Ballad in Plain E

At a time when everyone is debating this issue (literally — I was just talking about it with some colleagues at lunch today!), I was thrilled to see this Crosby Group white paper that compares Quickscribe Online to QP LegalEze for legislative research. The study was commissioned by Stem Legal.

We had Mike Pasta of Quickscribe at our office yesterday, to do a training session on his service for our students and associates. The consensus? Everyone loves it. (Of course, you already know I love it!)

Of course, there is always room for improvement in any service, so I was pleased to see some recommendations (for both QS and QP) listed in the report. I skimmed the executive summary and plan to read the full report shortly.

The BCCLS has just rolled out another couple of screencasts; this time, on researching the history, judicial treatment, and intent of legislation. What makes them extra-cool is the example they use to illustrate these tasks: the illegality of “crime comics” in Canada. Kudos!

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!

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”!)

…thanks to Steve’s fabulous LegalPubs.ca feed, I was just alerted of the announcement on the LexisNexis site describing the new enhancement to Quicklaw: a statute citator.

I have always found that the content of WestlaweCarswell and QL’s case citators differ quite a bit, and often one will have one or more cases that the other doesn’t. So it’s nice that now we can have another place to look for cases judicially considered - though nothing beats a ‘manual’ note-up, when you want to be really sure. Shaunna Mireau has created some excellent guides on how to conduct an exhaustive search.

Make sure to catch the article in today’s Legal Post on the Canada Law Book/Lexis debacle.

I wish everyone could just get along and make one giant database of everything that’s available. Obviously, that’ll never happen. Still, a law library tech can dream.

Steve Matthews has done it again. As announced today on his Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, he’s just created LegalPubs.ca, a website/feed that aggregates Canadian legal publisher RSS feeds for a one-stop collection development shop. Another great project, Steve - way to go!

We had our trainer in today to do one of his excellent sessions on how to be most cost-effective when searching WestlaweCarswell. Even though I’ve seen eCarswell presentations a million times, I always learn something new.

Today I learned that:

(a) a search for the word “martian” actually retrieves documents that talk about extraterrestrials

and

(b) when searching for words that might be hyphenated, leave the hyphen in. It will automatically search for your word with and without the hyphen and also with a space. Same goes for acronyms - leave the periods in and it will also search for the acronym sans periods.

Obviously, (b) is the more useful tip.

It’s that time of the year, when scores of copies of BC Annual Practice (the “white book” that contains court rules) become useless as they are replaced by new editions.

In previous years we have donated our superseded copies to high school law classes, but the word on the street is that they’ve got enough already.
Has anyone found another use for them, aside from recycling?

My colleague Steve Matthews, who is the president of VALL this year, recently left Clark Wilson, the law firm where he’d been the Director of Knowledge Services for almost ten years. He’s just launched a new company called Stem Legal, which helps law firms develop and deploy web marketing strategies. And of course, he’s writing a blog to go along with it: Law Firm Web Strategy.

If Steve’s first blog, Vancouver Law Librarian Blog, is anything to go by, Law Firm Web Strategy will be a stellar resource, too. He’s already got some good posts up on managing web properties and law firm website demographics.

While I think the Vancouver law library community will feel somewhat at a loss with Steve not being “one of us” anymore, his drive and leadership in his VALL position will continue to inspire and motivate us. Steve was one of the first people who encouraged me to start a blog, and has been a great informal mentor to many of us library techs who are passionate about technology.

New and future Stem Legal clients are luckier and wiser than they know. I’m so excited for Steve, and wish him success and fulfillment in his new venture!