Hello Folks

I just wanted to let everyone know about an interesting phenomenon
occurring on WestlaweCarswell over the past couple of days.

In preparing our “Researching an Essay” session for law students,
my colleague Cathy and I noticed yesterday that when using
the ICLL interface, there is some trouble with the Table of Subject Headings.

This Table actually exists on one of Westlaw’s outside webpages
(not password protected.)
http://www.westlawecarswell.com/icll/index.asp

Yesterday, when I tried to search this Table of Subject Headings
page or to click on any of the alphabet along the top of the page,
I was given a “Page . . . [more]

The folks at William S. Hein have launched a new blog talking about their popular web-based service HeinOnline. The blog is called, appropriately enough, HeinOnline Weblog, and can be found at http://heinonline.blogspot.com/.

Hein have been very good at sending out updates to customers via email; however, for new subscribers or non-subscribers, there is no access to previous messages. Now they seem to be posting these notes to this blog for everyone, which will be helpful. Also, subscribers won’t have to save up past messages. . . . [more]

Noticed for the first time… only six months or so late:

The New York Times introduced an online feature some six months or more ago whereby if you double-click on any word a window pops up to offer you various reference works’ take on the word. Thus, from an article in today’s Times, a double-click on “nursing” (you must be in the article and not just on the front page of the site) gives a dictionary definition and one from a medical dictionary as well. “Florida” gives a dictionary entry, and entries from the NYT Guide . . . [more]

Although law-related (print) monographs in Canada are far from dead, perhaps we are at a tipping point now on the availability of law-related e-books. I recently made (an extremely) rough count of the number of e-books available through each of Quicklaw, WestlaweCARSWELL and Canada Law Book ((For this study, I am not considering the numerous “black binders” from CCH as “monographs”, although those binders are available online through CCH Online)).

I counted a total of 85 e-books, many of them being major Canadian legal treatises. Examples of an e-book from each of these vendors (where there are also print equivalents) . . . [more]

Further to my earlier rant and call to arms for Canadian law libraries to digitize historical Canadian federal and provincial legislation: Colleague and SLAW reader Neal Ferguson points out that the Revised Statutes of Canada, R.S.C. 1970, are actually available in very large files on the Internet Archive, available here. . . . [more]

At times lawyers need to learn a little medicine, and the NCBI Resource Locator might help. First of all, NCBI stands for the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information, which is part of the National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine, and the institution that manages PubMed, the likely the destination for a legal researcher.

PubMed has a fantastic search page, offering you all manner of ways of focusing your search into the medical literature. As well, there are tutorials to help you figure out how to do what you want.

Which brings us to the . . . [more]

Maybe this will help us all. TALL has started a Quicklaw tips wiki. Considering the recent posts about the level of service provided by publishers, and the availability of one jurisdiction’s law in another, I wonder if I’m alone in wondering why it remains so difficult to find a copy of Donoghue v Stevenson in QL. We all know about the case, and some of the excellent resources available online, and in video. However, as a prelude to our annual eFair, where we are asking students to complete their prize ballots by finding information related to the . . . [more]

House of Butter had a posting on Wednesday conveying news from the University of Notre Dame Australia blog here that access to the Quicklaw database was no longer to be available to clients outside of Canada. Access to the materials was to continue to be available through LexisNexisAU and Lexis.com.

I assume the reference is to old Quicklaw.

I have been curious to know, at a relatively technical level if possible, how all of the various LexisNexises will be designed to interact with one another (if at all) and with Lexis.com (probably not). When the new Quicklaw was unveiled, it . . . [more]

I am getting old (and careless). I thought I knew most if not all of the law journals that were available online. In a recent post, I jokingly raised the need for Canada Law Book (CLB) to put its journals online. I have since found out that in fact a number of their journals are or will be online online. To wit:

Canadian Business Law Journal – on HeinOnline (Vols. 1-40: 1975-2004) and soon to also likely be available through CLB.

Criminal Law Quarterly – on CLB’s Criminal Spectrum product

Other CLB journal titles will also be digitized, likely soon, . . . [more]