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]

The 2008 Law via the Internet conference got things started; October 3, 2011 marked the first meeting specific to the EuroLII initiative. January 2014, the EuroLII Observatory site launched with the aim at answering the question of how European countried promote and improve free access to law.

The site provides a jumping off page to the European Law overview page at WorldLII which helps searchers determine data coverage as well as search.

Some of the new content added to WorldLII January 28, 2014 includes:

Portuguese Constitutional Court Summaries
Portuguese Constitution 2005
Vatican City Laws
Bulgarian Laws
Azerbaijan Laws
Albanian Constitutional . . . [more]

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is accepting nominations for the 2014 Hugh Lawford Award for Excellence in Legal Publishing.

It honours a publisher (whether for-profit or not-for profit, corporate or non-corporate) that has demonstrated excellence by publishing a work, series, website or e-product that makes a significant contribution to legal research and scholarship.

Members as well as non-members of CALL can make nominations.

Nominations can be submitted to Cyndi Murphy, past president of CALL, before February 15, 2014.

The award honours Hugh Lawford (1933-2009), Professor of Law at Queens’ University and the founder of Quicklaw. . . . [more]

My team is consumed with rolling out the new WestlawNext Canada platform to our colleagues. This is a big job that many firms will face, so I thought I would share some things we have done to support this project.

First, as with any change, communication is key. Before we started down the rollout road, we discussed it as a library team, then with our key stakeholders – our Library Committee, and also with the Director of IT. We looked at the timing of this rollout from the perspective of capacity of our human resources, capacity of our technology (hardware . . . [more]

Canadian scientific research is under threat following the federal government making it more difficult to access scientific information and significantly down-sizing or closing federal science libraries. We are seeing a drastic reduction in accessibility to information and related literature research services needed by the Canadian scientific community, far exceeding library maintenance and restructuring that would typically be done to keep up with changing information, technology and standards.

Today CBC News reports that the main Health Canada science library has been closed. According to the news report, the closure was justified by a drop in in-house staff use of the . . . [more]