Ballad in Plain E

At last week’s VALL luncheon, Catherine Best & Teresa Gleave gave a presentation comparing Quicklaw and LawSource (WestlaweCarswell).

Catherine, a research lawyer, covered scope and functionality; Teresa, a law librarian, discussed the practical aspects: pricing, administration, training considerations, cost recovery, etc. Not surprisingly, the session was well-attended and well-received. They did a fantastic job of giving an impartial review of the two tools and made an effort to compare apples to apples, which isn’t always easy to do.

Catherine’s presentation, entitled “Electronic Legal Research: A Moving Target” is available on the VALL website.

What was nice is that Catherine included some tips on when CanLII is a good alternative to the pay sources. I admit it: when the new CanLII interface was unveiled, I really didn’t like it. But it just gets better and better all the time. Now I use CanLII almost daily.

You can use it to search by citation and in many cases, parallel cites are provided. It provides a gorgeous, clean PDF of each case. RSS feeds for each court and tribunal. So I’m glad that Catherine could point out some of CanLII’s newest enhancements: stemming, proximity searching, etc. I wasn’t aware of the proximity searching capability until her presentation, and had occasion to try it out today–it works well.

We all have our favourite tools that we tend to be faithful to, but this presentation gave some great reasons for why we should always be aware of what the “other guys” can do.

The BC Courthouse Library Society has posted some videos on YouTube that show how to find forms and precedents (in this case, shareholders agreements) using three different sources: O’Briens Forms Online, CLE Online (one of my favourite tools of all time), and the BCCLS Library Catalogue.

Très cool!

There’s a good article in today’s Globe & Mail (BC Edition) on the strike currently happening at the Victoria Public Library. The article reminds us that public libraries are not just about books, and fulfill different needs depending on the user group. The last few lines are especially moving:

“Go on down to the picket line at one of the nine branches and you can meet your neighbourhood library workers. What a fine bunch of assets they are.

“I’ve never been ashamed to say I’m a librarian,” Mr. Thompson said.

That’s a statement not many of us - and certainly no newspaper reporter - can make.”

It’s a shame that libraries don’t usually make headlines until there’s a strike.

Steve Matthews has just announced the launch of BC Legislation Portal, a new website from Quickscribe that offers free, updated-daily legislation monitoring. From Steve’s announcement,

“The primary goal of this site is to provide a quick and easy place for anyone in British Columbia to watch the latest updates to provincial law. As soon as amendments come into force, this website will automatically publish a summary. Visitors will also be able to scan the most recent updates, review the monthly archives, and search for changes by the name of an Act or Regulation.”

Way to go, Mike and Steve! (I think I should start a new category: “Cool Projects Brought to you By Steve/Stem Legal”!)