Ballad in Plain E

I had a call from Mike Pasta at Quickscribe a couple of weeks ago. He called to get us set up with our free trial of Quickscribe Online, a legislation service similar to QP Legaleze, and gave me a very thorough tour of the system. It contains all BC stats and regs, and a “growing list of federal legislation” as well.

I’ve used it a few times since then, and I have to say, it’s very good. Where Quickscribe really stands out is its RSS feeds. You can subscribe to feeds for all stats & regs, topical groups, or create a feed of selected titles. Items in the feed tell you exactly what’s been added, amended, or repealed, and when you click on the “view change” link next to each item, it takes you to exactly where the change was, and shows you in an easy-to-read, colour-coded layout, exactly how the text reads now, and what it looked like before the change. Score!

Another great feature is the Point in Time archive that you can access with one click.

Mike tells me that they are updating the service daily, so with its visually appealing design and excellent RSS feeds, I think I’ll be making more and more use of this.

We had our WestlaweCarswell trainer in yesterday to give a session on cost-effective searching. I learned a few things that I either didn’t know or I had forgotten about:

• The regulations citator (ability to note-up a section of a regulation) should be available in May 2008. I can’t wait! This will be especially handy for MV regs.
• You only get free access to items on your research trail if you access them from your research trail (outside the trail, simply revisiting a document you’ve already seen counts as another transaction).
• You can type a Boolean query into the default Cases template (don’t need to switch to “Terms and Connectors” template – just leave the “These Results Must Contain” dropdown as “Any of these terms”). You can also add fields and limits to a Boolean search in here. Cool – I thought you could only do a Boolean search from the T&C template. And I found that extra click very annoying.
• When viewing a section of an act, clicking “previous” and “next” to navigate to other sections does not count as a transaction. There’s a handy Thesaurus feature under the search button in the terms & connectors search template. I think I knew this but must have forgotten.

Erica Smith, president of the newly-formed Nova Scotia Library Technicians Association, is the winner of the 2007 Canadian Library Association – Library Technician Interest Group Award of Merit. You can read the CLA announcement here.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Erica for the March 2007 issue of LTAIG News. She struck me as friendly, enthusiastic, and ambitious – and it is wonderful to see her accomplishments being recognised at the national level. Congratulations, Erica…I hope to shake your hand someday!

Last year’s winner was Diane Walker, past chair of LTAIG.

What an amazing bunch of people we have in our library tech community!

And how would you catalogue the title, for that matter?

I’ve been putting off dealing with the first three volumes of Halsbury’s Laws of Canada, but finally got to them today. Confusion central. The volumes aren’t numbered; they’re named. And each volume has a distinct author/editor.

My recollection of cataloguing rules is embarrassingly patchy, but as far as I can tell, following the CCIP, each volume would be its own record. Halsbury’s of Canada would be listed as the series, not the title, unlike the other Halsbury’s sets. But it seems excessive to eventually have 57 records for one series. But I think it’s the best way to go.

What we’re going to do is give each volume its own record, with an abstract and appropriate subject headings. This will result in more ‘publicity’ for each volume than would exist if only the series were catalogued under the subject heading “Abridgments, encyclopedias, digests”.

What have others done for Halsbury’s Laws of Canada? Leave a comment if you have a solution, or if you just want to mock my totally hobo-style cataloguing skills.

Over at XKCD, a map of “Online Communities” reminds me, in some strange way, of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places. Only with a Sea of Memes. Check out the comic’s alt text, while you’re at it.