In light of the upcoming law library conference season (notably including the Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference–CALL 2011–next week), I am taking the liberty of sharing a few reasons why I see conferences as essential to law library staff.

If you have a law library, sending at least one library staff member to a professional conference each year is worth more than the equivalent dollar cost of books.

Let me repeat that in another way: you will get more value from conferences than books.

Radical, I know, and my legal publishing friends are perhaps going to . . . [more]

A message on the American Law Libraries – Private Law Libraries SIS Listserv has alerted me to: (i) A new blog by Law Librarian Jean O’Grady called Dewey B Strategic which has the subtitle of “Risk, value, strategy, libraries, knowledge and the legal profession,” and (ii) a recent intriguing post on this new blog called The Myth and the Madness of Cost Effective Lexis and Westlaw Research Training that raises the challenge (if not impossibility) of trying to teach “cost-effective searching” on Westlaw or Lexis to students or associates given the complexity of how these products are priced. Some examples . . . [more]

Does our museum need a digital licensing agreement policy?

May we post content on flickr, YouTube or Facebook?

What special concerns do Canadian museums face in licensing digital content on a global basis?

What fees should our museum collect for the use of its content on an organization’s Web site?

Who should be part of our negotiating team when licensing digital content?

These are a sampling of the many questions museums face when licensing digital content. Libraries, other cultural heritage institutions as well as law firms, governments and a variety of organizations are all faced with signing various license agreements . . . [more]

I may be imagining things, but the little microphone image that now graces the right side of the Google search box wasn’t there yesterday. Regardless of when it arrived in fact, voice search on Google’s main web platform is welcome. It’s been there for a while on the Google Mobile app, and I’ve found it useful.

Of course, when there’s a full keyboard literally at hand, you may find it’s easier to let your fingers do the talking, but if you’ve got a built-in mic and if you’re not shy about talking to a thing — and a thing that’s . . . [more]

No matter how good a library is, space and economic constraints mean that it simply cannot carry everything a researcher might need. As a result, libraries rely on other libraries to help fill in the gaps in their collection. (This practice has its flaws, most notably being what happens when the other libraries stop carrying the materials you need, but that’s another column.) I run the library of a Vancouver law firm so my “go to” libraries (as you might expect) are the B.C. Courthouse Libraries and the University of British Columbia’s Law Library. However, I also use the . . . [more]

Are you ready to meet the future? Special Libraries Association members have been exploring this question on the Future Ready 365 blog, discussing potential and what it takes to make us as individuals, an association, and the profession as a whole ready for the future. SLA President Cindy Romaine explains that being “future ready” for members, the Association and the profession is supported by four pillars:

• Collaboration to accelerate the availability of useful information
• An adaptable skill set that anticipates and responds to the evolving marketplace
• Alignment with the language and values of the community you serve
• Building a

In DC today, the Law Library of Congress unveiled its Strategic Plan for the next five years. While the entire Plan is interesting, Slaw readers may be particularly interested in the Library’s Social Media strategy:

Strategy 6.

Commit to adopt industry standards and best practices while monitoring emerging trends and cutting-edge practices.
objectives:
1) Update law library data contained on the public website by adding xMl and RDf as available formats for all data and e Pub for published reports by September 30, 2015.
2) Conduct an ongoing review of all law library data contained on the public website

Technical work in the library–largely done behind-the-scenes–is key to ensuring things go smoothly on the client-facing side such as reference and research. One tedious and time-consuming tech task is shelf-reading: checking each book on the shelf to ensure it has been signed back in and is in the correct place. Without doing this on a regular basis (such as once or twice a year), books that have been mis-shelved become impossible to locate.

A library shelf-reading prototype using augmented reality technology–technology that adds to an image of physical space with a computer-generated overlay–is being developed out of Miami University’s Augmented . . . [more]

Here’s the only existing study of the citation rates of open access legal journals v. their toll access counterparts. OA legal articles garner a 58% better citation rate. . . . [more]

CanLII has just announced that now you can get an RSS feed for a caselaw search. The feed will give you “recently added decisions that match your current query.” As you see in the image below, an RSS icon appears above and to the right of your search results:

Click on image to enlarge.

This will be a great boon to researchers, giving their current awareness a serious cost-free boost. But it’s not the only improvement announced today. Searches are now speedier, thanks to improvements in indexing. (I’m informed that since last summer CanLII has been made faster by a . . . [more]

I am very excited about the new offering from the Canadian Association of Law Libraries: the New Law Librarians’ Institute. This is a substantive learning opportunity that I wish I had as a new law librarian.

According to the flyer sent out by the Association:

the New Law Librarians’ Institute is an intensive, week-long, in-person course fostering key competencies in law librarianship, including knowledge and understanding of

• law-making institutions (legislatures, courts, administrative tribunals) and how law is created
• characteristics of, and differences between primary and secondary sources of law
• the principal substantive law publications (legislation, case reports, commentaries) in

I was happy to receive and thumb through the new 4th edition of Daphne Dukelow’s The Dictionary of Canadian Law (Carswell, 2011).

It has been close to 6 years since the previous editon was issued. In that time, Dukelow notes in her preface that one “sea change” in legal language has been a movement to plainer English in legislation and judicial reasons. According to her, the new edition focuses more on pure legal terminology and less on industries and activities regulated by law. Dukelow also notes that Betsy Nuse helped with this new edition (and on a historical note: in . . . [more]