Summer has finally arrived. The on purpose plantings have finally overtaken the weeds and the chickens are big enough that they don’t have to be chased indoors at night. These are signs that it is past time to execute the big summer project.

The big summer project this year is adding to the firm archives. Part of the library portfolio at my firm is collecting, describing, and housing the firm archives. We had a consultant work up a plan for archival description, set up a holdings list, and start the archives collection a couple of years ago. We have a . . . [more]

Today’s conclusion of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) 2012-2013 session calendar— after a burst of some high-profile opinions—is an opportune occasion for a reminder of the fantastic resource that is SCOTUSblog. The site’s been around since the relatively early days of blogs—2002—and it has been discussed or referenced on this blog a few times. Indeed, a Google search for “SCOTUS” returns SCOTUSblog before it does the home for SCOTUS itself:

SCOTUSblog can be seen as a superb example of an excellent public resource supported by commercial partners, including a legal publisher. It started small and rather . . . [more]

Actually, the big news, of course, is that the U.S. Library of Congress has integrated its web archives into its main web search function. For quite some time now, LOC has been archiving significant websites, of which Slaw is one. At the moment there are 940 such sites being archived. Though archiving began in 2008, the archives of Slaw contain some posts reaching back to its inception in 2005 but extend only up to 2010, because the archiving process lags by a few years. (As a digital archivist at LOC explained to me by email, “We do have an . . . [more]

Yesterday the Digital Public Library of America launched a partnership with HathiTrust, marrying the preservation mission of one with the access strengths of the other. The partnership will have the DPLA—itself only a couple of months post-launch—employ HathiTrust’s metadata to improve discoverability of and access to that content in HathiTrust that is in the public domain or otherwise freely available. HathiTrust’s own discovery and access platform will continue to develop as well. As has been noted previously here and elsewhere, HathiTrust preserves a fair amount of content useful for legal research.

Details of the partnership are in yesterday’s . . . [more]

I used to have a working VHS player and a copy of the movie Speed. Often a scene from the movie will pop into my (overactive?) mind when I am looking for legislation from my desk:

01:03:38 – Jack, what did he say?
01:03:42 – What’s the matter?
01:03:49 – There’s a gap in the freeway. – What?
01:03:53 – What do you mean? – How big is a gap?
01:03:56 – 50 feet. A couple of miles ahead.

I remember when looking for legislation at my desk was rarely a reasonable option. Today, if I can’t browse my . . . [more]

I occasionally like to draw attention to the wealth of information that can be found in law commission reports.

When I help people with research or do a training session, I like to remind them that law reform bodies often deal with important public policy issues that are not on the government agenda but may nevertheless require critical analysis and potential reform. And judges who often need to address difficult or novel legal issues do refer to law reform publications in their judgments [a simple caselaw search in CanLII for the expression “law reform commission” produces close to 1700 . . . [more]

The Spectator, which bills itself as “the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language,” has put online its archives, dating back to its inception in 1828. The Spectator is a relatively small-circulation, conservative-oriented publication in the United Kingdom.

This is not strictly a law-related matter, of course; but general research sources are worth noting and bookmarking for a possible future legal use when they are of this historical depth. And from a brief trial run I can say that it seems that the magazine has done the archiving very well indeed, with text items digitized and also . . . [more]

Last week Steve Matthews highlighted the newley redesigned Best Guide to Canadian Legal Research. Congratulations to Catherine Best for providing a great content to the legal community and providing it in a lovely package. I have been a gushing fan of this site for years.

Every year at the Head Start program in Edmonton, we highlight the Suggested Textbooks portion of the site. With the recent redesign, I hope that we will also discuss the portion of the site called Making Good Choices: Canadian Electronic Research Sources.

I appreciate the time an effort that Catherine has put into . . . [more]

Many Slaw readers will be familiar with the guides and resources made available at Catherine Best‘s LegalResearch.org. Over the past 15 years, Catherine has invested thousands of hours into this project, making it one of the most respected (and fluid) resources for introducing legal research here in Canada. “Best’s Guide to Canadian Legal Research” has helped to introduce an entire generation of researchers to the topic. I would also consider it to be one of our earliest examples of a digital guide published entirely over the web.

So I’m very proud to announce the re-launch of this . . . [more]

Back in March I lamented, along with many others, the announcement that Google Reader is being discontinued. As I wrote, I have been exploring the use of Outlook for RSS. I also said that I dislike it, and my opinion has not changed. My team uses RSS to selectively gather information from specific feeds that we then pass along to others. We have found a replacement for Google Reader and a new method for sharing that Slawyers may be interested in.

Jennifer Merchant, one of the fantastic library team members at the Field Law Libraries, was tasked with . . . [more]

The confusion of the names of cases, what used to be called their “styles of cause”, is distressingly common. There is a recent decision of the British Columbia Court of Appeal called by CanLII, Poole v. Lombard General Insurance Company of Canada, 2012 BCCA 434, called by the D.L.R., Danicek v. Alexander Holburn Beaudin & Lang, 356 D.L.R. (4th) 710. Not one party is common to both reports of the case. CanLII notes the “Related Decisions” as (i) Court of Appeal, Danicek v. Poole, 2012 BCCA 65 (CanLII) – 2012-02-09, and (ii) Supreme Court of British Columbia, . . . [more]

Division 27 of Part 4 of the federal Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act (legislation to implement Budget 2012 measures), which received royal assent on June 29, 2012, will repeal section 13 of the Statutory Instruments Act on April 1, 2014, and remove the requirement to deliver and sell printed copies of the Canada Gazette.