My team has nearly finished with our project rolling out the new WestlawNext Canada platform. So far the response to the new site is positive. WestlawNext Canada has a lovely new feature along side the new all-in-one search box that will be interesting to Slawyers.

Folders

Within WestlawNext Canada a user can create folders to store information like full documents or snips from a WNC content (cases, legislation, texts and annotations as well as journal articles). Sharing a folder with colleagues within the firm is also available.

While I like the concept of sharing folders full of research bits with . . . [more]

Many members of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries will be familiar with Wendy Newman, lecturer and fellow at the University of Toronto’s iSchool. At the CALL/ACBD conference in 2012 she took many of us through an Advocacy 101 workshop which was invaluable. I’m pleased to let everyone know that–starting today!–she is leading everyone through a library advocacy MOOC. Is is free, online, and provides a certificate for those who fully participate and do the work over the next 6 weeks.

From the website:

About this Course

How can we strengthen libraries and librarians in the advancement of knowledge,

I’m in the middle of teaching an introductory course on metadata and while preparing for an upcoming lecture I was reviewing the <indecs> model for e-commerce. It occurred to me that this model might have something to contribute to the interoperability of legal data.

<indecs> is a rather peculiar looking acronym that stands for Interoperability of Data in E-Commerce Systems. It’s a “metadata framework” or reference model similar in intention to the library community’s Functional Requirements for Bibliographical Records (FRBR). FRBR is a conceptual model that provides the cataloguing community with a common frame of . . . [more]

I was surprised recently that I had a hard time finding something. It wasn’t something big or terribly important; it wasn’t a grey area question or an interpretation of legal information. All I want to know is where 9-1-1 calls are answered in Alberta. No one asked me about this, but the Proclamation of the Emergency 911 Act and the publication of the Emergency 911 Grants Regulations made me curious about who exactly would be eligible where a regulation says:

Eligibility criteria

4 Any person owning or operating a public safety answering point is eligible to apply for a grant

Registration is now open for the 2014 Canadian Association of Law Libraries Annual Conference. This year’s conference will take place in Winnipeg, Manitoba at the Fort Garry Hotel from May 25-28.

From the conference webpage:

Winnipeg host city of the 2014 conference

Welcome to the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/L’Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit Conference 2014: The Confluence: Knowledge Meets Inspiration/Au confluent du savoir et de l’inspiration. 

CALL/ACBD currently has approximately 500 members representing a wide variety of law library interests. It provides a forum for the exchange of information and ideas among members, fosters cooperation among Canadian

I recently had the pleasure of addressing the Edmonton Law Office Management Association, a chapter of the Association of Legal Administrators, on the topic law librarians and the services they provide to law firms. Law librarians most often serve lawyers in firms. I think it is pretty important that the business managers of law firms understand what law librarians do.

Here is a PDF of my presentation on Private Law Libraries. . . . [more]

A couple of posts ago Thomas R. Bruce reminded me of the work that he, and a team of others, had done for Cornell’s Legal Information Institute on modelling American legislation. This is an extremely useful project that anyone working on modelling data of any kind would benefit from reviewing.

On the project website you will find project documentation, visual documentation and documentation on data model versions. I returned to the project documentation myself this past weekend and found myself having some difficulty conceptualizing the written report as a whole.

This is partly due to the lack of an . . . [more]

Slaw readers might like to know that Stephen Mason’s journal, Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review, is now open source, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 license.

Readers will remember that Mason’s book Electronic Signatures in Law was reviewed on Slaw not long ago and an excerpt from that book was one of our recent Thursday Thinkpieces.

The Digital Evidence and Electronic Signature Law Review is published by Mason “with the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS), School of Advanced Study, University of London on the SAS Open Journals System.” The journal welcomes submissions for its peer-review . . . [more]

It always makes me happy when I see law library folk reaching out to other communities to explain the work we do. Law library technicians and librarians work in a wide range of settings and take on a lot of different responsibilities depending on the setting and their roles. The library community in Ontario know that January is “SuperConference” month since the Ontario Library Association puts on its annual conference in Toronto at the end of January. Brenda Wong and Karen Sawatzy of Library Technician Dialog blog fame (among other great accomplishments!) made the trek from Saskatchewan and Manitoba to . . . [more]

Robin Cover, Director of Information Services at OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards), has released version 2 of his annotated bibliography on standards for legal citation.

This extensive collection provides a list of references “intended to provide general background to the larger ‘legal citation’ problem.” A Standardized Data/Markup Model to Support Neutral Citation of Court Cases, Legislation, and Regulations includes references from 1995 up to and including mid-January 2014.

In his introductory remarks Cover notes that “As of September 12, 2012, community discussion was underway about the value of a standardization effort to define a . . . [more]

A post earlier this week on In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress in Washington, explained that the Australian federal legislative website ComLaw and the New Zealand legislative website were offering official versions of their laws.

In other words, the sites guarantee that the text that a searcher finds there (usually the PDF version) is a correct statement of the law and is admissible as evidence in court. Traditionally, only the print version of legislation from a government printer is official.

Many people are surprised to find out how few electronic versions of laws . . . [more]

My class at University of Ottawa Law is now over. But the thoughts provoked in class hopefully are not. U of O has, probably more so than other Ontario law schools, a social justice/access to justice bent and I have been critical of the CBA’s recent Reaching Equal Justice Report mostly because it is unrealistic and provides little hope for change. So it was interesting for me to see two presentations by students that focussed on ideas that should have been part of that CBA Report.

One student presented ways in which gamification could be used in legal services. It . . . [more]