Last year the Legislative Assembly agreed to include more archived bills on their website to compensate for bills being removed from the Quicklaw.

Micheline Gravel from the Legislative Assembly recently informed us they now have Alberta bills going back to 1961: http://www.assembly.ab.ca/net/index.aspx?p=bills_archive

Thank you Micheline!

Josette McEachern

I was speaking to a friend in an academic library a couple of weeks ago and she mentioned her library recently signed a contract with a publisher? jobber? to provide patron driven acquisitions.  Maybe this is old news for you academic librarians but it's the first time I had heard the term.  The vendor catalogue is linked into the library catalogue. When students search the library catalogue they may also retrieve hits for electronic books the library does NOT own.  If the students wants that ebook, they simply download it.  The first download of a specific title is FREE.  If the ebook is downloaded a second time, the library account is debited. They are contracted to spend a specific amount and I don't know  who owns the book -- the student or the library.  But the concept is intriguing.

Then I read on the Quill & Quire blog about a very cool print-on-demand copier called the Espesso Book Machine. It retails for $125,000 U.S. Very affordable. I see no reason why every Law Society library in Canada couldn't acquire one at some point.  Several university libraries already have one, including the University of Alberta.

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

There is a very thought provoking article on the Value of Checklists by Mary Abraham at Above and Beyond KM.  Mary's blog is excellent and I would highly recommend it for your RSS feeds.  This post talks about surgeons using checklists for both routine and complex tasks.

We had a new associate start today, and of course we have pulled the "new lateral hire" checklist out of our Library Procedures Manual to make sure we share all of the relevant need to know info as well as do all the preparatory steps to welcome a new person (personalize the sign out rotunda, get a Westlaw Canada password, etc.)

What about legal research checklists?  I admit, I fail miserably at using a checklist except for the brain stumper questions, even though there are good checklists available. We put checklists for research sources and noting up processes in the student's Head Start packages.  Is a checklist instructional material or is it something we SHOULD use as a practice tool?

I look forward to reading the comments!  Cheers, Shaunna (cross posted to my blog)

The Stream which is a new blog from Courthouse Libraries BC has some excellent coverage on Wikipedia used in Canadian judgments, and the relevance of Wikipedia as a legal research source.

There are also some very recent academic articles on this topic posted on SSRN.

I recently spoke to the CBA Research Lawyers South subsection on the topic of Social Media for legal research. My slides and the handout are available.

[cross posted to mireau.blogspot.com]