British Columbia Reports Online
The digitalization of legacy report series continues! A new joint project involving both UBC Law Library and the BCCLS has been launched to make The British Columbia Reports (1867-1946) available electronically:
http://stikine.library.ubc.ca/bcreports/index.html
Clipped from the collection website:
The British Columbia Reports is a law report series that was first published in 1884 by the Law Society of British Columbia, with judgments dating back to 1867. The series ceased publication in 1948. This collection includes the full text of all decisions published in the series.
The Reports, as a body of work, contains important social and legal history of this province, in addition to charting the development of British Columbia law through the course of its publishing history. The British Columbia Reports is an important resource for legal researchers, historians, genealogists, and British Columbians in general, due to the fact that it provides a collection of unique primary information on society and individuals living in British Columbia in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.
Also published during this period was the Digest of British Columbia Case Law, a three-volume series of summaries of cases from the Reports, as well as from publications of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the United Kingdom.
Funding for this project was provided by the Notary Foundation of the Society of Notaries Public of B.C. Additional support was provided by the British Columbia Courthouse Library Society, UBC Law Library, and UBC Archives.
Search results show keywords in context, and documents are retrieved in PDF format.
Absolutely brilliant. We should be doing this for all of the older series. My only quibble is with the size of the files. The PDFs don’t seem to have been compressed. Volume 1 is 63 MB in size.
This is great news. Thanks for mentioning it.
Good point (Simon), I noticed that too.
Outside of this project (of which I’m not involved), do you, or anyone else here @ Slaw have a preferred software solution for reducing PDF file size? (beyond Acrobat). I’ve tried a few and haven’t been satisfied with the results – reducing image resolution always seems to compromise print quality…
The utilities within Adobe Professional 7.0 work quite nicely – I also understand from John Tredennick that one can get even higher compression by adjusting some of the algorithms. I haven’t used third party utilities