Back in 2009, I did a quick check on link rot in Canadian decisions on CanLII. Today I repeated my quick investigation of link rot in Canadian judicial decisions. To gather decisions with URLs I simply searched for the text “http://” in CanLII. I limited my results for 2012 decisions, and sorted by date.

There were 156 court decisions in 2012 that referenced websites by specific URL. I looked at 10 decisions – all of which were decided between December 19 and 31, 2012. There were 4 broken hyperlinks. One reference was missing the colon in “http://”, and once that . . . [more]

The May 2013 issue of the AALL Spectrum, the monthly publication of the Association of American Law Libraries, is devoted to law library architecture south of the border. Nice pix.

From the presentation:

The 13th annual architecture series features two new buildings and four remodels/renovations from two public law libraries, one law firm, and three academic libraries. Both new buildings aim to achieve Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design certifications. In Baltimore, the library transitioned from occupying two floors to being spread over six, and in Denver, the new library bridges print and electronic.

In Seattle, the law firm

Very shortly, at 7 pm ET, a presentation on Orphan Works and Digital Libraries will be live-streamed. The stream will be available at http://tfisher.org/hls1x-copyright.html.

For later viewing, the presentation and discussion will be archived in about a week at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/tfisher/CopyrightX_Events_2013.htm.

The speakers are top-notch: Brewster Kahle, John Palfrey, and Robert Darnton. It seems likely their discussion will be set in the context of the Digital Public Library of America, which launched last week, and with which all are connected. Copyright themes likely will focus on US law.

More information on the DPLA is . . . [more]

Earlier this month, Kirk Makin of the Globe and Mail scooped an announcement of a major set of Reports on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters, an inititaitive that started with the Chief Justice’s challenge to the Canadian Bar Association last summer.

The four Reports from Working Groups chaired by Justice Thomas Cromwell were officially released this morning:
Backgrounder
Report of the Court Processes Simplification Working Group
Report of the Access to Legal Services Working Group
Report of the Prevention, Triage and Referral Working Group
Report of the Family Justice Working Group

And a background literature review: Family . . . [more]

Legal researchers and law librarians have long worried about the lack of a coherent strategy in Canada to ensure the digital preservation and archiving of legal and governmental information. A case in point is Louis Mirando’s Slaw.ca post of Feb. 15th , 2013 on Library Budgets and Priorities: A New Year and a New Normal:

(…) when will we begin an organized, comprehensive preservation/digitization project for our historical law collections? Preservation must procede hand-in-hand with digital access. The Internet Archive and Hathi Trust (for monographs), and JSTOR and Ontario’s Scholars Portal (for journals – unfortunately not open-access) are a start,

I had to visit the Provincial Archives of Alberta today. I was looking for an Order of the Planning Board from 1981. Why? Because there was a reference to the document on the title for some land.

This is not the first trip I have made to the Archives. I have visted the archives to find information for clients a number of times. Water records, repair costs for infrastructure, lists of names, my great grandfather’s homestead record (wait, that was for me, not my law firm), copies of Alberta Orders in Council (with the appendices), copies of Ministerial Orders, and . . . [more]

Law reform commission reports can be great sources for legal research. Many of the reports provide historical background and you can often find comparative information about how other jurisdictions have responded to an issue.

The past few weeks have a very busy time for law reform commissions. A sampling of reports:

• New Zealand Law Commission Report on Regulation of the Media: the review was prompted by concern about the disparities in the legal and ethical standards that apply to news as a result of the emergence of new web-based publishers and the convergence of mainstream print and broadcast media

B.C. is the home of innovation when it comes to law in this country, moving ahead with new ideas and new ways of providing its citizens with access to justice. We’ve talked about the foray into online dispute resolution and about the Ministry of Justice two-part White Paper on Justice Reform, to mention only two developments. And just yesterday Chief Justice Robert Bauman made a public statement predicting dire things for law and lawyers if significant changes aren’t made and made quickly, something rare for a sitting judge.

As significant is a quiet development we’ve not yet noticed on . . . [more]

A not-new UK law was given regulatory effect this week and enables the British Library to archive the .uk web, just as it already receives legal deposit of UK print materials. The import of the new regulatory changes in effect April 6 is, I gather, that the archive can built by automated crawl, rather by permission for page-by-page grabs.

As the British Library explains, legal deposit of UK publications to identified libraries is, of course, a practice of long standing. The new regulations extend and entrench the program for UK digital materials:

Legal deposit has existed in English law

I have never had the opportunity to practice my craft in a law school library having only worked as a law librarian in private firms. By the time I meet law students, they have had the benefit of learning about legal research in the academic setting. Though legal research practice in a law firm setting may operate differently than in academia, the principles of legal research are the same. Law firm librarians enjoy the fruits of the labour that takes place in law school libraries.

Recent news from the U of A Law Library was unexpected.

We regret to announce

Windsor Yearbook of Access to Justice
Call for Papers on Access to Knowledge

We invite submissions dealing with social justice in access to knowledge in the broadest sense. Without
limiting the scope of the subject-matter and its treatment, we would especially welcome timely and
topical papers that focus on access to knowledge and its intersection with development issues, cultural
rights, intellectual property rights, international human rights, international trade, open access publishing,
the A2K movement or any combination thereof. Deadline for submissions is MAY 31, 2013

Articles, case/legislation comments and notes, book reviews, or other manuscripts will be considered
for review. . . . [more]

In the April 20123 issue of Spectrum, the American Association of Law Libraries’ monthly magazine, I read the article “Law Firm Changes Offer Opportunities for Libraries” by Sarah Sutherland with great interest. Sutherland is Manager of Library Services at McMillan LLP in Vancouver and currently Vice-President of the Vancouver Association of Law Libraries.

In this article, Sutherland closes the loop on a couple of key legal industry ideas:

1. “Certain aspects of the practice of law are changing”
   

   …the movement toward KM, alternative billing, and initiatives to automate some aspects of legal practice is a movement away