2008 Canadian Association of Law Libraries Conference – Some Trends

A few Slawyers are currently in Saskatoon at the annual conference of CALL/ACBD. On Sunday we held business meetings of the various committees and special interest groups, as well as held a Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum to discuss publisher/vendor issues, followed by demonstrations by a number of the vendors.

A few trends to report back:

• During the Vendor Liaison Committee Open Forum the publishers asked about reducing the number of paper catalogues they produce both to be more environmentally friendly and no doubt to also reduce costs as catalogues are expensive to produce and print. One suggestion was that they clean up their contact management records to only pick one main contact at any organization to receive a paper copy, as organizations are receiving multiple copies including numerous for those who have long since left the firms.
• We also ran a straw poll to see how many people are using paper publisher catalogues and how many are using online publisher catalogues. We allowed people to vote for both categories. We discovered that almost all are using online catalogues; in comparison, roughly half of the library folk present are still also using paper catalogues.
• We then asked how many are using the publisher new title RSS feeds; it looked to be perhaps at most a fifth of the audience were using them. We also pointed out the LegalPubs.ca web page that Steve Matthews has put together as a site where all feeds can be viewed together for those not using RSS readers. This was of great interest to those who had not yet seen it (I guess they have not been regular readers of Slaw!)
• The trend for online legal research tools is increasingly moving toward specialized electronic products. Currently WestlaweCarswell, LexisNexis and Canada Law Book have products for practice groups (or are developing them). This seems to be where the trend is going, and as these specialized products gain popularity we may expect to see more, possibly in smaller niche areas. Librarians in the larger firms who I spoke with worry about fragmentation of Canadian legal research sources as we have increasing numbers of places to find information. Meanwhile, for smaller firms and solo lawyers (who outweigh the number of lawyers in large firms in Canada) this is ideal as not only do they pay for only that information they need, but also more in-depth resources are becoming available to them.