80 Years of Canadian Bar Review
While the Canadian Bar Association says that they’re unlocking the digital vault on the Bar Review on Monday, the search engine works today.
The content is extraordinarily rich. PDF’s of everything. The historical depth is extraordinary and the scholarship can be excellent.
I was upset when my old firm trashed an entire set of the Bar Review due to space restrictions. Now I’ve got everything on the desktop – and I’m a happy researcher.
The interface is a bit clunky. It’s essentially the old Index volumes to the journal linked to the relevant PDF. No full text searching, although you can run the Adobe text recognition software on any particular article to make it locally fully searchable.
But for content alone, this is a source we should all be using weekly.
Congrats to the CBA for doing us all a service.
For those who might not have it bookmarked, the url is http://www.cba.org/CBA/Canadian_Bar_Review/Main/default.aspx
The only problem is that you have to be a CBA member to access these sources. :(
Unfortunately New Zealand researchers are not able to access the database either. :(
We would really like to be able to share the resource with so much material relevant in New Zealand. Any way around this?
Law Student might check his/her library’s databases. I know that the law library at Osgoode-York subscribes to the Canadian Bar Review, so any student on the yorku domain or logging in to the proxy server can have access. It’d be surprising if most — all? — law schools didn’t subscribe to the CBR database.
Pat – because it’s a member benefit, my suspicion is that they lock you out. I’d be happy to forward anything on that is of specific interest. I think the work-around would be a search by journal on InfoTrac and then to pin-point it.
I think we should also be suggesting to the CBA that they load the materials on Hein Online, then they would be full text searchable to anyone globally that had a Hein subscription. Or does Hein insist on exclusivity?
I’ve just been referred to a great article in the CBR and can’t get access to it because my law school does not subscribe to InfoTrac and the material is not fully available on Hein (it cuts out at around 1926). If anyone has a copy of (2002) 81 Can Bar Rev 247 I’d be most grateful if you could forward it to my emal address above as I need it for a soon to be due research paper.
It would be great if the CBA chose to upload the whole of the CBR so that those in related jurisdictions can access relevant materials and stay atop of developments.
Thanks heaps in advance:).
Done