On May 11 a US District Court issued its long awaited decision in the lawsuit brought by three academic publishers against Georgia State University for its use of copyrighted materials in its "electronic reserves" system. A practice at many universities is to post scans of required classroom readings to secure "student only" websites or course management systems such as Blackboard. The GSU had developed a policy on the use of copyrighted materials that attempted to balance the rights of copyright holders and the University's fair use rights. The GSU policy includes a "fair use checklist" that is based on the four fair use factors in 17 USC § 107.

The Chronicle of Higher Education provides a clear account of the Court's decision. The Chronicle reports that the Court ruled "that only five of 99 alleged copyright infringements did in fact violate the plaintiffs' copyrights".

The text of the 350 page judgement can be found here.

For Canadian commentary on the GSU decision see Professor Ariel Katz's blog. Professor Katz suggests that if this case were decided in Canada that "the result could be 99-0 for the defendants". Professor Michael Geist calls Katz's post a "must-read" for Canadian university administrators. The GSU decision is especially interesting in that it comes at a time when Canadian universities are deciding whether to sign on to Access Copyright's model license that seeks to cover many of the same activities that the GSU case considered.

For some US commentary see the Brief from the Association of Research Libraries and these posts from Duke University's scholarly communications blog here and here. On the publishers/rights-holders side the Association of American Publishers has issued a Statement expressing "disappointment" and the US Copyright Clearance Centre also issued a brief statement along similar lines.

The National Law Journal reported that the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco will reduce the size of its student body by 20% over the next three years. Hastings is ranked 44th in the US News and World Report rankings of US law schools.

At a time when new law schools are opening in Canada, and some schools have increased their enrollment, the reason for the reduction in the class size as stated by Hastings' Dean is very interesting and timely given the New York Times declaration last November that "legal education is in crisis", and SLAW's own Omar Ha Redeye's excellent commentary on the market and career prospects for new lawyers here last week. As quoted in the National Law Journal Dean Frank Wu states:

The critics of legal education are right…There are too many law schools and too many law students, and we're going to fix that. We would easily be able to fill 425 seats, but to do so would be irresponsible.

While there will be staffing cuts, including to the library, the school plans to fill new faculty positions. The details can be found here in a message from Dean Wu to the Hastings community.

For early reactions to the announcement see here and here.

[UPDATE (April 20, 2012): I'm happy to report that I was incorrect in assuming that the Legal Journals Index (LJI) would be discontinued along with the Current Legal Information service. The LJI will continue as part of Westlaw UK. Please see the comments from Westlaw UK below.]

Like most law librarians I've been a strong advocate of the use of journal indexes in research. While full-text searching on Hein, Lexis and Westlaw is the fastest and preferred way of finding journal literature, especially if you know exactly what you are looking for, I think there is still a place for indexes such as the Index to Canadian Legal Literature and LegalTrac with their controlled vocabularies and their source neutral approach.

Given this, the announcement a while ago from Sweet and Maxwell that their UK based service Current Legal Information (CLI) will be discontinued on April 30 comes as a disappointment if not necessarily as a huge surprise. The CLI included digests of new cases and a case citator, but it was most notable to law librarians for its Legal Journals Index the most complete online index of UK legal periodical materials.

Hopefully the demise of the CLI is a not a sign of things to come, but I worry that it might be. Sweet and Maxwell's announcement mentions the "now far superior online research services available, such as Westlaw UK and Lawtel, which provide vast amounts of content and are much more suited to today's legal practitioner". However the full-text sources are not a complete replacement for the indexes – their major shortcoming is that not every journal can be found in each full-text database. For a Canadian example see my post from last August where I noted that of the 66 Canadian journals I track that only 24 of them are on Lexis, 25 of them on Westlaw and 30 of them on Hein – only 11 titles appeared on all three platforms. So if the best article on my topic appears in a journal that is exclusive to Lexis, I wouldn't find it if I prefer using Hein. Indexes on the other hand are (in theory) source neutral – the ICLL indexes all relevant Canadian literature regardless of provider.

The indexes also can't be beat if you are trying to survey the literature on a topic. If I wanted to find out what has been written on the courts' use of a proportionality analysis in dealing with freedom of religion issues, I suppose I could craft a keyword search that I could run separately on Lexis, Westlaw and Hein – and I might be able to filter out all the irrelevant and duplicate hits. Or I could go to LegalTrac and take advantage of the controlled vocabulary the index uses and simply search for the subject terms "religion" and "proportionality" – I might miss something, but I can be certain that the articles I find truly deal with both my issues.

I will miss CLI and I hope that despite the demise of the Legal Journals Index that the other established indexes continue.

A couple of weeks ago the University of Toronto Faculty of Law hosted the Grafstein Annual Lecture in Communications. This year, Robert Darnton, the University Librarian at Harvard, spoke on "Books, Libraries & the Digital Future". A webcast of the talk is available via the UofT's Information Commons website.

I know a number of law librarians were disappointed to miss the talk as it was not publicised widely outside the University community. As it turned out Professor Darnton spoke to a packed house. His talk picked up on the themes in his widely read New York Review of Books article (commented on by Simon here).

The main part of the talk focussed on the challenges and possibilities created by the Digital Public Library of America project. The DPLA ultimately aims to provide free digital access to all American books and publications. Given that he was speaking to a Canadian audience, Darnton suggested that perhaps a DPL of "North America" is realistic. The talk highlighted the challenges this project will face, with special emphasis on the barriers that current understandings of copyright place on a public good undertaking such as this. Given the limitations of copyright the DPLA will focus on pre-1923 materials to start with.

If you have any interest in how we might get to a digital future I encourage you to watch the webcast – if only for the incredibly coherent and insightful analysis of the Google Books settlement close to the beginning of the talk. If like me, you felt that you could never really get your head around the implications of the settlement, Professor Darnton's talk will be very illuminating.

Many SLAW readers will already be familiar with the excellent video legal research tutorials that the Courthouse Libraries BC have put together. If you are not I encourage you to check them out. The videos look great and really demonstrate the power of the medium as a teaching tool.

The tutorials provide the novice researcher with an excellent introduction on how to approach researching legislation and case law. For those of use who are librarians or lawyers working with students, the tutorials are a wonderful resource for supplementing and reinforcing our instruction and giving students something short and engaging to refer to when we are not available.

The Researching Legislation tutorials are especially effective at using screencast technology to demonstrate how online and print resources are used together to trace back a piece of legislation to its origin and to research legislative intent - both still largely paper based forms of research, and very tricky to teach. I never thought one could make looking through a print index to Hansard interesting, but the BC Courthouse Library managed to pull it off!

The Library also provides an 8 part series on finding cases on point that walks through how to use the CED, LawSource and CANLII to find and note-up relevant case law, as well as a 3 part series on finding forms and precedents including a tutorial on using O'Briens.

Publishing academic monographs – the kinds of books that may sell only a few hundred copies – in an era of digital platforms and shrinking library budgets is a serious challenge. Earlier this year leaders from many of the major US libraries and academic presses were hosted by Robert Darnton, the Harvard University Librarian, to discuss the idea of a Global Library Consortium (GLC).

In a nutshell something like the GLC would allow academic library members of the consortium to work with publishers to identify which monographs they would be willing to purchase. The more purchasers for a specific title, the lower the cost to each of the members of the consortium. Libraries who purchase a title would receive "enhanced" access to the book, however the contents of the book would be available free online for everyone to access, whether they purchased or not. In this way publishers have some certainty in knowing upfront that they will be able to cover their costs and make a profit, libraries can stretch their collection budgets, and open access to knowledge is promoted as well. For a better explanation see this YouTube clip by Frances Pinter who first proposed the idea. A deeper overview of the issues from Publishers Weekly can be found here.

This approach presents some real benefits to libraries and their users but there are challenges, not least of which is the free rider problem. It will be interesting to see if this has legs, and if something like this makes sense in the much smaller world of legal academic publishing.

A little while ago I blogged about legal bibliographies and highlighted some of the work that John Eaton at the University of Manitoba has done in this area. It is very nice to see that John's work has been recognised as he is the 2012 recipient of the Association of College and Research Libraries Marta Lange/CQ Press Award. This award recognises librarians who have made a significant contribution to bibliography and information service in law or political science. The press release from the American Library Association announcing the award can be found here.

Congratulations John!

A couple of weeks ago the academic library blog and twittersphere was ablaze reacting to a tweet that “[a]ll of Harvard library staff have just effectively been fired”. As more news came out of a January 19 Harvard town hall meeting it appears that the reorganization at Harvard will not be that extreme – but these will be very challenging times for the Harvard library. The Chronicle of Higher Education has a nice short piece on this situation here. The text of the presentation that sparked the reaction is here. More news is expected next month.

An obvious question is what this type of restructuring may mean for other academic libraries. My gut sense is that Harvard is so big and so different than most academic libraries that their issues are not the same as most. Were many academic law libraries inspired to follow John Palfrey’s approach to restructuring at the HLS library? Academic libraries (not to mention private law libraries) have been quite nimble in facing (and leading) the challenges of the digital age. Perhaps the Harvard situation is more of an example of how much more challenging it is to change the direction of a huge ship than a smaller one.

In any case it will be interesting to see how this proceeds and its impact on libraries and research.

The start of the winter term means a happy return to the University of Toronto Faculty of Information where I am again part of the team that teaches the perennially oversubscribed Legal Literature and Librarianship class. This year I am co-teaching with two of my colleagues Susan Barker and John Bolan and we will once again feature a guest lecture from Ted Tjaden who taught this course from 1998-2004. (Ted has blogged about his impressions of the class here , here and here).

It might strike some of my non-librarian colleagues odd or quaint that such a course continues to exist. Legal Literature and Librarianship is one of a handful of masters-level courses at Canadian library and information schools that teach future librarians about the literature and tools of legal research as well as the practice of law librarianship. While students in this class obviously do not learn about legal writing and analysis, they do learn a lot about research and the literature. By the end of the course their ability to find just about anything and quickly identify the best secondary sources on any topic, coupled with their ability to advise others on research strategy, impresses me every year.

With it becoming ever easier for any novice legal researcher to muddle through and find something relevant, we continue to need people who can identify the best sources and know how and when to use them. In fact, given how easy it is to find just something there is less incentive to learn the tools and sources well enough to find everything when required. Getting new librarians on the road to becoming this kind of expert is exactly why classes like Legal Literature and Librarianship continue to exist.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about some of my favourite print bibliographies. Most academic law library and law society websites include some research guides or bibliographies – here are some of the ones I use the most:

Queen’s Law Library Select Bibliographies. Very comprehensive lists of Canadian materials for all of the core law school subjects. These bibliographies also lists materials from other jurisdictions.

Osgoode Hall Law Library’s Research Guides also cover many of the core subjects but tend to be more selective in their coverage which is useful to the student looking for just the key resources.

University of Ottawa Law Library’s Law Research Guides are using the very versatile LibGuides format which is popular with many academic libraries. These LibGuides move beyond the core first year curriculum and are excellent starting points for identifying key resources. See their Aboriginal Rights LibGuide for an excellent example of the potential of this format

The University of Alberta Law Library also has a good collection of Subject Guides using LibGuides.

At the University of Toronto Law Library, we are working through the process of moving our subject based research guides from behind our “student-only” site to our general site. We will be using LibGuides as well.

Outside of the academic law library world a couple of noteworthy bibliographies include the Suggested Textbooks section of Catherine Best’s Guide to Canadian Legal Research and the Legaltree.ca website’s Resources by Subject Area

In the not too distant past law librarians were valued for their knowledge of "legal bibliography". Great librarians who built the collections of law schools libraries across Canada were experts in knowing what had been published across jurisdictions and legal topics. With the explosion of print and online legal publishing a knowledge of bibliography gave way to the need to know and understanding how to find relevant information when needed.

Still, the art of knowing the literature on a topic and organising and making that literature available to users both expert and novice is still an important (if perhaps somewhat undervalued) role of librarians. I was reminded how important this art is when consulting with Lakehead on what they might want to include in their planned law library. Here are a few bibliographies that I recommend:

John Eaton & Denis Le May, Essential Sources of Canadian Law, (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2009). This gem of a book provides short bibliographies of the most essential titles for 105 areas of law. Most law librarians will be familiar with the titles in this book, but I have found this an excellent source to keep on my desk to jog my memory when researching an unfamiliar area. It's an excellent tool for new librarians, and I would expect that public libraries and other non-law libraries would find this a very useful entry point to identifying the key titles in an area. A nice feature of this book is that it lists both French and English language titles.

Two of the more recent books on Canadian legal research: Tjaden's Legal Research and Writing, 3rd ed (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2010) and McCormack, Papadopoulos & Cotter's The Practical Guide to Canadian Legal Research, 3rd ed (Toronto: Carswell, 2010) also provide bibliographies by topic – Tjaden in chapter 8 and McCormack in the appendix. Since Tjaden's first edition, I must have said "let's look in chapter 8 of Tjaden to see what's out there" to hundreds of law students. Ted's bibliography is a bit less granular, looking at 45 topics, but he goes beyond the essential books and also lists relevant journals, encyclopedia entries, reporters and websites. McCormack looks at 44 topics with many topics including lists of sub-topics where appropriate. For example there are 22 sub-topics for "Criminal Law" including the Charter, Evidence, Sentencing and Youth Criminal Justice. Like Tjaden the approach aims to be more comprehensive than Eaton's focus on essentials.

Outside of Canadian literature, John Eaton has recently published Finding English Law: Key Titles for Non-UK Lawyers and Researchers, (London: Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2011), which like his Canadian book takes a granular approach listing 97 topics. John's approach is perfect for a Canadian audience, as he gives us just enough information to find the right literature without becoming too esoteric. This is an excellent reference source for librarians as well as an aid to collection development.

I've had less reason to find US books, but the "Legal Treatises" chapter of the annual Legal Information Buyer's Guide and Reference Manual by Kendall Svengalis has been useful – although aimed at US librarians who are purchasing titles, its annotated list of titles for 61 topics provides a good starting point.

In a future post I'll take a look at some of the best online bibliographies find on law library and legal research websites.

I've come across a couple of new law reviews that might be of interest to SLAW readers…

1) The Washington Journal of Environmental Law and Policy from the University of Washington in Seattle. WJELP is a student run journal. Issues will be available for free online and the first issue is here. You can sign up for e-mail alerts of new issues at the journal's website. All issues will also be archived at the University of Washington's digital repository.

2) The Southampton Student Law Review is a new student publication from the Southhampton Law School in the UK. There are two issues so far, both online.

And while not a new law review, I wanted to plug the recent Canadian law journals tables of contents service that the Bora Laskin Law Library has been offering via our Blog. The October listing will be up in a day or so. You can now sign up to follow our Blog by e-mail.

Canadian Law is an iPhone app, put together by Lunaform Software, a German based company. The cost is $4.99. The app’s purpose is a little more modest that its name suggests – it provides offline access to over 700 Federal statutes. This includes the full text of all statutes (but not the regulations) in English only. Once the app has been downloaded one does not need to be connected to the Internet to view and work with the statutes.

I reviewed the app on an iPad 2, but I expect that it works the same on an iPhone. As I worked through the features of the app it became clear how effective a touch screen is for quickly navigating through large volumes of text.

The real strength of this app is to allow you to quickly access and work with familiar statutes offline. If you know the provision you are looking for it takes seconds to pull it up by browsing through the list of statutes. Within an act it is easy to move from section to section. One can quickly and intuitively bookmark and annotate sections (with the notes feature) and refer to them later.

The currency date for most of the statutes I reviewed was May 30, 2011. The developer of the app told me that from time to time updates to the statutes will be provided through app updates in the App Store. They are also working on functionality that will allow the user to update online from within the app, but this is still in development.

The search box on the main screen is fairly basic and has limitations. The results are sorted:

I'm new to the cloud, just having opened a Dropbox account a couple of weeks ago. Still even to a newbie like me its clear that cloud computing on a larger scale can raise many legal issues about privacy and security. As it turns out the potential new law and policy issues are many. To address these issues the Centre for Innovation Law and Policy at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law is hosting an all-day conference on Friday October 14 entitled Cloudlaw: Law and Policy in the Cloud. The conference will consider the issues that may arise from the storing of large amounts of information virtually in the "cloud" as opposed to locally on your own organization's servers.

Speakers include the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario Dr. Ann Cavoukian who will deliver the keynote address, as well as speakers from academia, government, corporations, and legal practice. They will discuss the jurisdictional challenges that the cloud presents as well as privacy and security, competition law and IP issues raised by the cloud. Details and registration information can be found on the conference website.

And if you like me need a good description of what the "cloud" is, Wesley Ng has a nice overview in his recent SLAW posting.

A recent ethnographic study at a number of Illinois academic libraries suggests that students who have grown up with computer and Internet access are not as sophisticated at accessing the world of online resources as is often assumed. A very brief article on the project appeared in many daily papers last month and my colleague Humayun Rashid brought a much more detailed report in Inside Higher Education to my attention. The Inside Higher Ed. article provides an excellent summary of the study.

The results of the ERIAL Project (Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries) are perhaps not very surprising to those of us who work with the students that the literature has dubbed "digital natives" – but they are nonetheless very interesting and instructive. The ERIAL Project is a two year study of how students do research. The study's research methodology was much more sophisticated than the typical library use survey and included anthropologists observing how students work at research, as well as interviews and other exercises such as keeping diaries. A book reporting on the project is coming out soon: College Libraries and Student Culture: What We Now Know (Table of contents here)

Some highlights noted in the Inside Higher Ed. report include:

Ted Tjaden's post today on “Legal Research and Writing Skills in Law School” could not have been more timely for me and my colleagues at the Bora Laskin Law Library.

For the first time that anyone here can remember (*however, see comment 3 below), the UofT Faculty of Law is offering a stand-alone mandatory legal research and writing class for its incoming first year class. It is a 10 week programme of hour-long classes that attempt to address many of the challenges that Ted outlines. This programme was long in the making and was driven by the Law School’s Standing Curriculum Committee and ably marshaled into place by our Assistant Dean Sara Faherty and a group of faculty and librarians.

The first week was taught by faculty member Simon Stern, who is passionate about LRW. The subsequent nine weeks will be taught by Sara, four legal writing instructors (doctoral students – Gail Henderson, Hélène Maynard, Mike Nesbitt and Mike Pal) and three librarians (myself, Susan Barker and John Bolan), thereby exposing our students to experts in writing and analysis as well as in the process and tools of legal research. Classes will be taught in small groups of about 15 students, with a combination of lectures, in class exercises, and hands-on computer lab instruction.

It is early days for our programme and it will be a challenge to address all of the issues that Ted outlines. For example, we expect that by the end of the programme that our students will be familiar with writing a memorandum of law, but finding room to teach about CLE materials and “words and phrases” services will be a challenge. The programme will give students a foundation in LRW that still leaves lots of room for our instructors in the upper year Advanced LRW classes, and our law firm librarian and research lawyer colleagues to build on.

Still, our programme is an exciting start for UofT and an important step in addressing the concerns expressed by Ted and so many of our law library and research lawyer colleagues.

For the last few months, I have been tracking new issues of Canadian law journals for Bora Laskin Law Library's Recent Law Journals Tables of Contents service (July issue here) . This was as part of a bigger project, that will hopefully see the light of day someday. One of my collaborators on that project Andrea Davidson (a lawyer who is currently a masters student at the University of Western Ontario's Faculty of Information and Media Studies) thought it was worth noting that a number of the journals we were looking at were not available on either Lexis or Westlaw. This is a bit of a surprise as I had half-assumed going into this project that I would be able to find most journals I needed online by looking in one or two places. While most journals are indeed online somewhere, you have to look in a few different places to find them all.

A closer look at what I found is surprising. There may be errors here – I have relied on UofT's list of law journals, but this gives a good general picture. We certainly do have a way to go.

Of the 66 Canadian law related journals I am tracking:

- 11 are on all three main commercial platforms (Lexis, Westlaw and HeinOnline)
- 12 are on two of these platforms (10 Lexis, 10 Hein, 4 Westlaw)
- 20 are on only one of these platforms (3 Lexis, 7 Hein, 10 Westlaw)
- 2 are only on Hein but are not current
- 21 are not on any of the three platforms (some of these are published on the web only, others are available on other online platforms such as Gale or Proquest or a CLB database, and some (about 12) I could not find online at all)

Looking at things another way, if I was expecting to get one stop shopping - of my 66 journals I would find:

- 24 of them on Lexis
- 25 of them on West
- 30 of them on Hein (not all would be current)

I guess there are a couple of lessons here. One, it looks like neither of these sources has a clear competitive advantage in their journals coverage. The second is one that my library mentor Ted Tjaden made sure I understood when I joined UofT: if you are doing journal research and want to know what has been written on a specific topic use an index - full-text searching is (still) not enough.

Yesterday Larry Alford joined the University of Toronto as its new Chief Librarian. Larry is responsible for the UofT Library system which is the largest research library in Canada and among the largest in the world. Mr. Alford is only the 6th permanent Chief Librarian at UofT since 1892. Larry replaces Carole Moore who retired earlier this summer after leading the Library for over 25 years and overseeing the transformation of the UofT Library system from a good Canadian library to one of the great research libraries in the world – matching the University's aspiration to join the ranks of the world's great research institutions. In the most recent available Association of Research Libraries (ARL) statistics, UofT is ranked 4th in total volumes and near the top in most of the ARL's 22 different rank order tables.

Larry comes to the UofT from Temple University where he was the Vice Provost for Libraries, University Librarian and Dean of University Libraries. Under Larry's leadership Temple Libraries experienced its own transformation in collections and services that saw Temple make a huge jump in the ARL rankings.

So what does this have to do with legal information? This is an exciting and transitional time for libraries and people like Larry will be shaping the discussion and decisions on issues around digitization, open access, licensing vs. owning content, and intellectual property that will affect how we access information – including legal information. Larry has a deep appreciation of these issues as well as an excellent understanding of traditional library functions and the important role that collaboration among and between institutions will play in how we access and preserve information.

As reported last week internet activist Aaron Schwartz “was charged … with sneaking into a computer closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and making unauthorized downloads of more than four million journal articles” from JSTOR. While there is a long list of charges (a copy of the 15 page indictment from the US District Court can be found here), the charge that has generated the most online debate is “intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access” 18 U.S.C. § 1030(a)(2).

Academic libraries pay for access to JSTOR – an enormous repository of full-text journals. The Boston Globe reports that a subscription to JSTOR can cost a university up to $50,000 a year. It is not widely available outside of the academy. As a Harvard student Schwartz has free access to JSTOR via the Harvard library. As the author of the "Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto", it appears that Schwartz's download at MIT was designed to protest the fact that this material was not free for everyone. Schwartz wrote in 2008:

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Online discussion has focussed the general unavailability of this content and whether downloading too many articles is actually wrong enough to justify charges that carry a maximum of 35 years in prison. This is a curious story, where ultimately the hard drives of downloaded content were never distributed and JSTOR itself decided not to peruse any action once the content was secured.

As an academic librarian I support the open access movement for scholarly communications. There is a lot of work to be done and the recent Calgary Statement issued by the Council of Canadian Academic Law Library Directors is a good start to what will be a slow moving process. I however can't see how Schwartz and his supporters are helping the cause of access at all. There seems to be a wilfully naive attitude to the questions of how all these articles actually were collected into a database and the important role that publishers and libraries play in the process of making this scholarly content available.

A short while ago the first issue of the UC Irvine Law Review became available via the UC Irvine website. Given the school’s initial growing pains it is welcome to see this first issue. Many SLAW readers may remember the political controversy involving the initial offer, withdrawal of offer, and rehiring of leading US constitutional law scholar (and frequent critic of the Bush administration) Erwin Chemerinsky as the school’s Founding Dean. Dean Chemerinsky addresses the controversy in the journal’s opening article on the school’s founding and his vision for a new law school. Of interest to SLAWers is that he saw the hiring of a librarian - my colleague Beatrice Tice, formerly of the Bora Laskin Law Library – as an important part of building a new law school.

Beatrice has an excellent article in the inaugural issue: “The Academic Law Library in the 21st Century: Still the Heart of the Law School”. The title is a reference to Harvard president Charles Eliot’s descriprion of Harvard’s law library as “the heart of the school” in his 1872-73 Annual Report. Beatrice gives us an excellent overview of the role and perceptions of the law school library from the 18th century to the present. I’m a bit embarrassed to say that a lot of the very interesting history that Beatrice recounts was new to me.

Beatrice concludes with a discussion of why the academic law library is still relevant in the twenty first century. There has been a lot of recent discussion among and between librarians on this topic. Here Beatrice is addressing non-librarians and provides a good summary of some of the strengths of the academic library– including the increased need for the library’s “information facilitation” function in a hybrid digital and print environment (what John Palfrey calls “digital plus”), and the observation that “The indefinable ambience of the law library as an environment for work of great consequence—as the ‘laboratory of the law school’—is felt and understood by those who use the library, even in the information age.”

Thank you for the kind welcome Simon. I’ve just returned fresh from a research leave where amongst other things I investigated the challenges and possibilities around creating a Canadian subject based research tool that does for Canadian Journals what the wonderful Current Index to Legal Periodicals does for US journals. I hope to talk a bit more about this project in a future entry.

In the meantime, along with many SLAW readers and contributors I have been missing the excellent Current Law Journal Content service offered by the Washington and Lee Law Lbrary. Simon has recently written about CLJC here. This service (which ceased in May) provided reasonably timely tables of contents for hundreds of law journals. At Bora Laskin we included links to CLJC in InfoExpressCurrent our monthly faculty newsletter as way to alert our faculty to new issues of Canadian journals.

Fortunately my research leave project required me to collect and keep track of the table of contents of every new Canadian law journal issue, so it seemed natural that we re-purpose all this information and in a small way try to fill CJLC’s void – at least for Canadian journals. My colleague Susan Barker, Bora Laskin’s Digital Services and Reference Librarian has taken all the ToCs that I am collecting, and has since May been producing a monthly list of tables of contents to include in our faculty newsletter. Our May listing is reproduced on SLAW here (under the Useful Things tab). If you think you will find this useful we encourage you to sign up for the RSS feed on the Bora Laskin Law Library’s Blog. I imagine similar projects may be brewing or are already in place in other libraries – in which case we may have opportunities for collaboration.

Ideally, in time this service will be supplanted by something much more robust – perhaps a collaborative effort by Canadian law schools to create an open access online repository of Canadian legal scholarship along the lines that Simon described a couple of months ago. In the meantime, I look forward to your comments and the possibility of collaboration.