This year the Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL/ACBD) presented its annual award for legal publishers at its conference in May to Québec-based online vendor SOQUIJ. One highlight that stuck out in my mind is that SOQUIJ is now making some of the Québec case law available translated into English. From the SOQUIJ website:

Parmi les raisons pour lesquelles SOQUIJ a été choisie, on trouve notre forte présence sur Internet, la traduction récente de certains jugements en anglais, Le Citateur et l’appui important que nous avons reçu de nos clients.

Here on the east coast we are in the throes of a provincial election campaign with the big day coming on June 13th. Here are some resources if you are interested in looking into it. No reports of rum bribes as of yet, however one of the candidates was buying hot dogs outside of the SUB yesterday….

NS Election Info

Parties

(in alphabetical order)

Media

I stumbled upon this post and I’ve been twisting my head back and forth trying to absorb and understand this. I haven’t had much time to really sort it out but something tells me it’s worth knowing about. While I’m putting this on my personal back-burner, maybe this speaks to someone more immediately and maybe someone will make it clearer to me before I start digging.

Eric Lease Morgan writes:

SRW/U is used for searching indexes (, and to some degree databases as well). It is possible to use it to search just about any list of stuff you have.

Why didn’t I know I could do this until now? Did you? If so, why didn’t you tell me?!!

I just had an advanced training session with our new WeC learning consultant, Sebastian Stella. He showed me this little trick that I have already posted on our firm’s internal blog. It’s SWEET and I can’t believe I didn’t figure this out on my own since I use this right-click feature all the time otherwise.

Okay … here it is …

You can right click on any link within WestlaweCARSWELL and choose to open it in a new window! And you

What do legal researchers really want?

From technology, I mean. We spend a bit of time here at Slaw fielding the news about this and that technical development initiated by others and helping each other cope with change that if not forced on us then certainly is, like the weather, happening without our informed consent. But if we had our druthers, what would our druthers be?

I know we want others to get beyond email. The wish has been expressed here more than once, for example, that legal publishers should wake up and smell the RSSes, so to speak. Ordinary . . . [more]

I’m interested in finding out how current awareness services are evolving in other organizations. Most of our clients have indicated a preference for “push” services, but I’m told that the company is moving toward a “pull” environment. What are your organizations doing?

Thank you,

Martha . . . [more]

The long awaited Legal Services Bill is to be introduced into Parliament today and the draft bill is summarised in the latest edition of The Lawyer . There are big changes proposed for the way the profession operates here, many of which are already in place in other countries, but some are quite adventurous. . . . [more]

A week or two ago Connie posted a question, which I was not then able to address a comment to, about how we keep up with Web 2.0. A suggestion is Stephen’s Lighthouse, Stephen Abram’s blog. I always find him to be a great source of information on this and other new developments generally (as he is VP of Innovation at SirsiDynix). And, by virtue of being Stephen Abram, he is always fun to read/listen to; I’ve seen him at SLA and CLA events a number of times. He frequently does informative presentations on various topics including . . . [more]

The lead story in the May 2006 issue of LJN Internet Law & Strategy is titled “Wikipedia Creates Concerns Aplenty About the Web’s Reliability”. Notwithstanding the title, the author (Shari Claire Lewis) discusses the broader issue of lawyers and web-based research.

Apparently, at least one U.S. Bar Association has taken the trouble to opine that lawyers doing web-based research are required to “take care to assure that the information obtained is reliable”. In fairness, this ruling dates from 1998 – which is perhaps why the ruling seems startling today. Could anyone presume that internet-based research is magical and not subject . . . [more]

Last week when I was at the joint Canadian Association of Research Libraries/American Association of Research Libraries I heard and interesting talk by Lynne Brindley, CEO of the British Library, on the international dimensions of digital science and scholarship. I was amazed at the rapid strides being taken in this area and some of the SLAWers, like me, may not have known of some of the relevant sites:

European Library

A result of EU investment in digital libaries, this site is a portal giving access to the combined resources of the national collections of the 15 EU nations, the 7 . . . [more]

Check out our very own star of stage, screen and multimedia.

Well done Connie . . . [more]

One of the more difficult sets of issues in both offline and online worlds involves identity: how do I know who you are? how do you tell me who you are? who are you willing to be when you’re dealing with me? and so forth.

As Canadians know at the moment, proof of citizens’ identity has become a critical matter in our dealings with the United States. Must we have, are we prepared to submit, fingerprints, or iris scans in order to travel across the border? And then there is the near regression to absurdity of identity itself: identity with . . . [more]