One of my favourite tasks as a firm librarian is to provide training (formal) and mentoring (informal) to articling students on gathering materials to answer legal research problems. Another favourite task is identifying trends (industry trends, process trends, changes in the use of language, emerging technologies) that will affect legal practice at my firm. I have noticed some interesting crossover lately.

• The Legal Education Society of Alberta is hosting an Advanced Legal Research and Writing seminar on December 3 in Calgary and they recently offered a basic Legal Research session
• A DVD on Advanced Legal Research by Bonnie Fish is

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) in the United Kingdom, the people who bring us the authoritative and official Law Reports, have their very own YouTube video channel.

Videos include interviews with the Law Report editors, a history of the ICLR, a video on the process of how a case goes from trial to official report, and a brief introduction to case law research using both online databases and hard copy reference works.

And check out their wonderfully produced video A Tale of Two Citations:

“This short featurette featuring two barristers. One of them serenely competent

A couple of releases from Thomson-West and Reed Elsevier that may interest Slaw readers.

The first radical search innovation in a while from Dayton is the use of semantic search methodology to enrich searching for prior patent art. Here is a slide show advert – which sadly doesn’t explain how it all works. And Kindles are coming to West’s monograph series. . . . [more]

Foreign ownership

In the early days of online legal research, when everything was uncertain, governments and law societies were legitimately concerned about the prospect of foreign ownership of Canadian legal information. The fear was that the legal heritage of Canada would fall into the hands of “non Canadians”, a prospect viewed with horror in many circles. While no one at that time really could foresee the future of online legal research in Canada, in retrospect, everyone should have expected that the natural “Canadian” predisposition to reconcile differences would produce a solution that would reflect everyone’s interest, offend almost no one, . . . [more]

I recently wrote that email lists still exist. But perhaps when it comes to living relics the true coelacanth as far as the internet is concerned is Usenet. Begun in 1979, Usenet was a collection of discussion groups — or, newsgroups, as they were known — that, as Wikipedia says, “can be superficially regarded as a hybrid between e-mail and web forums” but possessing considerable technological sophistication.

Yes, Usenet lives — after a fashion. In 2001 Google acquired the 700 million posts in order to preserve the archive. Trouble was, it couldn’t be searched properly. Until today, that is. . . . [more]

Email lists still exist.

One of the first — if not the first — social media on the internet, they’re still enjoyed by people who like to find their information in their inbox. Though perhaps their number is not what it was when Eric J. Heels compiled his 1996 catalog of Law-related Resources on the Internet.

The International Law Librarians List is of interest because, unlike many, it has a publicly accessible and searchable web archive, which makes it a potentially valuable research tool, of course, and also a source of interesting information if you’re just browsing.

For . . . [more]

I’ve learned from Hughes-Jehan Vibert that his JurisPedia project has recently won the 2009 Dieter Meurer Prize for Legal Informatics [in German]. We talked about JurisPedia a couple of years ago here on Slaw. And last year Simon Chester posted about the 2008 winner, Case Matrix.

JurisPedia’s new front page operates as a search engine, using Google’s Custom Search, with filters available that let you focus your search on any one of 70 jurisdictions around the world. You can, as well, search the wiki that is the growing JurisPedia encyclopedia.

Hughes-Jehan, who studied at UQAM and is now a . . . [more]

Thanks to a tweet by Stephane Cottin (@cottinstef), I’ve found a catalogue of resources on legal informatics — “legal information systems. . . a research area within the disciplines of information science and computer science.” Legal Information Systems & Legal Informatics Resources by Robert Richards contains a hoard of links and references to material that is mostly beyond my ability to understand. But for those of you trained in information science, this should be a useful resource.

Despite my relative ignorance, I’ve found that some of what Richards offers is stimulating and informative even for me. For example, . . . [more]

The National Archives and Records Administration of the United States and Footnote.com yesterday announced the release of the Internet’s largest Interactive Holocaust Collection with hundreds of thousands of records, including:

• The Ardelia Hall Collection of records relating to the Nazi looting of Jewish possessions, including looted art
• Concentration camp registers and documents from Dachau, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, and Flossenburg
• Captured German records including deportation and death lists from concentration camps
• Nuremberg War Crimes Trial proceedings

Access to the collection will be available for free on Footnote.com through the month of October.

On the matter of looted art, there are a number . . . [more]

The Australian government has launched data.australia.gov.au as the new home of Australian government public information datasets. There are more than 165 sets arranged into 30 or so categories, covering such topics as culture, planning, environment and education. The invitation on the site is to “[mash]-up the data to create something new and exciting!”. The datasets are in various formats — XML, XLS, ESRI Shapefiles, CSV, etc. — each accompanied by basic metadata.

The United States federal government offers an increasing number of federal datasets free via Data.gov.

Partly in response to the U.S. initiative, . . . [more]

The debate in legal publishing circles continues with regard to retro case law builds. Does anyone really need them? If so, which ones and why? Do any of retro builds in the planning or development stages have any real value to the legal researcher?

Unreported court cases that pre-date 1970. Boxes and boxes of older full text court cases that were not reported in print law report series still haunt some court houses and some legal publishers. What should be done with them? Tens of thousands of these cases exist in hardcopy and rest heavy on the consciences of those . . . [more]

A patron asks you to find (and update) a Canadian federal private Act. How do you do it?

The legal research literature lacks detail on the process, so I thought I would test the following approach with SLAW readers and ask if there is a better way. I also provide links to some additional resources on researching federal private Acts.

In the following example, I have (arbitrarily) picked the Stanmount Pipe Line Company (which would appear to no longer exist – at least based on Google searches; as such, it is not a very realistic example, but I needed . . . [more]