ELLA is hosting a Social Media in the Courts session on May 17th, 2012.  I just came across this very timely news story on CBC that will give all of us a bit of info we can bring to the session:  "5 Canadian legal rulings involving FaceBook"   CBC News - Technology & Science page, May 10, 2012, 7:49 p.m.

Josette McEachern

Registration is underway for the Edmonton Law Libraries Association Head Start Program.  It is hard to believe, but 2012 marks the 10th anniversary of Head Start.

As of March 28, 2012 we are 25% sold - please register your articling students to ensure their spot.

The Registration form is online at http://www.edmontonlawlibraries.ca/HeadStart.htm.

***Cross posted to http://mireau.blogspot.com***

Back in January I wrote a Tip at the (then) newly launched Slaw Tips blog titled <a href="http://tips.slaw.ca/2011/research/monitoring-a-case-law-subject-with-canlii">Monitoring a case law subject with CanLII</a>.  There were a lot of great comments on the tip.  I also heard that CanLII was working on a built in solution to subject Query RSS feeds.

I am extremely pleased to pass on the news that <a href="http://www.canlii.org/en/blog/index.php?/archives/52-Major-Improvements-to-Search-Tools.html">CanLII has made some improvements to their search tools</a> this week and Subject Query RSS feeds is one of them.

Way to go CanLII.  Hat tip to <a href="http://twitter.com/stevematthews">Steve Matthews</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/Hannasus">Susannah Tredwell</a> for tweeting this.

Along with faster results rendering CanLII has also added the ability to more specifically target your hit results based on the query. 

Thank you to CanLII for the innovations and for the fabulous example of what a well organized and reasonably funded free access to the law movement can do in 10 short years.

Shaunna

Check it out at http://www.pacer.gov/

PACER is the US Public Access to Courts Electronic Records.  Searching is available for account holders and the cost of documents is 8 cents a page.

Last summer it came to my attention that Westlaw Canada has a glitch in the way it handles searching citations, which I posted to this blog on August 31, 2009. This email is an update to that glitch.

If you enter a citation in the Find box (Home page) you can use periods or no periods, e.g.: 46 c.p.r. 3d 492 works, as does 46 cpr 3d 492.  But, if you enter a cite in the Citation box under the Cases template, it only works with periods, e.g. 46 cpr 3d 492 returns zero results.  I reported the issue to Carswell and initially they hoped to fix it. But it turns out the cost associated with doing so would be enormous so it will not be fixed.

However, they did agree to add a note to the Citation box at the Cases template to remind users to use periods in a citation.  Unfortunately, they can only do that at their regularly scheduled maintenance. I don't know when that will occur.  In the meantime you may want to ensure you include this tip in any training sessions your lawyers and students receive.

Josette McEachern