Nostalgia title for this post – I can’t tell you the number of times I said to the now grown, employed and, after this evening, all moved out on their own, Mireau Giggles, “Use your words”. Actually, it wasn’t too often come to think of it, but as you read the phrase you may hear your mother or fathers voice. Use your words is a more recent theme as well. Yesterday, I was delighted to share some tips for deploying knowledge management initiatives in mid-sized law firms with a group of engaged participants from the BCLMA KM Subsection. My presentation . . . [more]

That was the question that welcomed us on the morning of Day 2 at the law repositories conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. This session was billed as a “debate” between Sharon Bradley, University of Georgia School of Law, and Beth Williams, Louisiana State University Law Center, but it turned out that the two speakers didn’t really have much to disagree on; they both considered digitization a form of preservation.

Bradley stressed the need for libraries to get started. “Digitization can’t wait,” she said, “your books are deteriorating.” She sees digitization as a way to both protect the physical . . . [more]

Every year, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) hands out the Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

The nominees for this year are:

• BC Laws (British Columbia Queen’s Printer)
• CanLII Connects (CanLII)
• Centre de documentation et de ressources informationnelles [CDRI] (Chambre des notaires du Québec)
• Osgoode Society for Canadian Legal History book series (University of Toronto Press)
• Quickscribe 2.0 (Quickscribe 2.0 Services Ltd.)
• Saskatchewan Builders’ Lien Manual, 2^nd ed.

Hello!
On the day that the new E-Laws site went live, I sent them an email to ask where I could find the Detailed Legislative History Tables.
Here is their reply:

Dear Ms. Demers:

Thank you for your e-mail concerning the new e-Laws web site (www.ontario.ca/laws).

Detailed legislative history (DLH) tables are no longer being maintained. As of April 10, 2015, there were 3,971 regulation tables and 998 statute tables, which were regularly being updated manually in Word format. In their current format, the DLH tables could not meet the web accessibility requirements set out under the Accessibility . . . [more]

I had the opportunity to gather with fellow “repositorians” in Williamsburg, Virginia, last month. It was the first meeting held to discuss the development and maintenance of institutional repositories for law and legal resources. The event was called, “Law Repositories: Shaping the Future,” and was made possible through a grant from the AALL/Bloomberg Continuing Education Grants Program and the sponsorship of both bepress and the Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA).

Jona Whipple, Digital Resources Librarian, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology, has provided a nice report on the event and I refer . . . [more]

Ontario’s e-laws site has been reformatted to conform with the general provincial presentation standards – without changing the integrity of the content.

The new version of e-Laws has several improvements, including:

• Easier navigation between related documents (e.g. statutes and regulations, consolidated law and source law, current versions and previous versions)
• A cleaner look and feel
• Quick and easy search and browse functions for each law category, (e.g., current consolidated law, source law, repealed and revoked law, and law in force at particular times)
• Simplified “Help” information
• More accessible for more people, including those who

Anyone involved with clearing copyright permissions to allow for open access to digital resources on a personal website or in an institutional repository are probably familiar with the SHERPA/RoMEO database.

SHERPA/RoMEO began as a UK research project developed at the University of Loughborough and is now maintained by the Centre for Research Communications (CRC) at the University of Nottingham. It’s an excellent starting point to find summaries of “permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement.” Policies can be searched for by journal titles or their ISSNs or by a publisher’s name. . . . [more]

The candidates for the forthcoming elections have all – save one – drafted statements or manifestos to garner support.

What these documents frame is what’s on the minds of the candidates as they try and anticipate the issues that most concern the lawyer members of the legal profession who will shortly be voting.

The picture speaks volumes. The size of the text reflects how frequently the concept occurs in all of the candidate statements.

. . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington recently conducted a survey of its staffers to find out what their favorite legal terms or phrases are and why.

Among the results are:

• in custodia legis
• proprio motu
• amicus curiae
• res ipsa loquitur
• estoppel
• force majeure
• Miranda warning
• pettifogger (!)

One employee’s entry was for “in loco parentis”:

In loco parentis [in place of parents]. When I see this term, I see not the Latin word for “place” but the Spanish word for “crazy,” as in “parents make you crazy” or “in parenthood, craziness.” I think of this term whenever my

It’s tempting (and fun!) to dismiss futurists and trend spotters as people who see connections and consequences where none exist. It is equally tempting (and fun!) to assume the role of the clairvoyant because, in the words of Future Babble author Dan Garder, the soothsayer can never lose: “Heads I win, tails you forget we had a bet.” Sometimes, however, it can be quite easy for everyone to see the future.

Last week, many of us were reading and sharing the latest “future of law” warning. The fine folks over at The Economist offered a sobering look at just . . . [more]

Almost exactly a year ago Amy Taylor, Emerging Technologies Librarian and Adjunct Professor at the Pence Law Library, Washington College of Law, wrote about creating a legal ontology for basic 1L legal research instruction. She shares her experience and provides a useful methodology that can guide you if you ever set out to create your own ontology.

Taylor was motivated to start thinking about this when she saw a change in headnote presentation in the then new (Fall 2012) WestlawNext platform. The change, in both style and content, prompted her to ask a couple of good questions: . . . [more]

In the days of electronic access, judicial decisions (and sometimes other court records that have always been public in principle) no longer benefit from practical obscurity. Court have had to wrestle with the consequences of this, including tailoring the way decisions are written to reduce the amount of personal information they contain.

The Canadian Judicial Council has published material on this, as have the federal and state courts in the US.

Recently a US lawyer proposed that databases of court decisions should block search engines from indexing the decisions – a block that is very easy to implement, with a . . . [more]