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Archive for the ‘Legal Information’ Columns

Mining the Twitterverse for Current Awareness

The nature of current awareness is changing. It has become increasingly easy for us to read newspapers from other cities, to retrieve transcripts or recordings of television and radio programs. We can monitor the progress of legislative debate without the need to read every word in Hansard. The blogosphere is a source of commentary and analysis. The “current” is more like a tidal wave than ever before.

Librarians are used to providing media monitoring and environmental scanning services. We’ve gone from clipping the local paper and photocopying tables of contents to harvesting RSS feeds, searching global newspapers on the web . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Doing the Library Thing

Last summer, I was asked by a client at a small administrative tribunal to help with an interesting project. Over the organization’s 20-year history, it had accumulated a number of “issues files”, which document the evolution of its thinking on a range of questions and problems which had arisen over time. The collection was a valuable store of corporate knowledge and history, but it was difficult to know where to look for a particular piece of information or to know what questions might be answered by using these files. Could we recommend a way of cataloguing the contents of these . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Legal Sources Part One: Law Reform Materials

My legal research career has taken me to several different settings in different cities or jurisdictions, and one thing I have found interesting is that there has always been a stronger emphasis on some tools in each of my workplaces. For this reason, I decided to write a series of columns that will address particular research materials or sources of law or legal information that, for one reason or another, I found myself using more in some settings than in others and that generally might be otherwise overlooked as excellent resources. This month, the column addresses law reform bodies and . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

If You Feed Them, They Will Come

“Will there be food?” is the usual response to any invitation to attend a library event. Attendance always seems to be higher if it is promoted as having refreshments. My column this time is devoted to the various ways in which libraries gain attention by literally dangling cookies in front of their audiences.

I remember putting together a library open house some years ago. I deliberately chose Valentine’s Day as the day of the event, which I called the Library Love-In (yes, I know). The invitation went out via e-mail, with the subject line: “Chocolate”. Attendance was remarkably good, and . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Who Does Legal Research?

Sorry if you thought I am writing a “Who does legal research anymore, anyway?” column this time. What I mean by the title, and what I mean to ask in the column, is in what settings and by whom is legal research done today, and whether the answers to these questions call for any action by legal research professionals. Those of us who carry out legal research or provide legal research instruction as a regular part of our livelihoods or occupations often think of legal research in what I think of as a more traditional context: the private law firms, . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Karen MacLaurin’s Next Chapter

There are few members of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) who are unfamiliar with Karen MacLaurin. The lively Executive Director of Ottawa’s County of Carleton Law Association for the past 20 years, Karen has been a fixture at CALL conferences for more years than any of us want to remember. She has also been a key contributor to many CALL initiatives. The Copyright Committee, Vendors’ Liaison Committee, Courthouse Librarians’ SIG, as well as other groups, have all benefitted from Karen’s energy and experience. In 2007, Karen was the chair of the program committee for the Ottawa CALL conference. . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Research Plugged-In, Too

This time around the Legal Research Unplugged column is a little less legal and a little more plugged-in than usual. As often is the case, I have been thinking about the way students and young lawyers carry out research and the way we teach or guide them in this (the “we” being the more experienced research lawyers, teachers, and librarians who are tasked with or take on the responsibility). However, this time around my thoughts have turned to research skill with tools other than the traditional legal resources, in particular, skill with the tools of a “plugged-in” researcher. Perhaps this . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Feeling Weedy?

Summer is for weeding. The horticultural among us use the sunny days for tending to their gardens. The bibliocultural among us tend to our collections. This summer, as every summer, I read shelves, assessed collection strengths, and determined the fate of subscriptions and individual volumes – keep or chuck? Repair or replace? Track down missing volumes, or write them off? And I shifted, and I shifted, and I shifted. We’ve now got grow room in the areas that need it, and I got a great upper body workout.

Shifting books is one of those activities that permit contemplation. As I . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

A Lament for Legal History

A friend (and fellow law graduate, non-practising) recently related an exchange she had with a prominent Canadian justice in the course of the friend’s work with a federal government department. (You may notice I am trying very hard to keep details vague, so as not to cause any embarrassment, although the friend did give me permission to relate this story in this column.) My friend had the pleasure of accompanying the judge during a trip, and they got to chatting about Canadian law and the Charter in particular. The friend mentioned the concept of the “living tree” in the context . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Trust in Librarians

I’ve spent the early weeks of Summer 2008 catching up on my reading. I’ve finally read Wikinomics, for example. I’m also trolling through my Google reader, bookmarks and photocopies of short pieces that I promised myself I would pay closer attention to “when there’s time.” In these articles and posts and books I’ve noticed a recurring theme. The idea of trust, and how Web 2.0 is changing who we trust and what we trust arises again and again.

Jordan Furlong identified trust as a challenge in the world of law firm KM, prompting me to ask the question: Do . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

Why Librarianship?

I was chatting recently with a friend and fellow librarian, and mentioned that my 16-year-old niece is considering librarianship as a career alternative. “Really?” my friend replied “I don’t know that I would encourage that –- in fact, I’m not sure I would go into it myself now. Is librarianship still relevant?”

That conversation, coupled with the invitation to contribute to SLAW, has given me a chance to really think about the relevance of librarianship. Is there a future for the profession?

According to the New York Times, librarians have never been cooler. Friends in the know at UWO . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information

The Role of the in-House Research Lawyer – Is There One?

The idea for this column arose from discussions at a recent meeting of a research lawyers in Toronto. This column takes a slightly different path from our banter at that meeting but, in essence, rests on one of the same themes: the role of research lawyers in firms today.

As we all know, over the past several decades it has become not uncommon for law firms of various sizes to have in-house research lawyers. Similar functions to those of law firm research lawyers are also carried out by dedicated individuals in government departments, courts, tribunals, and other organizations; these persons . . . [more]

Posted in: Legal Information