Ballad in Plain E

As posted on Slaw this morning, the statutes and regulations part of the Justice Canada website recently got an overhaul.

I was interested to see what they’d done; for us, the site has been basically nothing but trouble because it’s not reliably up to date. While the website doesn’t look any different (which is unfortunate, because it’s still not very intuitive), it now offers point-in-time for both stats and regs, which is pretty sweet.

Oddly enough, though, the Federal Accountability Act, S.C. 2006, c. 9, is nowhere to be found - not even a reference to it. I couldn’t find it anywhere but the LegisInfo site. This is a little troubling because it received Royal Assent in December 2007 and certain sections are already in force. Maybe they don’t publish a statute unless the whole thing is in force? That doesn’t make any sense. More likely, they are still just behind in updating the site. Tricky, very tricky.

Like most things in life, you get what you pay for, and sometimes no information is better than wrong information. We’ve got a combo of two now. We’re been warning our students and lawyers not to rely on the free sources on the internet for this reason. Even with these improvements, I probably won’t be relying on the new Justice Laws site.

To be fair, we are warned to check more than just this site, in the “Important Notice” located at the bottom of every page (buried after the copyright information):

” For all purposes of interpreting and applying the law, users should consult:

• the Acts as passed by Parliament, which are published in the “Assented to” Acts service, Part III of the Canada Gazette and the annual Statutes of Canada, and
• the regulations, as registered by the Clerk of the Privy Council and published in Part II of the Canada Gazette.”

Unfortunately, most people are never going to read that little notice, and might assume they are looking at everything there is. And not just lay researchers - we are all vulnerable to the allure of stuff available free on the internet.

I think we’d gladly pay for a QP-Legaleze-esque version of federal statutes… but for now, WestlaweCarswell and QL will have to do.

Just got this press release from a good friend in Winnipeg, about a 24-Hour Freedom to Read Marathon. Very cool event, one I wish I could attend.

Speaking of freedom to read, I’m going to the Deb Ellis reading tomorrow night at VPL Central. She’s the author of a book called “Three Wishes: Palestinian and Israeli Children Speak” that has been quite controversial in the last while (the book is mentioned in the press release below). Should be really good.

Use it or Lose It! . . . your Freedom to Read

EVENT: 24hr Freedom to Read Marathon
DATE: 10am. Saturday, February 24 - 10am. Sunday, February 25
LOCATION: Millennium Library (251 Donald Street)

At 10am Saturday, February 25th the Manitoba Writers’ Guild will kick off the 5th annual 24hr Freedom to Read Marathon as part of the upcoming national Freedom to Read Week celebrations.

Staged in Winnipeg’s Millennium Library (251 Donald Street) the marathon will have participants work in a relay fashion, reading aloud a book that has been banned or challenged, for ten minutes. As each reader finishes their ten minutes of reading they are replaced with a new reader, who then shares a passage from a different banned or challenged book. In this way the words of authors who have been silenced, are celebrated for the 24-hour period.

From 10am until the library closes (5pm.) the marathon will take place in the reader services area on the main floor of the library. At the closing of the library the marathon proceedings will be escorted from the library in a symbolic gesture and the library gates will be drawn closed. From 5pm. onwards the marathon will take place in the foyer of the Millennium Library, with the shuttered gates of the Library looming in the background.

Titles read at the marathon are varied and far reaching, from kids books like Dr. Seuss’ “The Lorax” and “Harry Potter” to the Bible and Margaret Laurence’s “The Diviners.” Readers are also encouraged to read works by authors who face persecution for their writing around the world.

Recently, censorship issues have risen to the forefront with titles such as “Three Wishes” by Deborah Ellis and “The Higher Power of Lucky” by Susan Patron being banned and challenged in Canada and the United States respectively.

While freedom of speech is often taken for granted in Western Democracies, it continues to be challenged to this day. The 24hr Freedom to Read Marathon allows people from all walks of life a chance to raise their voice and use their FREEDOM TO READ.

People wanting to take part in this important event can learn more or sign up as a reader at the Manitoba Writers’ Guild website, www.mbwriter.mb.ca.

A couple of weeks ago, we hosted a meeting of the Vancouver Inmagic Users Group, at which the fine folks at Andornot showed off all the great new features of Textworks & Webpublisher Pro v10, which will be released soon for us CS peeps.

First cool thing: Webpublisher PRO v10 will support Firefox (fully, I assume). ‘Nuff said.

Second cool thing: you can now switch from the somewhat unintuitive standard Webpublisher Pro syntax to an alternative search syntax that allows you to use operators that were until recently limited to my search engine dreams: you can now use OR instead of the slash, a minus sign instead of the exclamation mark for NOT, and…ooohh….ahhhh…a space between words is an implied AND, not a phrase!

Third cool thing: ability to generate RSS feeds — for instance, you can generate a feed of the latest additions to your library catalogue, to use on your library’s intranet page or website.

Word is that we won’t get upgraded until at least March, which can’t come soon enough - I’m chomping at the bit to fool around with these new features.

Ty Yates, whom I went to school with at SAIT, sent me the link to this hilarious video on Youtube, in which a dude learns how to use a revolutionary new text storage device called a “book”.

I don’t know what it is, but it seems like this is the week that YouTube hit some sort of critical mass — I got about 15 different videos by e-mail (the best was “Promiscuous Firm“, a take-off of Nelly Furtado’s “Promiscuous Girl, produced by U of A Law students) and kept hearing IRL near-strangers mention watching videos about totally random stuff.

By the way, Ty’s just started a blog at digitalholepunch.com, where he plans to “discuss topics of interest in the information managment world, and hopefully generate some dialogue and collaboration.” Welcome to the blogosphere!

This past December, Courtney sent an e-mail around to a group of fellow library techs and/or book lovers in Vancouver, asking if any of us were interested in forming a book club in the new year. A bunch of us said yes and we held our first get-together on Saturday afternoon chez Court & Andrew.

The first book we chose to read was “The Accidental” by Ali Smith. While we had about a month to read it, of course I didn’t actually finish until a hour before leaving for Court’s. I had trouble getting into it at first; Smith’s writing style is very different from anything else I’ve read. Nevertheless, when I finished the book, I realised that I’d really enjoyed it and was glad that I’d finished it. In April of 2006, the Daily Mail’s book club selection was “The Accidental”, so we based our meeting on those discussion questions. I’ve had occasion to mention the book club to a few people, who have all been suitably impressed that we actually talked about the book - apparently, in most book clubs people just drink and gossip about other stuff!

Next up is “The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, which I’ve already read but liked a lot and will be happy to talk about. And then we arrive at my selection, “The Golden Spruce” by John Vaillant. I started reading this book a couple of months ago but had trouble getting past the first chapter. I’ve heard others say they had the same problem, but at the same time, I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s an amazing book, so I hope reading it for book club will motivate me to power though the…er…drier bits and get to the good stuff.

It felt really good to have a good talk with my friends about literature and get the ol’ critical thinking going. Even though I’m sure we’ll lapse a little more into the eating/talking book club MO over time, I hope we’ll manage to maintain a group of nine or ten, and keep the good discussions coming. A great start to 2007!