recalls of therapeutic products and cosmetics; substantially increases the penalties relating to offences; and provides for the disclosure of confidential business information in certain circumstances."
• Consumer Product Safety Act (Bill C-52): "This bill is designed to repeal and replace Part I of the Hazardous Products Act, creating a new system to regulate consumer products that pose, or might reasonably be expected to pose, a danger to human health and safety. Bill C-52: prohibits the sale of certain listed products and provides for testing and evaluation of consumer products; makes it mandatory for manufacturers, importers, and sellers of consumer products to report dangerous incidents associated with these products to the Minister of Health; obliges manufacturers, importers and sellers of consumer products to report product or labelling defects that result, or might reasonably be expected to result, in death or serious adverse effects on health, including serious injury, to the Minister of Health; requires manufacturers, importers and sellers of consumer products to report recalls of consumer products initiated by governments and government institutions in Canada or elsewhere to the Minister of Health; provides for the inspection and seizure of consumer products for the purpose of verifying compliance or non-compliance with the bill’s provisions; empowers the federal government to institute interim and permanent recalls of products that pose, or might reasonably be expected to pose, a danger to human health or safety; and establishes both criminal and administrative penalties for those who violate the CCPSA or orders made under it. "

It is possible to follow progress of the 2 bills via RSS feeds available on the following pages:

• Bill C-51
• Bill C-52

RSS Feeds for U.S. Code Updates

The Legal Information Institute (LII) at Cornell University announced today that it is offering an experimental notification service for changes to the U.S. Code via RSS.

Federal Library Community Forms Web 2.0 Interest Group

Interested federal government librarians in Canada are looking into the creation of a Web 2.0 Interest Group to explore ways of incorporating wikis, RSS, collaborative technologies, open source, etc. into their work.

An invitation to join was sent out this week by one of the manager's of the Industry Canada Library and Knowledge Centre.

The invitation reads in part:

"What we need to do as a federal library community is to draw together this shared interest in Web 2.0. This will enable us to hear about common areas of interest and then discuss issues and challenges presented and the lessons learned."

"So, what is Web 2.0? Tapscott and Andrews in their influential work Wikinomics distinguish Web 2.0 from what they call the old Web. 'While the old Web was about Web sites, clicks and eyeballs, the new Web is about communities, participation and peering.' Openness, peering and sharing are the action words of a new generation of knowledge workers. The key is audience engagement. As librarians, we would like more of that in our libraries. The promise for libraries is that our audiences that are now going to Amazon, Google and YouTube also come to the Library."

"So, this is an invitation to you to get involved. We are proposing:

• to form an interest group next month
• to identify & publish a list of key resources on Web 2.0 specifically for federal libraries
• to identify topics of interest in Web2.0 for discussion, for example, wikis, RSS, collaborative technologies, open source, etc.
• to identify departments engaged in Web 2.0 projects and
• to show the results to the community this fall."
  

Federal government librarians should contact Industry Canada's Oryst Iwanycky [iwanycky DOT oryst AT ic.gc.ca].

RSS Feeds from Law Library of Congress

The Law Library of Congress in Washington has started offering RSS feeds to a number of its information products, including the Global Legal Monitor that I have described before.

The Monitor regularly summarizes legal developments from around the world, with selections made based on official national legal publications, and various press sources.

Top Web Apps & Sites of 2007

ReadWriteWeb has published its review of the Top Web Apps & Sites of 2007.

The article is divided into sections for:

• RSS Reader
• Start Page
• Tech News
• Online Music
• Web Office Suites
• Project Management
• Web Email
• Social News
• Video, Photos
• Social Networks / Blogging
  

Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency

George Mason University professor Jerry Brito has posted a working paper entitled Hack, Mash & Peer: Crowdsourcing Government Transparency on the Social Science Research Network:

"In order to hold government accountable for its actions, citizens must know what those actions are. To that end, they must insist that government act openly and transparently to the greatest extent possible. In the Twenty-First Century, this entails making its data available online and easy to access. If government data is made available online in useful and flexible formats, citizens will be able to utilize modern Internet tools to shed light on government activities. Such tools include mashups, which highlight hidden connections between different data sets, and crowdsourcing, which makes light work of sifting through mountains of data by focusing thousands of eyes on a particular set of data".

"Today, however, the state of government's online offerings is very sad indeed. Some nominally publicly available information is not online at all, and the data that is online is often not in useful formats. Government should be encouraged to release public information online in a structured, open, and searchable manner. To the extent that government does not modernize, however, we should hope that private third parties build unofficial databases and make these available in a useful form to the public".

The context for the article is the U.S. situation but it contains a fascinating description of how independent third parties such as NGOs and citizen think tanks have created hacks to publish, in a structured format, data that the government has either not published online or not made easily accessible.

"The most important contribution all these hacks make, however, may not be the accessibility they provide to individual users, but the fact that their hacked data is offered in a structured and open format. This allows yet other third parties to tap into the now useful data to create new applications. As Joshua Tauberer [creator of Govtrack.us] has explained, 'Gathering the information in one place and in a common format gives rise to new ways of mixing the information together'." (pp.18-19)

The article takes a look at many projects, including:

• Govtrack.us
• LOUIS—The Library of Unified Information Sources (search engine that indexes Congressional Reports, the Congressional Record, congressional hearings, the Federal Register, presidential documents, GAO reports, etc.)
• Metavid (captures and archives video of Congressional proceedings)
• OpenSecrets.org (campaign finance data, lobbyist tracking, financial disclosure forms of Congress members, and executive officers)
• MAPLight.org (searchable database that highlights the connections between campaign contributions and how members of congress vote)
• etc.

European Court of Human Rights Offers RSS Feeds

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, has started offering RSS feeds.

There are currently 3 RSS news feeds for news, webcasts of public hearings and monthly "information notes" (which provide details of cases of particular legal interest plus some statistics).

The Court is an institution under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms that was drawn up by the Council of Europe. The Court website has excellent information about its history, structure and procedures.

LegalPubs.ca - RSS Aggregator for Canadian Legal Publishers

Steve Matthews announced on his Vancouver Law Librarian Blog that he has created an aggregator that receives RSS feeds from Canadian legal publishers.

He calls it Legalpubs.ca and it is put together using Yahoo Pipes and Feedburner.