Last summer I wrote an article that was scheduled to be published in the Law Library Journal. The article, like Gaul, was divided into three parts. Each of the three was edgy. The first was a reflection on the end of scholarly bibliography as a mainstream intellectual activity. The second was an overheated rebuttal of a piece on the nature of Law Librarianship that the eminent Professor G. Edward White had written in the Green Bag a few years back. The third part consisted of me pontificating on the future of academic law librarianship in the United States. In that . . . [more]

Recently, Slaw introduced Talklaw, a calendar of legal conferences and events. This reminded me of an annual legal conference that doesn’t get talked about much outside of Manitoba, the Isaac Pitblado Lectures.

Non-Manitobans are not likely to be familiar with Isaac Pitblado. As stated in the biography from the Pitblado Lectures published papers:

At the time of Isaac Pitblado’s death, the Hon. Richard S. Bowles, the President of the Law Society of Manitoba, said about him:

The Law Society has lost its most respected and beloved member. Canada has lost one of its most able and distinguished sons.

I stumbled into this career and it has been a blast! I did not plan to specialize in foreign, comparative, and international law (FCIL) librarianship. I just wanted to be the world’s greatest general legal reference librarian (ah, youth!). But, here I am, enjoying doing work I never imagined.

Because I’ve been in the profession for a while, I get asked from time to time – how does one become an FCIL librarian? Here’s what I would have done to research career opportunities as an FCIL librarian (besides reviewing job postings to see what current employers are expecting from FCIL . . . [more]

A few months ago we had a minor flood in the library. It wasn’t catastrophic, in large part due to the observant eyes of a lawyer browsing our tax section. Nonetheless it was a reminder of how important it is for libraries, regardless of size, to have a disaster recovery plan. In addition to our firm-wide business recovery plan, we now have a specialized library disaster plan.

Key tips for the disaster plan include:

• Keep the plan simple. Guy Robertson, a specialist in disaster planning, recommends that the plan be small and portable; wallet-sized is ideal.
• Clearly delineate responsibilities of

Recent activity in the legal informatics world has been characterized by numerous efforts to make legal documents and technologies more openly available, and to make legal information more interoperable. Here are some examples:

• Núria Casellas, Joan-Josep Vallbé, and Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute discussed their recent work applying Linked Data technology to the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR), in entitled , presented at the Open Government Knowledge 2011 conference. The paper described their experiments with marking up the text of the CFR as RDF Linked Data, marking up the CFR Thesaurus of Indexing

This is my first column for Slaw, and may I say, it is an honour to be asked to contribute. Of all the reading material that crosses my desk and my computer, Slaw is one of the few for which I have always made time, even if it’s just to scan titles. The combination of blogs and columns always seems to bring me information, just when I need it, or even better, before I know I need it.

By way of introduction, for many years I worked as a Law Librarian in Bay Street law firms. I even spent a . . . [more]

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting is an interesting publisher, established in 1865 by the legal profession in Great Britain, to bring some order to the then somewhat chaotic world of law reporting. Before this time, English law reports, now known as Nominate Reports, were produced on an individual basis by barristers, with a series lasting from one or two volumes, to the working life of the author barrister. Series varied in standard, layout and structure.

The ICLR oversaw the introduction of an orderly reporting system with the creation of The Law Reports, as the series that would report judicial . . . [more]

Decades ago when I was looking for legal information on gays in the military worldwide, resources were scarce. Those gopher, pre-web days are gone and now researchers can find a wide variety of resources on the global legal status of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex (LGBTQI) people. So, let’s check to see how these resources cover military law related to LGBTQI persons around the globe.

The newest resource is the International Commission of Jurists’ Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Justice: A Comparative Law Casebook (September 2011). It includes a foreword by the Hon. Michael Kirby, former President of . . . [more]

From my earliest days as a professional I have taught about how best to carry out legal research. Over the years I have instructed high school students, undergraduates, prisoners, graduate students, paralegals, librarians and many, many law students. Something not quite rational drove my interest. Many times I have paraphrased the lines spoken by John Belushi in the classic movie The Blues Brothers, telling people that I was on a mission from God to teach legal research. I have written books, made cassette tapes, video tapes and DVDs about legal research. If this almost obsessive interest had not been . . . [more]

Librarians often use the rule that 20% of a library’s collection accounts for 80% of its use. However a recent OCLC study found that 80% of the circulation in a university library was driven by just 6% of the collection. Given that law libraries, whether academic, courthouse or private law firm, are constantly under space pressures, does this mean that we should be discarding the other 80-94% of the collection and using the space for something else? (Spoiler: my answer is “no”.)

Usage is not necessarily a good measure of the value of an item. There are items in my . . . [more]

The new library of Osgoode Hall Law School is open, even if not yet quite finished. We’re still waiting for some of the furniture to be delivered and the rare books reading room (Canada Law Book Rare Book Room) is still under construction. I’m crossing my fingers that the missing pieces will be in place for the official opening of the new Ignat Kaneff Building, home of Osgoode Hall Law School, on October 16.

But there’s much more to a good library than well-designed facilities, access to good resources and helpful staff. One of the essential ingredients of any successful . . . [more]

The past two months have seen a flurry of innovative activity in the corner of the legal technology world that concerns free access to law and open legal information. Here are some developments that seem noteworthy:

Open Legal Educational Resources

New, free, and open versions — in ePUB and .mobi formats — of U.S. federal court rules have been published, jointly by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School and CALI, The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction. This is the latest addition to the ePUB-based open legal publishing endeavor that John Mayer describes in this recent post. . . . [more]