Good morning Colleagues! La version française suit. We are writing to you on behalf of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries AI Working Group (WG). The WG is responsible for developing guidance on the use of artificial intelligence in legal technologies, including both commercial and non-commercial databases. The databases anticipated to be covered would be those that use legal information sources (statutes, regulations, cases, commentary, and other sources) as their primary data source. At this time, we are soliciting feedback from the legal profession. Your feedback is important to the p ..read more

Over a decade ago I first pitched this, and after years of off-again on-again discussions, Courthouse Libraries BC has reached a notable milestone in legal research and public access to justice in British Columbia. We’ve secured special access to BC’s Court Services Online’s (CSO) E-search for all visitors to our library branches. This access is not just a new service—it’s a bridge to understanding the intricacies of legal proceedings, offering unparalleled insight into court cases within the limits of court records access policies. What is CSO E-search and Why Does It Matter? CSO E-search i ..read more

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries conference is #IRL in 2023. Our theme Innovation Research Leadership features a focus on each topic during the event May 28-31 in Hamilton, Ontario. Early Bird registration is available for a few more days if you are looking for a discount price. The conference is a must for anyone working in law libraries and welcoming to anyone who has an interest in legal research, knowledge management, legal technology. This conference is our first in-person event since our 2019 meeting in Edmonton. Our virtual events were very successful the last couple years. Mem ..read more

Earlier this week, American President Trump nominated Brett M. Kavanaugh from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia to take the place of Justice Anthony Kennedy who will be retiring as of the end of this month. Who is Kavanaugh? There are plenty of resources to figure that out. The Library of Congress in Washington has published a page with resources about the nominee. The page includes links to articles and books by and about the nominee, to cases decided by him, to Congressional materials about his earlier nominations to federal judicial posts, and to web reso ..read more

Is there one right way to research the law? No. Do most of us know the best? the most? or even a handful of useful search strategies? Almost certainly not, according to a few recent studies. As one of those studies highlight, even those who do probably aren’t sharing strategies in any event. These studies paint the picture of a profession that plops a few words into a single search engine, relies heavily on the machine to sort the results returns, and then stops looking within a few minutes having grabbed a few documents that look useful. There are valuable methods, various tricks and tips th ..read more

The 20th edition (2017) of the Code civil du Québec annoté by Jean-Louis Baudouin & Yvon Renaud is now available on the website of the CAIJ. CAIJ is the Centre d’accès à l’information juridique, the network of courthouse law libraries associated with the Québec Bar Association. The annotated Civil Code includes: links to caselaw and commentary on each section links to section-by-section explanations produced in 1993 by the Quebec Ministry of Justice as the new Code was making its way through the National Assembly links to parliamentary debates in the early 1990s concordances for the Civil ..read more

About a million years ago…wait, that was just 2020. Back in 2011-2012 I was invited to collaborate with colleagues on Legal Information Specialists: A Guide to Launching and Building Your Career with colleagues from the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. At the time, Annette Demers asked contributors to gather some quotes from our colleagues about the value they considered in having a Legal Information Specialist team member. As uncomfortable as it was, I asked colleagues to write something. My colleague James T. Casey, QC who was then Managing Partner of Field Law wrote this which appears ..read more

I am always on the lookout for innovative ways that libraries have found to create great stories about complex legal or historical issues that have many moving parts. This one is quite remarkable: the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor has created a site that tells the story of the Missing Children of Indian Residential Schools using maps. This intereactive visual representation of the residential school locations across Canada uses data from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report to document the experience: “The recent discoveries of more than 1,700 unmarked graves at the sit ..read more

The Canadian Research Knowledge Network (CRKN) that is responsible for the Canadiana collection of digitized documentary heritage has replaced the subject heading “Indians of North America” with “Indigenous peoples.” This will effect a little under 2,000 records. “The content, metadata, and resource descriptions in the Canadiana collections contain language that reflects the biases, norms, and perspectives of the time in which they were created. With the guidance of CRKN’s Preservation and Access Committee (PAC), CRKN staff are replacing inappropriate language in the metadata and resourc ..read more

In Custodia Legis, the blog of the Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. published a fun little roundup this week about various laws relating to Santa Claus: “Local, federal and foreign governments are doing their regulatory best to speed his mail and ease his journey across borders with foreign livestock, regardless of his nationality or the emissions his vehicle produces.” You may have also caught the article Santa Claus in court: From bingo prizes to custody hearings by Nathan Baker earlier this week in The Lawyer’s Daily. Santa apparently managed to get himself into a spot of troub ..read more