Law students or young lawyers sometimes struggle when they are faced with a complex research problem. Where do they start?

At the root of this is the need to think strategically about the problem to identify what sort of problem it is and how to best break it down into manageable pieces.

In retrospect, I realize that I in fact don’t necessarily address this challenge head on in my book, aside from citing some of the suggestions on how to analyze the facts and the law made by Maureen Fitzgerald in her Legal Problem Solving – Reasoning, Research & . . . [more]

Law library consultant Nina Platt is the editor of the new PinHawk News free daily email alert service for law librarians, the Librarian News Digest.

From the inaugural issue:

Welcome to the first issue of the daily Librarian News Digest, a free digest of news from publications and blogs on the internet that focus on topics of importance to librarians. As editor of Librarian News Digest, my goal is to track pertinent news and select what’s most important to you as a librarian. Expect to see news and ideas that help you manage, acquire, organize, research, and market your

There’s a new Columbia research study that looks at our ever growing reliance on search engines for memory recall. Not a ton of surprises here. Yes, we’ve become more reliant, especially for certain types of information. We’re also becoming better at remembering the successful search strategies that led us to obtaining certain facts. In some cases, our memory of the search strategy is better than our recall of the trivia itself.

Oh, and three cheers for Columbia for including an embed code within their video player! So I can show you this:

. . . [more]

Thank you for the kind welcome Simon. I’ve just returned fresh from a research leave where amongst other things I investigated the challenges and possibilities around creating a Canadian subject based research tool that does for Canadian Journals what the wonderful Current Index to Legal Periodicals does for US journals. I hope to talk a bit more about this project in a future entry.

In the meantime, along with many SLAW readers and contributors I have been missing the excellent Current Law Journal Content service offered by the Washington and Lee Law Lbrary. Simon has recently written about CLJC here . . . [more]

A few months ago on SLAW I mentioned the ebook initiative by LexisNexis Canada for three of their court rules / legislative services.

They have now added a fourth title, being the Canadian Federal Courts Practice 2012 (Hughes, Renaud and Horne).

The books are published in epub format and can be read in a variety of readers. Purchasers of the print version get the ebook version included as part of their purchase.

Since lawyers seem to increasingly be using the iPad and other larger screen tablet devices, I think it is useful that publishers are experimenting with ebook versions of . . . [more]

It appears that SLAW has not yet mentioned what appears to be a very useful and reasonably priced current awareness and case law service in Manitoba: Cite-on-Site Publications.

The site is run by Manitoba lawyer Brad Brooks and offers current awareness newsletters with case law summaries for the following 5 topics of Manitoba law: civil, criminal, family, first nations and municipal. Annual pricing seems extremely reasonable, with a range from $20 per year for the municipal service and $100 per year for the First Nations service, with the other services falling in between those ranges. Sample newsletters are provide . . . [more]

With a hat tip to my colleague Ben Keen, who spotted the story below on the Torstar website.

“Internet Archive Canada, a small non-profit company, fired 35 of its 47 employees on Wednesday due to a massive drop in donations. Most will leave Aug. 12 unless a white knight appears soon”.

It’s difficult to find out exactly what the issue is – the website offers no explanation.

The story ends:

“The loss will be felt by more than those who will be out of work.”

Here they all are – they’ve made a major contribution in digitizing Canada’s . . . [more]

Fellow law library consultant Kathie Sullivan and I have been working together to track new collaboration tools and document the challenges that groups face in using them. New project management platforms such as Basecamp, collaborative mindmapping, and wireframe/mockup tools like Mockingbird and Balsamiq join familiar tools like wikis and Google Docs to make teamwork easier, regardless of where everyone is located. We are specifically interested in how these might be used in library and legal settings.

We are building a wiki that will document the tools and related stories (still to be made public), and will be speaking at two . . . [more]

The July 9 issue of the Canada Gazette was published and it includes the second set of proposed regulations under Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL). These are the Governor in Council regulations from Industry Canada, not to be confused with the CRTC regulations that were pre-published last week for consultation.

You can read the pre-publication in the Gazette here:

The consultation period for these proposed regulations is 60 days. . . . [more]

The Library of Parliament has released a document outlining the current and emerging issues that will face the new Canadian Parliament elected on May 2, 2011.

William Young, Parliamentary Librarian, explains:

“The pages that follow illustrate the kind of work we can do for you: 27 concise and easy-to-read briefings on subjects ranging from cybercrime to the impact of demographic changes on public policy. The issues are presented in summary form and represent just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to our subject-matter expertise (…)”

“The sheer volume of information presented at the beginning of a new Parliament

The Law Foundation of British Columbia has announced a new fund of $100,000 per year to support legal research in BC.

The fund will offer $100,000 annually, with a maximum of $20,000 allocated per project. The purpose of the initiative is to support projects that “advance the knowledge of law, social policy, and the administration of justice”; and also to encourage projects that “reflect the diversity of British Columbia.”

Letters of intent must be received by Sept. 23, 2011, and should be discussed with program director Michael Seaborn prior to submission.

(HT: BC Law Watch Blog) . . . [more]

Set out below is one technique I use to make doing legal research on the iPad easier. If readers have other suggestions, I would welcome comments.

Rather than create Safari browser “Bookmarks” on my iPad, I instead found it more useful to use the option of “Add to Home Page.”

What I have therefore done was this: I use a customized HTML “home page” at work and on my home laptop that is organized into 6 “boxes” providing links (and password information) to web resources covering such things as reference tools, books, publishers, journals, research databases, news, case law, precedents . . . [more]