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 Items in the feed tell you exactly what’s been added, amended, or repealed, and when you click on the “view change” link next to each item, it takes you to exactly where the change was, and shows you in an easy-to-read, colour-coded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.

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.

After months of pleading, I finally convinced my boss to subscribe to CLE Course Materials online. I am beyond excited. Instant access to more than 1600 conference papers…so convenient! The service offers fully searchable PDF versions of all CLE course materials since 2001. I’m such a nerd; this is one of the most exciting things to happen to me all month! Woo hoo!

I’m thrilled to see the BC Courthouse Library A-Z Knowledgebase is up and running. I got a sneak peek of it as a tester, and now it’s available to the public. It’s been really helpful already: the first day it was up and running, I used it to find some helpful info on the review of lawyers’ bills. Way to go, BCCLS!

Rob provided a good overview of what’s happening with the Legislative Library closure over in Victoria. VALL has just released an update, with details on what we know, what we don’t know, and what we can do. And a “Save the BC Legislative Library” blog has been created, and seems to be posting news articles and letters to the editor as they roll in.

There’s a great quote from the story that ran in the Vancouver Sun on Saturday:

“It’s a tragedy,” said veteran Times Colonist columnist Jim Hume, who has used the library for more than 50 years. “My God, if the legislative chamber is the heart of the legislature, the library is its soul . . . . This is our history. If you really want to do research, you use the library where you can find everything, not the Internet.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself. I plan on writing to the Premier, the Leader of the Opposition, my MLA, and the Speaker, and I encourage you to do the same.

As posted on Slaw this morning, the statutes and regulations part of the Justice Canada website recently got an overhaul.

I was interested to see what they’d done; for us, the site has been basically nothing but trouble because it’s not reliably up to date. While the website doesn’t look any different (which is unfortunate, because it’s still not very intuitive), it now offers point-in-time for both stats and regs, which is pretty sweet.

Oddly enough, though, the Federal Accountability Act, S.C. 2006, c. 9, is nowhere to be found – not even a reference to it. I couldn’t find it anywhere but the LegisInfo site. This is a little troubling because it received Royal Assent in December 2007 and certain sections are already in force. Maybe they don’t publish a statute unless the whole thing is in force? That doesn’t make any sense. More likely, they are still just behind in updating the site. Tricky, very tricky.

Like most things in life, you get what you pay for, and sometimes no information is better than wrong information. We’ve got a combo of two now. We’re been warning our students and lawyers not to rely on the free sources on the internet for this reason. Even with these improvements, I probably won’t be relying on the new Justice Laws site.

To be fair, we are warned to check more than just this site, in the “Important Notice” located at the bottom of every page (buried after the copyright information):

” For all purposes of interpreting and applying the law, users should consult:

• the Acts as passed by Parliament, which are published in the “Assented to” Acts service, Part III of the Canada Gazette and the annual Statutes of Canada, and
• the regulations, as registered by the Clerk of the Privy Council and published in Part II of the Canada Gazette.”

Unfortunately, most people are never going to read that little notice, and might assume they are looking at everything there is. And not just lay researchers – we are all vulnerable to the allure of stuff available free on the internet.

I think we’d gladly pay for a QP-Legaleze-esque version of federal statutes… but for now, WestlaweCarswell and QL will have to do.

Today I had the opportunity to be a tester for a new database that the BC Courthouse Library will be unrolling in the (hopefully near) future. The A-Z Knowledgebase will contain “handy references and hard to find answers” for legal researchers in BC.

I am ridiculously excited about this new offering from the Courthouse Library: they already provide so many great services (eg., Unreported Decisions Index, BC Legal Literature Index, etc.), and this one will be no exception.

According to Mandy Ostick of BCCLS, the A-Z was “originally a private resource to help our staff answer our users’ questions”, but luckily, they’ve decided to make it available to the public on their website. The database has an interface similar to the aforementioned indexes and includes both search and browse capabilities.

Even in the small selection of records made available for the test phase, there was a lot of good stuff. One particularly nice feature is that the records often list contact organizations/agencies and have references to where the answer/information was found (eg., list of corresponding/related regulations, agency websites, library resources on that topic, etc.).

No word on a launch date, but I presume there will be adequate (and well-deserved) fanfare when the time comes. This database is sure to become another essential website for law libraries (actually, all libraries!) in BC.
Way to go, BCCLS!

P.S. What – did you think I didn’t notice? The A-Z Knowledgebase will also have an RSS feed for new items…jackpot!

OK, this is shameless self-promotion, but I think it’s kind of cool. Our firm is running a campaign called “Fresh Thinking” and recently, our department was featured in an ad. It appeared a couple weeks ago in the Vancouver Sun, so we are minor celebrities! At least in our mothers’ eyes ;)

At first I was a little reluctant to be photographed for and named in an ad that would be published in a major paper, but now I think it’s alright — how often do you see a little old library tech in something like that? Behold the mighty and modest Research & Reference team!

I moved this past weekend and won’t have my computer up and running with the internets until this weekend…so no real posts from me for a while still.

But can I just say, I love WestlaweCarswell? I really am trying to give New Quicklaw a chance, but WLeC is just so good. Is it wrong to love a commercial database so much? All the problems with New QL make me love WLeC that much more.

This morning I discovered they’ve added a download icon so that you don’t have to go other>download. It’s little tweaks like that that make it such a good service. I’m working on a top ten wishlist for New Quicklaw, which I’ll post here…oh, sometime.

EDIT: I just came across this video at LibraryStuff…if it is a real Westlaw ad, wow. Awesome! I love the blowtorch part.