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]

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]

I’m on for a little rant today but this is significant topic, courtesy of one of my LRW students conducting some research on the Nadon appointment to the SCC (on the plus side this does drive home the point I continually try to make that you cannot exclusively rely on one source or the web all the time). Interestingly, I thought we were getting rid of all the print government publications because the Interwebs are so much more efficient and effective? Well try and find SC 2013, c 40 which received Royal Assent on December 12, 2013, over a month . . . [more]

There are some recent decisions of the Federal Court that acknowledge the necessity of using online legal research sources and seem positioned to allow law firms to charge reasonable disbursements for them. The basis for having computer research costs allowed appears to be the ability to justify both the amount claimed, how it is calculated and the relevance and necessity of the research performed.

The key to costs happiness will lie in how legal researchers keep track of their work. A researcher in a costs argument will have to explain that the disbursements for billed research on Westlaw or Quicklaw . . . [more]

Join me in welcoming the debut of Journal of Open Access to Law, or JOAL. A post on the B-SCREEDS blog at the Legal Information Institute announced the launch:

I’m proud to announce the debut of the Journal of Open Access to Law, a multidisciplinary journal that will publish the work that its title suggests: research related to legal information that is made openly available on the Internet.

Simon Fodden wrote about the new peer-reviewed journal in June, posting about the call for papers for the first issue.

That issue is now available and, true to its subject, is . . . [more]

We have a pretty darn fantastic research training program at my shop. We offer learning objective based source training and give refresher training at lawyers desks, in groups, as feature items on meeting agendas, and we also share what we know via blogs, email bulletins and on our Intranet in both text and multimedia. We keep our skills sharp by attending vendor delivered training and by doing legal research daily.

Even with this highly programmed scenario we learn search quirks by initially not getting things quite right and then figuring out why things did not work as expected. Here is . . . [more]

The Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. has published a new comparative report on the handling and adjudication of sexual offenses in the military.

The report examines how the military justice systems of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel and the United Kingdom deal with alleged sexual offending by service members.

The Library occasionally publishes reports that compare the laws on a given theme in a number of countries.

Earlier comparative law reports from the Law Library of Congress have covered topics such as:

• Bioethics
• Campaign Finance
• Children’s Rights
• Constitutional Provisions on Women’s Equality
• Education of Non-Native Language Speaking

Some exciting news today for fellow Hansard geeks:

https://twitter.com/LoPInformation/status/403177276843757568

The full digitized historical federal Hansard, Senate and House of Commons, is now available online, browsable and searchable. Canadiana.org’s Historical Debates of the Parliament of Canada portal was launched today: http://parl.canadiana.ca/

The project has been in development for some time. It complements the content that has been available on parl.gc.ca (House: 1994 onward; Senate: 1996 onward), to create a full collection of digital federal Hansard.

https://twitter.com/LoPInformation/status/402900381400719360

Full details about the portal and the search functions are here: http://parl.canadiana.ca/support/about. . . . [more]

Yesterday Google Scholar Blog announced the launch of Google Scholar Library, a feature that allows a user to:

. . . save articles right from the search page, organize them by topic, and use the power of Scholar’s full-text search to quickly find just the one you want – at any time and from anywhere . . .

You’re able to use “labels” to organize the material you’ve saved to your library.

A user must log in to Google and via this link activate the Library feature.

This is clearly of potential benefit to the profession, because Scholar’s database includes . . . [more]

I wrote last month on a recent conference, The Future of Law School. The backchannel and later discussion was considerable, as I’ve noted, and several others wrote about the rich panel presentations and their own ideas about the future of law school. Weeks later, I still find myself pondering ideas from it often. I’m thinking lately about the place of the law school and its connection—in Canada—to the university and its library.

The focus of the conference was where law school curricula are, should be, or could be headed. Participants and presenters discussed various factors that do or might drive . . . [more]

The deadline for program submissions for the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference to be held in Winnipeg, Manitoba, May 25-28, 2014 has been extended to November 1st (this Friday). Submissions can be made by anyone; you do not have to be a member. If you have an idea but have been wondering if you should submit, now is your chance!

Details and links below.

2014 Annual CALL/ACBD Conference

CALL FOR PROGRAM SUBMISSIONS DEADLINE EXTENDED: November 1st, 2013

Submissions for the 2014 Annual CALL/ACBD Conference program are open! The conference is an exciting opportunity to explore and learn about emerging