The Electronic Information System for International Law (EISIL) launched in September 2004. Developed by the American Society of International Law (ASIL), a scholarly association that has been a leader in the analysis, dissemination and development of international law since 1906, EISIL is an open database of authenticated primary and other materials across the breadth of international law, which until now have been scattered in libraries, archives and specialized web sites. This huge catalogue provides bibliographic information on legal citations, entry into force and signature dates, amendments and brief descriptions, plus, of course, direct links to the web resources.
You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2005.
PharmaBlawg is a new work-in-progress blog of Richard Best, a dual qualified lawyer (England & Wales, New Zealand) who is also a Registered Foreign Lawyer in Frankfurt. Its purpose is to provide stakeholders in the pharmaceutical sector with an alternative source of summaries of and/or comment on judicial, regulatory, legislative and, in some instances, policy developments relevant to the industry. It focuses mainly on UK and New Zealand, but also covers relevant developments in Australia, Canada and the United States.
The UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE) is now providing its Legal Education News page via RSS. The page lists news from UKCLE and other websites, as well as snippets of news culled from various sources, including mailing lists, other organisations involved in legal education and the Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN).
Michael Gorman, the new President of the American Library Association (ALA), is at it again. In an interview for the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals he expresses several more of what the interviewer describes as:
“robust opinions, untrammelled by lip service to what in Britain passes for political correctness … gloriously oblivious to the likely consequences of his forthright utterances – with the result that his writing, and his speech, are peppered with aphoristic comments.”
One such is:
“Google cannot do what it claims because, in the end, it relies on the mass searching of free texts, and anyone who has studied indexing knows that efficient retrieval systems of any size must have controlled vocabularies. Lacking the latter, the searcher is doomed to more and more hits in no particular order and of marginal or no relevance.”
Aphoristic or just plain daft and ungrammatical? What Google claims (not “in the end” but as its raison d’etre) is to search a mass of free texts of huge proportions efficiently – and it does so; and anyone who has studied indexing knows that a retrieval system of this size cannot possibly “have” a controlled vocabulary – that’s why we need efficient web search engine technolgies.
The 26 May issue of the FreePint Newsletter carries a feature, Specialist Tribunals – Your Guide to Informal Justice, by David Ogden who recently began a new position as Head of Tribunal Library Services at the Department for Constitutional Affairs. He provides an overview of the tribunals system, including information about the Tribunals Service, a new government agency to be launched in April 2006 to provide common administrative support for the main central government tribunals, the tribunals currently supported by the DCA, those due to join the service in 2006, those due to join later and other smaller tribunals and tribunal sites.
A long-overdue mention for FreePint – a community of 72,000+ information researchers worldwide launched in 1997. The FreePint Newsletter is packed with tips on using the internet for serious research. There are also online Forums and Resources and you can post your tricky research-related questions to the FreePint Bar. It is free to subscribe to the email version of the newsletter and there is a complete archive online.
The FreePint Newsletter is a must-read for lawyers as a good proportion of the feature articles are law-related.
