By this point in the term, our advanced legal research and writing class has covered all the favourite usual suspects: research plans, research records and journals, secondary research using legal and library databases, federal legislative research, provincial legislative research, primary research using the big three, UK research, US research, and so on. We’re saving EU legal research for next week.

But this week we took a small detour and looked at the use of social media as a resource for legal research. For instance, we examined the strategic use of Twitter as a legal research source, mainly for secondary information . . . [more]

A note about the Quicklaw NetLetters Collection reminded me recently about scope notes. Quicklaw is focusing on NetLettrs that are most widely used by their customers and discontinuing some others. Like most collections that are discontinued, the archive of the discontinued titles will remain. LexisNexis Quicklaw has committed to helping users identify archival content:

The discontinued NetLetters will remain on Quicklaw as archive sources with the archival indicator (*) appearing beside the source name.

Understanding when database coverage starts and the currency of a collection is an important element in comprehensive legal research. Each research tool looks after currency in . . . [more]

Welcome Legal Sourcery from the Law Society of Saskatchewan Library to the law blog scene. They are posting several times a week on ” legal research tricks, interesting legal research news and what’s happening at the Library.”

Today they explain the blog name:

Putting our heads together and thinking creatively, we took a vote and decided to call this blog Legal Sourcery. Legal Sourcery is the expertise and capability we bring to legal research. It represents the multitude of legal resources we provide and the skills we use to wade through these resources.

So far they have pointed out interesting . . . [more]

Google now lets you search a news archive that consists exclusively, it seems, of newspaper archives, digital or scanned, provided they aren’t held behind a paywall. This may have been available before now, but I’ve only become aware of it today. And I have to say that for anyone seeking to inquire into the last hundred years or so, this is a treasure trove. Google doesn’t say how many newspapers are in the database, but I count something like 120 beginning with “A” alone (among which is a plentiful supply of Canadian publications). For each publication, you’re told how many . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) has posted the list of keynote speakers and concurrent sessions at its upcoming annual conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Among the keynote speakers are:

• Mitch Kowalski, author of Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century on “From Law Librarian to Integrated KM Professional – The Future’s So Bright You’ve Got to Wear Shades!”
• Justice Murray Sinclair on “Mandate, methods and results of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission”
• Greg Lambert of 3 Geeks and a Law Blog fame

The conference takes place May25-28, 2014 under the theme of “The Confluence: Knowledge Meets Inspiration/Au . . . [more]

This week is the 25th anniversary of the creation of the Internet a.k.a. the World Wide Web. Yesterday Google shared a message from the Internet’s Web’s inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In March 1989 he shared a proposal for “a ‘web’ of notes with links between them” or a non-linear system using “hypertext” which I remember (as someone who used the precursors of the Internet) as a hot topic at the time.

Berners-Lee takes the opportunity to ask some important questions in urging us to keep the Internet open and free:

So today is a day to celebrate. But it’s also

. . . [more]

I am excited about the pre-conference workshop coming up in Winnipeg in May as part of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference. This will have interest wider than Association members, so please pass the word.

We are fortunate to be having Tim Knight and Sarah Sutherland present this workshop that will provide us with some initial groundwork in areas such as linked data, the semantic web and open data.

Description is below and there is more information on the CALL/ACBD website, along with registration information: http://www.callacbd.ca/en/content/pre-conference-workshop

I have already signed up and hope to see you there!

Pre-Conference Workshop 

. . . [more]

The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) was founded 20 years ago and has become a popular place for legal academics to share their research. The SSRN objective is “to provide rapid worldwide distribution of research to authors and their readers and to facilitate communication among them at the lowest possible cost.” The success of their efforts sees SSRN currently listed by the Ranking Web of Repositories site as second in the world.

So it’s not surprising that the SSRN download count has fast become a valued measure of an author’s readership and the potential impact he or she might . . . [more]

When the Accessibility Standards Advisory Council/Standards Development Committee was formed in 2013, one of its first orders of business was to review the Customer Service Standard as required under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, 2005 (AODA). The AODA requires that each accessibility standard be reviewed five years after it becomes law to determine whether the standard is working as intended and to allow for adjustments to be made as required. The council has proposed several changes to the Customer Service Standard and is asking interested stakeholders for feedback.

Google Alerts are emails generated by Google when it finds new results. Alerts have mentioned on Slaw including an interesting article by Omar which offered an alternative service that uses a desktop or mobile device download – Mention.

Despite reports of concern about the continuing functionality of Google Alerts, I have continued to use the service for select monitoring with success. Google Alerts continues to be generally reliable and it was recently used by a team member and I to watch for notice of a newspaper article. There is an interesting story about our watches that may be relevant to . . . [more]

A few weeks ago I was fortunate to see Gordon Ross speak on a panel talking about the social intranet and KM for legal knowledge management practitioners in the public sector. Ross is a partner with the Vancouver-based consulting firm Open Road and the Vice President responsible for strategy and professional services for their social intranet platform ThoughtFarmer. He has written a blog post outlining his thoughts from that talk: How Social Intranets can Support Legal Knowledge Management.

While the post is quite a theoretical discussion, pointing to thinking by Max Boisot in his 1998 book Knowledge Assets around . . . [more]

Thanks to the work of Corporate Records & Archives and the Great Library, the Law Society of Upper Canada has made the minutes and transcripts of Convocation available online as a searchable and browsable database. According to LSUC Archivist Paul Leatherdale, “The site contains the public versions of the Minutes of Convocation from April 1988 to the present, and the public Transcripts of Convocation from September 1991 to the present.” . . . [more]