The topic of this column was suggested to me when I read Karen Sawatzky’s interesting column on “Future Ready Libraries”. In her column, Karen refers to The ARL 2030 Scenarios (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, October 2010), which imagines four possible futures for our research libraries. I find such exercises interesting and a good catalyst for thought, but don’t put much stock them. I would refer Slawyers to Canadian journalist and Osgoode alumnus Dan Gardner’s recent book Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway (New York: Dutton, 2010), reviewed recently in the The New York Times. Rather than ARL’s prognostications, I would refer readers to Library As Place: Rethinking Roles, Rethinking Space (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, February 2005). Though older than the ARL Scenarios, this work, too, addresses a likely future – “What is the role of a library when it no longer needs to be a warehouse of books and when users can obtain information without setting foot in its doors?” – but is grounded in solid statistics reflecting documented trends. It’s had a real influence on our planning for the new library of Osgoode Hall Law School.

For law libraries, the most relevant and interesting of the papers in this collection is “Righting the Balance”, by Scott Bennett, Yale University librarian emeritus (p. 10-24). Bennett argues that, just as universities are transitioning from a teaching to a learning culture, academic libraries must make a paradigm shift from a service to a learning culture. Our purpose is not to circulate books but to facilitate learning by the circulation of knowledge. Library space planning must begin by asking the right questions, guided not by our collection and operational needs but by student learning and their learning habits, and by preferring learning needs over operational needs.

Libraries are not just book warehouses with attached study halls and a reference desk; rather, they must be purposefully designed to promote study and learning. This is best done by first studying how students manage their study time and their study environment. Studies show that, while the library is the place students go for serious, sustained study, there is also a strong social context to their relationship to behaviour in libraries. As one student put it, especially when you’ve been in the library for hours and studying hard, “You’re not gonna not talk to somebody.” 

Study spaces must be more like domestic spaces, responsive to both the academic and social dimensions of study in ways that allow students to control them both. Such study space fosters both study and learning by

• supporting a distinction between studying and socializing that does not deny the social dimension of study
• providing choices of space, ranging from personal seclusion to group study, that variously reinforce the discipline needed for study
• permitting territorial claims for study that enable students to govern the social dimension of their study space
• fostering a sense of community among students, allowing them to be seen as members of a community while they take strength from seeing other community members.

Just as the classroom traditionally underscores the authority of the teacher and prefers teaching over learning, traditional library design reinforces the authority of the library staff, affirms the cognitive nature of learning and restricts students’ ability to manage their space and time by encouraging only traditional forms of “serious” study. “Domesticated” library space, on the other hand, fosters active learning. It affirms a nonfoundational view that holds that learning is a community project and that knowledge is community property, constructed by people working together in groups, interdependently.

So what have we done differently in the new Osgoode library to domesticate the public space, enable students to manage the social dimensions of learning in the library, and to foster active learning behaviours? To start with, we have tried to plan the library space not around the collections or library operations but around the students. First, we’ve ensured that the library entrance is in the centre of the school, across the “galleria” from student services and next door to the IT support desk. The wall of the library space fronting the galleria is glass, to encourage accessibility and transparency. We’ve provided generous social space at the entrance to the library, where students can meet and greet, sit and chat, collect and disperse, and directly access library services (circulation, reference), all without disturbing any of the study areas. This space features exhibits from the Osgoode History & Archives Project (described in my last post) as well as displays of the school’s trophies and awards plaques. And, while we don’t plan to go so far as to allow food in the library, the cafeteria (“bistro”), Junior Common Room and café are just down the hall.

Studies show that, when given a choice, today’s students prefer large tables to study where they can spread out and, even if intending to study seriously, can be surrounded by friends in a comfortable and secure community space. Where our old library offered only secluded carrels arranged along the perimeters of the library, in which the students were strictly secluded from each other, the new library offers large study tables arranged in two large reading rooms (194 seats total). For those students who prefer private, secluded study, we do still provide some study carrels (48 seats) in a separate area. We’ve provided lots of soft seating to allow for quiet, comfortable reading as well as napping, interspersed around both floors of the library, usually in front of windows, in small groupings (total 40 seats) and in one large, attractive “den”-like setting (16 seats). Most important, there are 12 group study rooms, each seating from six to 12 students. All these arrangements are intended to facilitate the social aspect of study, recognizing that students need to collaborate, share and discuss in order to learn. These community activities are as important a part of the learning process as is quiet study, and play and distraction can be equally conducive to learning and non-disruptive if we can provide the students with a space in which they can control those activities.

But what are the implications for law firm libraries, where the library-as-place is used for research rather than study and learning and the “community” has a completely different dynamic? How and where will law firm librarians interact with lawyers in a future environment of virtual information? Perhaps the more likely model for our private law libraries is that being developed at the Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins University, where the direction is to meet the changing needs of both researchers and patients and to deliver virtual information and services at the place where the information is actually used. To achieve this, the library is dispersing both its collections and its facilities. The print collections are being disposed of or digitized and services are being dispersed among “touchdown suites” located throughout the school and the hospital. Librarians (now referred to as “informationists”) circulate through laboratories, classrooms and clinics and “touch down” in these appointed library service spaces where librarians and users (including not only researchers, clinicians and doctors but also patients) can interact in the users’ own environments. The touchdown suite offers a base close to users that encourages encounters, both planned and casual, with the librarians. It’s a fascinating concept, completely different from the student-centred model, but still recognizing the importance of “place”, even in a virtual information environment. If you’d like to read more about this concept, I would refer you to Kathleen Burr Oliver’s article “The Johns Hopkins Medical Library as Base: Information Professionals Working in Library User Environments” on p. 66-75 of Library as Place.

The Peace Palace Library at the Hague, the Netherlands, has made its catalog available online. The library has a rich collection of materials in multiple languages on international law and international relations, but the catalog includes journal articles on comparative constitutional law and other topics as well. Users can sign up to receive weekly e-alerts of new journal articles on topics of interest. The Peace Palace Library won the 2005 IALL Website Award. The International Association of Law Libraries noted that the Peace Palace Library “offers value-added service to its users with up-to-date, customizable alerts based on a very broad international law collection, and is aimed at both law librarians and end users.”

Law libraries for several international agencies have catalogs which index journal content. The United Nations libraries in New York and Geneva both have catalogs that enable searches limited by journal article type: Dag Hammarskjöld Library’s UNBISNET and UNOG Catalog. The Vienna-based UNCITRAL has a Geneva-based catalog (and bibliography) that includes journal articles on international trade law topics in all languages, but mostly in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese. The JOLIS library catalog indexes the journal articles in the collections of the World Bank Group and International Monetary Fund (IMF) law libraries. WIPO’s library catalog indexes articles from the European Intellectual Property Review, Managing Intellectual Property, International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC), the Journal of World Intellectual Property, etc. Other catalogs in the UN library system similarly include law journal articles. As for other IGO libraries, users can find articles on European Union law in the European Commission Libraries Catalogue, ECLAS. The European Court of Human Rights also makes its library catalog available online, and the catalog indexes individual law journal articles by author, title, subject and keywords. 

Click on image to enlarge.

Major research libraries also have enhanced catalogs. The Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law’s OPAC includes articles from 1996 to date. Its holdings (and those of the Max Planck Institutes for international and foreign private law, criminal law, and social law) are searchable via the Max Planck Virtual Library. The GVK Union Catalogue includes article holdings for over 400 libraries participating in the Common Library Network (GBV) in seven German Länder (Northern Germany). The BVB catalog searches over 100 Bavarian libraries. The Bavarian State Library has an articles e-alert service. I subscribe to e-alerts on European legal history. The form for subscribing is here. Users can search the Baden-Württemberg SWB Online-Katalog (Southwest German libraries) for German-language law journal articles or “Aufsätze.” The Western Switzerland libraries’ RERO union catalog indexes articles in German, French, English, and Italian from over 170 law journals. This includes journal holdings of the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law in Lausanne.

Besides these unique library catalogs, selected online bibliographies and databases index law journal articles. The SSRN Legal Scholarship Network is increasingly adding more foreign law journal article abstracts. Google Scholar includes some full texts, but as yet it does not provide broad coverage for foreign-language legal periodicals. Melbourne Law School’s Asian Law Online is the “first and only online bibliographic database of Asian law materials in the world…[o]ffered to the public as a free service to assist students, scholars and practitioners of Asian legal systems.” It has citations to English-language articles for China, Japan, South Korea, and other jurisdictions.

There are also the Quebec Bar Association’s library catalog (French and English), Dialnet (Spain; not exclusively a law database), Index to Legal Periodicals in Israel (Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law Library; index to law-related articles in Hebrew and in English in Israeli periodicals from 1970 to present; to access, choose English-language interface, then drop-down the menu to selected the ILPI), Dottrina Giuridica (DoGI) (DEMO version; limited searching of Italian legal periodical literature). The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexes and includes full texts of over 100 law-related scholarly e-journals. Some resources are very specialized. For instance, Aberystwyth University has created a Bibliography of British and Irish Legal History (1977-2006). And some journals make their tables of contents available at their websites. Journal ToCs are also compiled in databases such as Washington & Lee’s Current Law Journal Content (covers English-language journals from 2005-2011; slated to cease after May 15, 2011) and New York University’s European Integration Current Contents. 

Most of these search tools do not clearly indicate how far back indexing of journal articles go. Frequency of updating varies. The different languages, varied interfaces, and unfamiliar search mechanisms might confuse users, while some search mechanisms do not permit more useful searches for combined terms. The catalogs may be unavailable for maintenance at different times based on their geographic locations. However, these indexes sometimes are more current than the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, and sometimes cover journals not indexed by the IFLP and other subscription databases and print law journal indexes. As of the date of this post, the publishers of these databases have made them available for free on the web. And the databases enable discovery of legal scholarship outside one’s national borders. Users may find these databases helpful for cite-checking, for generating more complete resource lists, for identifying the international influence of law faculties, and for a myriad other purposes.

Users may have difficulty integrating these free resources into their searches for law journal articles on their specific research topics. Simple links will not do. Researchers cannot now use a single search to find resources indexed by all of these tools. I don’t think that resource discovery services, like EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS), Serials Solutions Summon, OCLC WorldCat Local, ExLibris Primo Central, are integrating into their databases these freely-accessible journal indexes and bibliographies. The Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog does provide for cross-searching of library catalogs worldwide, but does not enable searchers to limit searches to journal articles as far as I can tell. Enhanced catalogs and databases are here, providing users with improved journal article search experiences today. Librarians have the challenge of helping researchers find, and determine when and whether to use these tools. 

My knowledge of Knowledge Management is self-taught; what I’ve read on blogs and white papers, and what I’ve gleaned in conversations with KM practitioners. I’ve been thinking about it a lot more lately, since I recently left one firm to join another. I tried to leave notes wherever possible, but of course, a lot of my knowledge didn’t get left behind. And in my new firm, there are areas where I have to start from scratch as well, even though the previous librarian did a much better job of leaving a trail than I did.

There isn’t anyone taking on a KM role in my new firm, so I thought I would try to develop it. I’ve been trying to get my head around knowledge management as a discipline. While browsing through my rss feeds, I see that I’m not the only one trying to understand and implement this concept. A guest post on 3 Geeks and a law blog (KM: The Big Room by Ryan McLead) posed the same question. Fortunately, I also came across Guy St. Clair’s series of blog posts on how to introduce KM into an organization. So I have a few places to start.

As with all new projects, the first thing to determine is what I want to achieve. In simple terms, I want to leave a roadmap of my work so that if I’m hit by that proverbial bus, someone can step in and take over without a huge delay. Applying it overall to the firm, I’d like for anyone to be able to access and retrieve anyone else’s work product. This is where a document management system would come in very handy. A controlled vocabulary is a must as well. I can see that just getting started is going to be a challenge!

I know that KM is more than a technology solution, but I’m not quite sure what else to include. I will be reviewing Guy’s posts very closely, as well as other blogs on KM. Please feel free to offer any other suggestions for developing a KM strategy in the comments.

Additional Resources:

Mary Abraham’s Above and Beyond KM

ILTA KM blog

Once Were Lawyers (Ryan McLead’s follow-up post)

Public libraries do not tend to have the extensive legal collections found in a courthouse or university library; their strengths lie elsewhere. The diversity of their collection means that they can provide resources that one might not necessarily be able to find a library with a focus purely on law.

Here are some suggestions as to how legal professionals can use their public library for both legal research and business development:

Government documents
A number of public libraries function as depositories for Canadian government information, meaning that they receive copies of all Government of Canada publications distributed via the Weekly Checklist. This comes in handy when trying to find older federal government materials where a significant amount of content is not available electronically. Examples of such material include Senate and House of Commons committee reports, Statistics Canada publications, and historical reports.

Standards
Technical standards can be very expensive so a purchase may not be economically feasible when only a single use is going to be made. It is therefore worthwhile checking with one’s public library to see if they already own the standard needed.

Business directories
Public libraries tend to have collections of business directories. These can be useful for finding contact information (despite the prevalence of business websites, it can be extraordinary what information doesn’t make it on to the site) or for gleaning business intelligence.

Newspaper databases/microfiche
Although most newspapers freely publish most of their recent news stories online, sometimes one may need to find an older news article. Most public libraries provide access to newspaper databases to assist with this. Alternatively, one may need a copy of how a particular page of the paper as it was originally published (for example a copy of an advertisement may be needed and most newspaper databases don’t include this type of ephemera). Public libraries usually have microfilm or electronic databases of copies of old papers which retain the full layout.

Research
Some public libraries offer paid research services whereby librarians will carry out more extensive research than can be offered for free; an example is the Vancouver Public Library’s InfoAction. Examples of the kinds of research InfoAction carries out include business or market research, and obtaining copies of documents. One particularly useful thing is that these services can request information from a government or organization while acting as an anonymous proxy; the library service functions as an intermediary so that there is no disclosure that a law firm is interested in the information.

Specialized collections
A public library is likely to have a specialised collection of books about the area it is located in, including those that have been published by small presses or vanity publishers. These can be extremely useful when trying to find out the specific history of an area or a local business.

Obviously the size of the public library is going to be a factor; the resources available through the public library system has will vary tremendously by individual library. Nonetheless, the public library is an excellent resource and one that should not be overlooked.

The major agents of change are easy to spot. In the world of legal research, LEXIS and then WESTLAW rose up. Library catalogs became digitized. In the wider world, the PC, Apple, Microsoft, and the World Wide Web marched across the stage. Then the great cloud of Google descended from on high to work with the Internet and cell phones to morph information beyond recognition. But are there other players who changed the game — players less well-known? Trying to suss out who the hidden agents of change might be has fascinated me. What publishers or products that fit below the radar had major impacts? 

One such game changer is Hein Online. The product of one of the last survivors from the world of independent law publishers in the United States, Hein is now in its third generation of operation. William S. Hein the senior began working for Fred Dennis, a legendary figure in the book trade, when he was 16. He began the William S. Hein Company in Buffalo, New York in the early 1920s. The bloodlines run deep. Still rooted in Buffalo, New York, Hein has had a more profound impact on law library collections in the United States than any other entity. Why? Because the Hein Company convinced us that we could trust them.

My metaphor for cognitive authority is the ‘tinkerbell.’ In the movie Peter Pan, Tinkerbell is a fairy who only lives as long as children believe in her existence. If everyone believes, she is vital. Cognitive authority works the same way. If everyone trusts a tool, if everyone uses that tool, then that tool is authoritative. Even if it has flaws no one notices. There is no longer a need to critically analyze it; it is now part of the furniture. It just is.

Accomplishing this feat is no simple trick. Trust has to be earned. The Hein Company — which formerly operated a big business reprinting runs of law reviews for new libraries doing a bit of original publishing and serving as a jobber of books and serials — rolled with the technological punches. Bill Hein, the younger took over the family business and looked to the future. Hein began to scan in federal materials and law reviews that were out of copyright. Launched in 2000, HeinOnline consisted of one lone library of materials, law journals, with 25 titles. Brick by brick, over time, Hein added content and increased quality. They built a structure so dependable that we came to trust it. Law reviews cut better deals with them, so more recent issues appeared. Whole new categories of materials were included. The edifice grew. Hein Online became accepted as a place where PDF files of legal information were safely archived. I am not sure when the tipping point came, but at some magical moment libraries across the United States realized that they did not have to retain paper copies any longer. They could rely on HeinOnline. People started throwing out books. Hein Online was the new Tinkerbell. Weaning law journals away from the requirement to see the cited source in paper, and convincing them that the source could be read as a PDF has taken longer, but it is happening too. Most libraries feel flush if they keep a single print copy of many serials now; HeinOnline has it covered. While LEXIS and WESTLAW were showering our students with training and gifts, HeinOnline was changing our collections. The system has a new and improving search engine, but it is as an archive that it changed our world. 

Having been lucky enough to have known Bill Hein Sr., and having been a contemporary of Bill Hein, Jr., I saw it all happen. But it happened in slow motion. Few saw it coming. That is how authority is created. It is not handed down from above; it grows up from below. The Hein folks did it. Now, most American law libraries could not live without it: The Hein family, agents of change that fly below the radar.

Now, crowdsourcing of legislation has come to the U.S., through LexPop, a new wiki created this month by Matt Baca and Olin Parker, both students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. [Baca is also a law student at New York University.]

As its first effort, LexPop is hosting the drafting of a net neutrality bill, to be introduced in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. State Representative Tom Sannicandro has announced his commitment to introduce the bill when drafting is complete.

Recently I spoke with Matt Baca about the development of LexPop, and the LexPop vision for empowering citizens through technology.

The Big Ideas

Key to the LexPop approach is collaborative government, an idea similar to Professor Beth Noveck’s concept of collaborative democracy: government that actively seeks and uses input from the public, meaning ordinary citizens, not lobbyists. LexPop cites the U.S. federal government’s Gov 2.0 projects ExpertNet and Peer to Patent — both Noveck’s ideas — as inspirations for LexPop. Baca also cited Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s POPVOX project as a model for LexPop.

Another concept informing LexPop‘s approach is lightweight policymaking, an idea derived from Tim O’Reilly’s concept of lightweight programming. As the LexPop team explained in a recent post, in lightweight policymaking, after a new statute is enacted, the public reviews the law, monitors its implementation, discusses its effects, and, if the law proves to be flawed, the public uses LexPop to quickly draft amendments.

Two other ideas are basic to LexPop. First, circumventing special interests is a fundamental goal of the project. As Baca wrote last week, today in the U.S., political participation is

[...] a game of power in which the public is losing. There’s no secret about the amount of money spent by big companies on lobbying. Just today, Nicholas Deleon of CrunchGear suggested it has cost ISPs about $1 million to defeat net neutrality legislation. That’s no fun, at least if you think discussion and debate, rather than dollars and cents, should drive policy creation. This is what LexPop is all about. It provides a forum for the public, rather than lobbyists, to write the policy legislators will introduce.

Second, LexPop seeks to enable contributions by citizens who have any level of time, interest, and knowledge, including both novices and experts, as the team explains in this post.

How It Began

Baca explained that LexPop began during a course at the Kennedy School that he and co-founder Olin Parker both took during fall 2010. As they read about Web 2.0 initiatives in government (or Gov 2.0, in Tim O’Reilly’s terms) Baca and Parker concluded that “eventually this will result in the co-creation of laws.” They explored Brazil’s e-Democracia site, but could find no analogous service in the U.S. So they decided to experiment themselves.

In November 2010, they started a wiki called writethebill, on the Wikispaces platform. writethebill was designed to enable anyone to launch the crowdsourcing of any bill on any topic. According to Baca, writethebill was “a free-for-all wiki,” whose activity was largely unstructured.

After some drafting had been accomplished on a total of thirteen bills — on topics ranging from campaign finance reform to the improvement of teacher quality — Baca and Parker began to seek a different platform that would enable a more structured approach to crowdsourced bill drafting.

How It Works Now

Earlier this year, Baca and Parker decided to move their project to the MediaWiki platform, and to rename the project LexPop. LexPop premiered earlier this month.

The desire to provide more structure to the bill-drafting process is evident from the LexPop homepage. There, the visitor learns that LexPop offers two options for bill drafting: “WikiBills”, the original unstructured approach used at writethebill [and "WikiBills" includes all of the legislation originally drafted at writethebill]; and a new, more structured method, called “Policy Drives”.

In the “Policy Drive” approach, the drafting process occurs in three stages, paralleling those used in most legislatures: “Hearing,” “Markup,” and “Build the Bill.”

During the “Hearing” stage, wide-open information-sharing and public discussion about the issue take place, and participants try to find a legislator who will agree to introduce the bill once it has been drafted. [LexPop's Massachusetts net neutrality bill is currently in the "Hearing" stage.]

During the “Markup” stage, participants choose which policies to adopt, and express these in an outline of the content of the bill.

Finally, during the “Build the Bill” stage, participants draft the legislation.

Although the first LexPop Policy Drive concerns Massachusetts legislation, LexPop can be used to crowdsource bill drafting for any jurisdiction. Indeed, several of the draft bills in LexPop‘s “WikiBills” section are federal.

Team and Research

According to Baca, the LexPop team currently consists of him and Parker. Neither is a programmer, and so they hope that civic-minded coders, developers, and designers will be among those who volunteer to contribute ideas about functionality and features to LexPop.

When asked about the role of formal research in LexPop, Baca replied that the team does not currently have a formal research program focused on LexPop, but they are currently using Semantic MediaWiki to gather usage and other data about the site.

Getting the Word Out

Respecting marketing, to date the team has created a YouTube video, issued a press release, promoted the service on Twitter and Facebook, created a Google Group, launched a LexPop Blog, and presented the service at Harvard’s 2011 Social Enterprise Conference Pitch for Change.

What’s Ahead

Baca said that LexPop does not currently have outside funding, and is not seeking funding at the present time. However, LexPop is currently seeking volunteers. LexPop is looking for volunteers to participate — by such means as contributing content and suggesting/creating new functionality — as well as to spread the word about the LexPop approach to crowdsourcing lawmaking.

According to Baca, since both he and Parker complete their current academic programs this coming May, the LexPop team intends to devote Spring 2011 to publicizing LexPop, facilitating the first LexPop Policy Drive about net neutrality, and growing the LexPop team and community with volunteers. Baca said that longer-term planning for LexPop will take place this summer.

How to Be Part of It

Baca encouraged readers who would like to participate in LexPop to contact the LexPop team at the LexPop Website.

I was attending Podcamp Toronto at the time, so learned about the controversy via Twitter. Search #hcod to see how quickly the library community mobilized, and the nature of the discourse. It’s fascinating. A boycott was proposed and debated. Overdrive moved to segregate HarperCollins titles into a separate catalogue. HarperCollins wrote an open letter to the profession, on a blog unfortunately titled “Library Lovefest”. It’s pretty safe to say that the prevailing attitude in Library land can be taken from Tina Turner: “What’s love got to do with it?” The response to the open letter has been interesting as well. I particularly like this video response, which lacks the vitriol of many of the comments on the Lovefest post.

The HarperCollins situation concerns typical public library content. Many of the titles in the ebook collections are works of fiction, borrowed to be read cover-to-cover. These issues haven’t yet arisen in law libraries, where the adoption of the ebook format has been slower. There are many questions to be answered as librarians consider adding ebooks to their collections. Some of these issues have already been raised on SLAW, in posts from Susannah Tredwell, Ruth Bird, Michael Lines and Ted Tjaden, for example. 

A panel discussion at a CASLIS Toronto event in February may provide some insight into the future of libraries in an ebook world. Denise Schon, Program Coordinator for Centennial College’s Book and Magazine Publishing Program, says we’re already starting to see an evolution in the way some information is delivered. 

Consumer health information is “dead” in paper, she declared – the internet has become the place that people go to for guidance. What is the future for legal publishing in a world where government and legislative documents are increasingly available online, and where courts and tribunals publish to the web? 

Remember the CED on CD-ROM? Turns out that it may have been a product ahead of its time. When the library that I was working at in the 90’s bought the CD version, I was horrified to see students firing up the CD and printing page after page. When we realized that the cost of production was being subtly pushed over to us, we went back to the looseleaf. 

Back in the day, I sent students to the CED when they were faced with a topic for the first time. “Have a look at the chapter on the topic – it’s like a textbook. Get a useful overview of the major questions and issues on any given topic, with pointers to the leading case law. It’s like a law library in looseleaf form!” And that’s how students used it. It was the go-to source when they were faced with something novel. They’d read and browse through the pages, developing an appreciation for the law as it operated in that topic. They might photocopy a few pages, but they didn’t reproduce the whole chapter, as they did with the CD. 

Today, I doubt that many students are even aware that a paper version exists! They’re more comfortable with browsing online. They will employ search strategies to find the particular paragraphs which address the issue they need to understand. Linking helps them move between logically aligned topics, and they can pop in and out of case law as needed. The process has evolved. The content hasn’t changed, but our ability to use it has caught up. 

Ebooks are another such evolution. There will be growing pains as the marketplace figures out how to price and distribute this new format. Fortunately, the legal publishers will have the example of the “public library” publishing houses to learn from, and as the academic publishing world moves onto hand-held devices, more lessons will be learned. How would you price the CED ebook? How about a legal textbook? Annotated statute? How granular can the pricing get – will we be able to buy paragraphs, chapters, tables of cases? What costs will get passed along to clients? Should libraries buy readers, or just make content available? Will publishers opt to market directly to practitioners, and bypass the library “middleman”? 

Hang on, kids – the ride’s going to get bumpy.

(P.S. Jeff Miller, Tim Knight and I will be discussing ebooks, libraries and legal publishing at the CALL conference in Calgary this May. I can’t promise you any answers, but the questions will be provocative!)

Why is it such a big deal? It is the first new Title to be added since the U.S. Code was created in 1926. There is good reason for the eighty five years of stability: Promulgating the U. S. Code took years of labor and was attended by much political haggling. If one tries to organize all of the generally applicable, in-force legislation of a jurisdiction into a set of organized topics, one confronts a very touchy set of questions. Pieces of legislation passed at different times by different Congresses have to be blended together into a coherent structure. Language must be smoothed over and decisions must be made. Bits might be left out; meanings might be shaded one way or the other. The whole enterprise is designed to raise the hackles of the suspicious among us — and there are many suspicious among us. Law reform, traveling under the guise of neatening things up, may occur.

Worse, many laws that are still in force are redundant, obsolete or contradictory. Great swathes of the existing U.S. Code might not be re-enacted if voted on today. Is everything up for grabs? These problems have kept the 50 titles in place, even when Title 34 was abandoned, and even though some of the Titles like Title 4, The Flag and Seal, Seat of Government and the States, are brief and seldom modified (the flag is pretty established and Washington, D.C. appears safe), and others like Title 42 Public Health and Welfare are bursting at the seams and always being amended.

For a time the Congress tried to enact individual Titles into positive law as a matter of convenience and economy, but the process was abandoned for the reasons set out above. Just looking at some Titles was enough to set off political fireworks. And that was a case of turning an existing Title into positive law.

Even worse, each and every book currently written about the U.S. Code is now wrong. There are now 51 Titles. This will be a boon for Thomson Reuters and for LEXISNEXIS as each produces a printed annotated version of the U.S. Code that are still widely used. Everyone wil have to decide if they are to buy a whole new set. Sigh. And the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the United States House of Representatives has announced that four more are coming.

Title 51, concerned as it is with space travel, presents little controversy. But Title 52 will focus on Voting and Elections, and Title 55 on the Environment. All relevant laws on these sensitive topics will have to be pulled from other parts of the U.S. Code, and reformulated into the new Titles. I think that a bit of dust will be raised over those enactments. Just imagine the enlightened solons that comprise the United States Congress re-enacting all environmental law without bringing out the hatchets. It is to laugh.

I am a patient man — age has helped me on that score. The decline of the book, the end of newspapers and the commodification of legal information: I can deal with all of them. But for me, messing with the U.S. Code is the last straw. The 21^st Century is proving to be a wild ride indeed. And I cannot get anybody excited about it! 

Can you imagine the world in 2030? I can’t, but the ARL Scenarios do. It’s not quite the future that I would like to see, but then, is the present what anyone predicted 20 years ago? The scenarios envision a world where researchers are free agents, and universities scramble for funding. (Hmm…how is that different from today, at least the second part?) There are four scenarios presented: Research Entrepreneurs, Reuse and Recycle, Disciplines in Charge, and Global Followers. Each one outlines a particular day in the life of a star researcher, Hannah Chen. The world is described slightly differently in each scenario, but varies on the theme that government funding of universities will dry up, mainly due to declining tax revenues, universities will seek more partnerships with businesses, and both students and faculty will be competing for meaningful positions.

So what are the strategic implications of these scenarios? Scenario 1: Research Entrepreneurs, resonated the most with me. Note the following strategic question that arose:

How do we begin now to develop the library professional of the future – a highly capable and credible service provider who can work directly with researchers with data preparation and curation capabilities? What skills are we currently developing in our library professionals that may not be valued in the future? (p. 39)

Replace “researcher” with “lawyer”, and we’re already at this scenario, at least regarding data preparation and curation capabilities (think compiling case law on a point of law, and determining which resources have the authority to be used to develop an argument). As to the skills we’re currently developing that may not be valued in the future – how about some of the audiovisual equipment training! All kidding aside, most of the skills I have are transferable across many occupations, and even something as library-specific as cataloguing can be useful in cross-training to write computer languages.

So how does this relate to the law firm library of the future? I’ve been thinking a lot about the physical space necessary to define the library of the near future, say in the next five years or so. My current space is fairly traditional – lots of shelving for (mostly) reporting series that are no longer collected, and a small work area. I haven’t quite figured out what is the best use of the space if I had the opportunity to renovate. Should there be more social areas, equipped with comfortable chairs and tables, to encourage use of the library as a place to meet and discuss? Or should it be a quiet area, where lawyers can review the resources they need without being disturbed? My personal preference is to see the space become more conducive to conversation – kind of like the lawyers’ lounge without the bar.

There have been a number of discussions of law library space recently. I especially enjoyed Louis Mirando’s posts, Rebuilding a Law School Library. Any ideas on what the future holds for law libraries? Will private firms outsource part or all of them? Or will it be a competitive advantage to house your own knowledge management team? What skills will we need? What does 2030 look like to you?

Image from The Life of Emile Zola

Discovery Tools

To find a foreign code of criminal procedure, first you need to identify the title of the code. With the title, you can search for full texts on the Internet or libraries who own the codes in catalogs. Reynolds & Flores’ Foreign Law Guide, a continually-updated subscription database, lists titles and sources of official texts of criminal procedure codes and major related legislation in the vernacular for over 170 jurisdictions. The FLG also includes English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish translations, if available, and links to full texts on the web. Here’s an excerpt from the FLG entry for France, for example:

Code de procedure pénal. Loi 93-2 of 14 Jan 1993 in Journal officiel 5 Jan 1993 implements, for the code of criminal procedure, a great range of reforms and amendments made by Loi 92-1,336 of 16 Dec 1992 in Journal officiel 23 Jan 1992…Official text of the code and of the relevant secondary legislation (Décrets or Décrets en Conseil d’État and Arrêtés), when it exists, is on LegiFrance at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/. Current text, consolidated texts to date, in English and Spanish translations also on the LegiFrance database at http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/…Criminal procedure code amended by Loi 291 of 5 Mar 2007 in Journal officiel 2007 pg. 4,206. These amendments liberalized procedures and conditions for detention and during the investigative phase and also strengthen the adversarial aspects in the preliminary stages of criminal procedure.

Free resources that similarly list sources of criminal procedure codes include Globalex and GLIN. Globalex is a collection legal research guides for over 100 countries edited by Mirela Roznovschi at New York University Law Library. Most of the guides include sections on major codes in English translation. The aim is to update the guides at least once a year. The Law Library of Congress’ Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) indexes legislation worldwide, with a special focus on Latin American countries. You can also do no-cost searches for library holdings of criminal procedure codes in public catalogs such as WorldCat.org, AMICUS (Canada), COPAC (UK union catalog), and the Karlsruhe Virtual Catalog (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, all national catalogs worldwide, electronic full texts/eBooks, book trade, including second-hand, used books), 

Full Texts

Criminal procedure codes can be published as separate monographs, as parts of foreign official gazettes of law (see Government Gazettes Online), as appendices to books, and in legal databases or country law portals. Ministry of justice websites sometimes include such codes. Sometimes journal articles include useful excerpts. Below I list some major compilations of full text sources of criminal procedure codes. Note that some of these are unofficial, non-authoritative sources, and they may not include the most current version of a criminal procedure code or law:

American Series of Foreign Penal Codes (F.B. Rothman/W.S. Hein print series) includes English translations of the criminal procedure codes for China, France, Germany, Israel, and Turkey.

Buffalo Criminal Law Center (BCLC): Criminal Law Resources on the Internet, which the law center last updated in 2002, includes materials for Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and Tunisia.

International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) International Humanitarian Law (IHL): National Implementation Database lists over 170 jurisdictions under “Implementing Laws & Regulations – by State.” Users can search for documents by keyword. 

The International Criminal Court (ICC) Legal Tools Database: once you accept the Terms and Conditions of Use, you can search the National Implementing Legislation Database by keyword or browse by States. For example, you can find Mexico’s Código Federal de Procedimientos Penales (2009). Note that even though the database lists over 100 countries, it does not have criminal procedure codes in full text for all those countries.

Legislationline (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR)) includes the criminal procedure codes of about 30 European countries in English translation. It also includes legislation on police, prisons, the right to a fair trial, and the death penalty.

Lexadin (The World Law Guide) covers extensive legislation, including criminal procedure codes, from over 200 countries.

Sammlung ausländischer Strafgesetzbücher in deutscher Übersetzung = Collection of Foreign Criminal Laws in German Translation (Max-Planck Institute for 

Foreign and International Criminal Law) lists information about ordering criminal procedure codes for Bulgaria, the Netherlands, and Poland.

Jurisdictions looking to reform their criminal procedures might also want to see the Model Codes of Post-Conflict Criminal Justice: Model Code of Criminal Procedure (v.2)(United States Institute of Peace (USIP)).

The majority of Canadian legal eBooks produced so far have been designed for access via a desktop computer, either online or as a downloadable PDF. Examples include Carswell’s eReference Library (online), Irwin Law’s E-Library (online) and David Whelan’s Finding & Managing Legal Information on the Internet (PDF). Although price and licencing issues can be a factor, from a library point of view online eBooks generally can be managed in the same way as other electronic databases.

Making sure that library users are aware of the full range of library resources is always a concern and even more so when it comes to non-print materials such as eBooks. How then does one make eBooks as accessible as possible to library users? Key concerns include such things as how to integrate eBooks into the library catalogue; for example, how should libraries handle electronic resources that have significant numbers of titles on them? Should they add all the titles into the catalogue or just selected ones? Larger law libraries, such as university law libraries, generally have the technical resources to integrate the list of journal and electronic titles directly into their catalogue. Alternatively, should libraries merely note the existence of the database in their catalogue?

Even if eBooks are included in the catalogue, libraries may still run into the problem that users will not use this material. Based on personal experience, a certain number of people find reading books on a computer screen to be awkward so even if a user does find the eBook in the library catalogue, he or she may not wish to use it. At the other end of the spectrum, there are those people who use Google for all their research and if a resource does not show up in Google, it might as well not exist. A colleague of mine recently commented that she dealt with law students who had never used the university’s library catalogue; they just Googled for materials.

There are still only a small number of Canadian legal eBooks designed for mobile devices, such as Canada Law Book’s British Columbia Annual Practice, and Carswell’s Practitioners Income Tax Act; the number of U.S. law books available for eReaders is much greater. It is far easier to read eBooks on a tablet than it is on the small screen of a Blackberry or iPhone so the ever increasing popularity of tablets means that the potential market for legal eBooks is growing.

Similarly, when it comes to legal apps, American publishers are ahead of Canadian publishers. Among the legal information apps currently available are Black’s Law Dictionary, WestlawNext and a number of U.S. federal and state codes. There are a minimal number of Canadian legal apps so far; Wilson and LaFleur have produced an app for the iPad that allows users to access a small number of French language titles.

It is likely that there are going to be increasing numbers of eBooks available over the next few years, so the question then becomes: how do libraries best manage eBooks for mobile devices?

Although public libraries have been in the forefront of eBook lending, their model does not really lend itself to law libraries. British Columbia’s public libraries provide access to a wide range of eBooks through Library To Go wherein titles are requested and checked out in a manner akin to the traditional process and then downloaded to the user’s computer or mobile device. Once the loan period is up, the book is automatically deleted, so the next person can “borrow” it. Libraries can only lend a preset number of copies of a book, so for a popular book users have to wait for it in the same way they would for a physical copy. There are some practical issues with this model when it comes to private law libraries. Unlike public libraries, the materials in a private law library collection are intended to be readily accessible all the time. With a traditional print book in a law firm library, a user either reads it in the library or signs it out to use in his or her office. If someone else needs that book, they can see who has the book and then borrow it from the original borrower.

A different way of handling eBooks is to place multiple eBooks and apps on a portable device (such as a Kindle, Kobo or iPad) which can then be loaned out. As with the public library model, this too reduces access to books since a borrower can’t then pass those books he or she isn’t using on to another user. This may become less of an issue as Amazon has introduced a system whereby Kindle books in the United States can be lent to other people. However, not all Kindle books are eligible for loans as it depends entirely on how the publisher has set up the eBook licence. It seems apparent that how legal publishers licence eBooks is going to be a major issue for libraries.

Given these issues a logical market for eBooks is as a replacement for the “desk copy”. From a practical point of view, it is much easier to manage an eBook when it is only going to be used by a single person. One advantage of an eBook over print is the ability to easily search the text, and some eBook readers allow annotation. An added bonus is that an eBook reader tends to weigh less than its paper equivalent; a single copy of the Income Tax Act is significantly heavier than any of the portable eBook readers on the market. (Furthermore, eBook consolidations of legislation are much less likely to be left behind in conference rooms than print versions.) The general purpose Apple iPad and the forthcoming Blackberry PlayBook (which will come with Kobo’s e-reader software installed) mean that the number of lawyers with access to some variety of eBook reader is likely to increase.

Judging from the vendor forum at the 2010 Canadian Association Law Libraries conference, legal publishers are very interested in the eBook concept. From the librarian’s perspective, there are a number of reasons for integrating eBooks into the library: reduced library space, ease of supporting the needs of lawyers who work remotely, and making it simpler for lawyers who would like to go paperless. Going forward from here, it is important that publishers work with libraries to develop both a business model and a practical framework for eBooks that meets the needs of all parties.

A law library is different from other libraries not just in its collections, but in its function and especially in its role within its parent institution. In a law firm, the library and the librarians are an integral part of the firm’s practice. The librarians bill their time when working on client files. Increasingly, the library supports the lawyers not just in their research but also in their business development and knowledge management activities, responding not only to specific requests but proactively seeking and distributing information that promotes the lawyers’ work and advances the firm’s strategy.

Academic law libraries, too, are different from other libraries in the university. The library’s topical specialization allows a focus on collections and services not possible in the general humanities or science libraries. The law librarians’ responsibilities for teaching and providing research instruction to the law students is considerably more extensive and intensive than the general “information literacy” programs offered by non-law librarians. It helps, of course, that the law library is committed to serving the information needs of one of the smallest and most tightly-knit faculties in the university, permitting the librarians a level of familiarity with their clients that is one of the special attractions of law librarianship. This familiarity is further facilitated by the fact that almost all academic law libraries are physically situated within the law school. This proximity of content and context, especially when combined with an administrative structure in which the library reports to the Dean of Law rather than to the central university library, allows for a level of integration of professional service, research support and institutional strategy among the library, faculty and students that is the envy of other disciplines.

The greatest impediment to the Osgoode library’s goal of fully integrating itself into the academic and social fabric of the law school was physical: Though the library was large and spread over five floors in the law school building, the entrance to the library was poky and hidden in a remote corner of the basement level. There was only one dark, cinder-block stairwell to access the upper floors. The library was dingy and, after 40 years, the furniture and fittings were tired and inadequate. Despite the marvellous collection and a committed, service-oriented staff, students understandably avoided the library when they could. 

These physical shortcomings are addressed in the design of the new library. Though reduced in area by half and restricted to only two floors, the new library is front and centre in the new law school. The entrance, wide and welcoming, has been moved to the main floor of the law school and is the first thing you seen when entering the Gowlings Galleria. Student Services are located across the Galleria from the library, the IT Helpdesk is next door, and the cafeteria and Junior Common Room are just down the hall. The new reading rooms – the Harris-Taylor Reading Room on the upper floor and the McMillan LLP Reading Room on the lower floor – are large and bright, surrounded by windows and with new furniture. The library’s renowned special collections of early Anglo-American law and legal Canadiana will be showcased in the Canada Law Book Rare Book Room, a book-lined jewel case in the centre of the library. Enthusiasm for the new library is high, and both the students and the library staff are excited about its opening at the end of August.

While developing the conceptual and design features of the library, much thought has been given to translating the library’s new central position in the school into innovative services and programs that will better integrate it into the curriculum, life and spirit of the school. Because such effort has been made to showcase the library’s historical collections, we struggled with finding a way to highlight history without seeming fusty and traditional rather than innovative and forward-looking. We think we’ve found the appropriate balance in the Osgoode History & Archives Project.

Given the school’s current programs and reputation, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that Osgoode Hall Law School is Canada’s oldest facility for training lawyers and the oldest law school in Ontario. After several false starts, the School was formally and finally (re)founded in 1889 as an institution of the Law Society of Upper Canada. The school gets its name from Osgoode Hall, the Law Society’s home on Queen St in downtown Toronto, where the law school lived until 1968, when it became affiliated with the recently founded York University as the faculty of law and moved to a new building on the University’s campus in suburban Downsview. This new affiliation and move to new premises provided the impulse that established Osgoode as a centre of scholarly excellence and as a leader in innovation in legal education; unfortunately, it also occasioned a break with the School’s early history and traditions.

As we worked on plans for the renovation of the law school, we became increasing sensitive to our history and all the changes that Osgoode has experienced in its 121 years. As faculty packed up their offices in preparation for construction and retired faculty came by to watch, we also realized that there was a real danger of losing much of our history. Boxes containing decades of papers and memorabilia began arriving in the library with the instructions, “If you don’t want this, throw it away.” We decided it was time to start preserving our history. We decided it was time to establish the Osgoode Archives.

Designing accommodation for the archives was easy: We have included archives shelving in the new Canada Law Book Rare Book Room. We then developed a collection policy that would not conflict with but complement the well-established archives of the Law Society of Upper Canada, the Archives of Ontario, the City of Toronto Archives and York University Archives. The policy we have adopted is to document the history and student experience of Osgoode Hall Law School, as well as the history of legal education and scholarship in Canada. But building an archive is a passive activity. The more difficult calculation was using this archive not only to preserve and document our past but as an instrument actively to advance research into Osgoode’s legacy of innovation and leadership and its impact on the legal profession. Thus was born the Osgoode History Project.

We have engaged the services of Lord Cultural Resources, a Canadian company that is the world’s largest professional practice dedicated to developing and displaying cultural resources. Other projects currently being worked on by Lord include the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg and the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo. Working with Lord, we are developing a number of dynamic, interactive displays in the library and throughout the law school to showcase the School’s illustrious past. The displays will accommodate physical, audio-visual and digital presentations. The main feature will be a “history niche” in Gowlings Galleria directly beside the library entrance.

The Osgoode History & Archives Project will consist of more than revolving archival displays. The real thrust of the project is to act as a catalyst for integrating the School’s history, library collections and archival resources into the life and work of the Osgoode community by involving the students in developing and curating exhibitions, both physical and virtual, that illustrate the dramatic changes in legal education and the profession over the course of the past century and document Osgoode’s role in them. 

There is nothing new or novel in establishing an archive. The desire to establish an Osgoode Archives to capture the School’s unique history is obvious and even essential but hardly thrilling. But the Osgoode History & Archives Project is, we believe, a unique and exciting initiative, ensuring that Osgoode’s history is preserved and continues to animate its future.

Respecting ePetition and eConsultation:

• Beginning in 2011, UK citizens will be able to propose legislation on the Direct.gov.uk Website. Proposals receiving a threshold level of popular support will form the basis for legislation which will be introduced in Parliament.
• Rules have been finalized for the European Citizens’ Initiative, a direct online democracy mechanism for the European Union. Initiatives receiving a certain level of support must be considered for action by the European Commission, though the Commission is not obliged to act on them.
• ExpertNet is a new, online citizen-consultation platform of the U.S. federal government. On ExpertNet, officials of the U.S. federal executive branch will pose policy questions on which they seek input from citizens who have in-depth knowledge of the relevant subject matter. These consultations could enable citizen involvement in the earliest stages of the development of new legislation or regulations. ExpertNet is based on an idea proposed by Professor Beth Simone Noveck of New York Law School in her book, Wiki Government.

All of these programs require eParticipation technologies capable of addressing difficult problems of online communication, document and user authentication, security, and privacy. These programs are also likely to borrow from or integrate to some extent existing innovative platforms, such as Legislation.gov.uk and the European e-Justice Portal. They may also integrate new technologies being developed through endeavors such as the EU project IMPACT: Integrated Method for Policy Making Using Argument Modelling and Computer Assisted Text Analysis. The IMPACT team is creating a suite of innovative tools for enabling automated processing of comments that citizens contribute on eConsultation platforms.

In the area of eRulemaking, the coming year may see substantial activity, on three fronts in particular:

• We could see more inspiring technological innovation, building on the prodigious accomplishments of initiatives such as Princeton CITP’s FedThread system, Cornell’s Regulation Room, and WestEd’s GovPulse.
• We are likely to see more valuable scholarship about the effectiveness of eRulemaking systems, from the University of Albany’s National Science Foundation-funded DeER (Deliberative E-Rulemaking) Project, led by Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University and Professor Jennifer Stromer-Galley of the University of Albany.
• The recently revived Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) may well issue novel policy proposals — as well scholarship and technological recommendations — respecting the U.S. federal eRulemaking platform, Regulations.gov.

Online voting pilot projects — testing technologies that could be implemented in states that permit citizen lawmaking — are likely to be launched in the U.S. in the coming months, pursuant to the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. Dr. Joseph Hall of Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley has written a persuasive commentary on these efforts.

Two other innovative U.S. state-level projects concern voter guides, the information resources on which many citizens base their direct-democracy lawmaking decisions:

• The Living Voters’ Guide — a National Science Foundation-funded collaboration between the University of Washington’s Center for Communication and Civic Engagement and Design – Use – Build Group; City Club of Seattle; and Reinspire Me LLC — is a crowdsourced commentary on direct democracy proposals in the state of Washington. It allows citizens to get involved early in the process of considering citizen-proposed laws, and to consider those laws with the aid of information provided by their fellow citizens.
• The Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) convenes small groups of Oregon citizens to learn about, deliberate about, and vote on proposed Oregon ballot initiatives. Statements expressing the groups\rquote votes, and the reasons for their votes, are then included in the voters\rquote guide distributed — in print and online — to Oregon voters before the election concerning the ballot initiatives. Oregon voters, as they make up their minds about proposed ballot initiatives, can consider the insights and votes of the CIR participants, who are their neighbors. Professor John Gastil of the University of Washington Department of Communication and his National Science Foundation-funded research team recently completed a study of the Oregon CIR which found that the CIR’s statements influenced voters’ views of direct-democracy proposals. The coming year may see more valuable research from Professor Gastil’s team.

These examples demonstrate that, all around the world, there is a wealth of technological and policy innovation and insightful research currently underway in the area of citizen lawmaking. This activity involves creative partnerships among programmers, policymakers, technology administrators, scholars and their universities, government funding agencies, philanthropic organizations, for-profit firms, and the nonprofit community. Through cooperative efforts like these, the promise of technology-enabled citizen empowerment is becoming a reality.

 “Innovation” has emerged as an important theme for our management team, and it has featured prominently in our discussions. We’re challenged by our senior executives to scan the horizon, to detect emerging issues and suggest possible responses. Exciting stuff! Our clients, on the other hand, expect the information infrastructure to remain intact. If the division doesn’t carry out its core functions: providing information management, IT and library services – we’ve failed. 

I love shiny new things. I could happily spent my whole career popping from one new method, concept or tool, thinking about how to adapt what I’ve learned to my workplace. It’s fun, challenging and never boring. But circumstances may demand a more deliberate approach. How can we reconcile blue-sky thinking with the need for responsible management?

One of my colleagues in the management team used a wonderful soccer analogy when talking about the need to balance innovative thinking with risk abatement.

The closer to your own goal you are (the defending third), the more conservative you must be. You have more to risk, so there is no point in being fancy in your play. Stick to the fundamentals, and execute. If you are in the final third, creativity may be your friend. There is capacity for experimentation, and creativity may yield rewards. Risk-taking should be encouraged, and staff can be allowed to learn through failure. And the mid-field? You may be able to indulge in some creative strategies, but be prepared to pull back and take a defensive stance if the opposition gains possession. 

I love this analogy. It’s understandable and practical. It also gives managers and staff permission to vary their approach to innovation. It frees us to chase the shiny new idea, to take calculated risks at appropriate times, and justifies the discipline of a less aggressive approach at other times. 

So, what are the things I’m going to be thinking about in my library? 

E-books: Academic libraries are starting to make inroads into collecting and managing digital texts, but I have yet to hear much from the world of special libraries. Some of the legal publishers are beginning to experiment with the idea, but I have yet to have a conversation with a legal publisher where the word “lendable” was heard with anything less than horror. This needs to change. Look to the public libraries – it seems to me that they have the model all sorted out. Libraries license a certain number of copies of e-books, which are made available to cardholders. Once the limit is reached, borrowers may be placed on a waiting list. When the borrowing period is ended, the digital book disappears from the borrowers’ device. (I’m not sure if renewals are possible, but I suspect not). We librarians need to think about whether or not they wish to purchase and lend devices, or focus our attention on building collections. 

Virtual clients: Librarians have been grumbling for years about how seldom they see their clients. As mobile technologies dominate the workplace, we have to reconcile ourselves to the idea of the virtual client. How does mobile technology change the way we deliver current awareness, answer reference questions and reach out to our clients, who visit us less and less, but still rely on us to understand their needs? Can we afford not to learn how to create apps and design information products which can be easily read and used on a smartphone or tablet? The change needs to be cultural as well as technological – be seen as responsive to new technologies, and you can sell the idea of the library as a place of innovation and adaptation, rather than a capital cost. 

Going back to the soccer analogy, where are we on the field? With an election due in the fall (and knowing that a number of Members are not standing for re-election), we at the Legislative Library can anticipate a certain amount of change in the coming year. Many libraries have similar, predictable turnover in their client bases – does this present an opportunity for creativity and change, or do you need to go back to fundamentals? I would argue that this is the best time to try something new – what do you think?

Then to keep up with trends and technology I also started publishing the House Of Butter blog and subsequently a Law Librarians News Twitter both of which appear, I hope, to be popular with an online readership.

It might appear that I’m doing my utmost to blow my own trumpet but it has always been somewhat of a surprise that it’s only those from the U.S. and the Canadians who seem to have understood that it’s imperative to try and keep tabs on what the legal publishers are doing in any given quarter or year and it is these individuals who are to be congratulated for information resources such as this site, SLAW or the always worth a read , the Joe Hodnicki-led Law Librarians Blog.

There are also a host of other independent North American legal information blogs publishing informative articles and posts regularly. Admittedly these sites are usually leaders for businesses supplying the legal industry with one information product or another. But that said the product propaganda tends top be kept to a sensible minimum and a selection of reports from these blogs in any given week of the year is usually a fairly reliable indicator of what’s happening in the North American legal information industry.

There’s only been one major blip in the last few years and that was the highly successful effort Westlaw Next put into bringing bloggers and information centres onside for the launch of that product.

Westlaw Next did a great job of persuading both legal library managers and bloggers that there was nothing closer to the company’s heart than pure love and affection for every legal librarian and writer on the North American continent. The honeymoon was of course, short lived, as we all learnt by mid 2010 when TR West started disappearing their “Library Relationship Managers”. I now get the feeling that many on the receiving end were more than miffed that they’d had the wool pulled over their eyes. As the Who once said, they “Won’t Be Fooled Again”

But elsewhere it’s been planet radio silence. A few official blogs the best of which being the BIALL (British & Irish Assoc Law Librarians ) blog report infrequently on some issues concerning the legal information publishing industry. Although if there’s something nasty to be said it’s normally said quietly amongst committee members as they are also generally clients with very large accounts.. God forbid one should anger senior sales managers at West or Lexis, just the fear of re-negotiating gigantic contracts is enough to make sure that issues are quietly resolved and only partially so, rather than made public.

The same applies to the majority of Law Library blogs, of which there are only a handful outside the US. They tend to start with a flurry and even the odd post suggesting that not all is always hunky dory with their suppliers tends to err on the side of caution. We’re yet to see a library blog that has decided to take the bull by the horns and go beyond standard advice for their library users on how to use the two main databases. Maybe the revolution is silent and that’s perceived by the users as the best way to deal with the legal publisher issue.

I can understand why the world of legal information might not always be the most exciting industry to report on but it does amaze me when I hear so many complaints that never get made public or even more surprising the absolute unhappiness many librarians want to share privately about the publishers but at the same time they’re equally adamant that their concerns should never go beyond a private conversation.

Now we come to new markets that both companies are making inroads into. South America, China & India.

 It goes without saying nobody in China is going to complain. Firstly it’s too hard and without a doubt there are more pressing details to deal with in the world that is China law. The South American market is still too small but I am constantly surprised that India, a country that’s got plenty to say about the entry of foreign law firms, doesn’t really have much to say about the likes of Lexis & Westlaw who are in the market and carving themselves a niche that could make them a lot of money

So although I’ve asked the question I’m not sure I know the answer. Is reporting the legal publishing market is simply too boring, too confusing or does it just feel like fighting a constant losing battle? 

As a writer on and about the industry all I can say is that this is exactly what executives at the major legal publishers would us to feel: a sense of ennui that defies action and therefore ensures writers and information managers will give up reporting on these secretive companies .

So to conclude: Congratulations to the North Americans and now it’s time for Australia and the UK amongst others to follow the lead and create independent information sources that help keep tabs on the suppliers.

Legal Information blogs outside North America

BIALL Blog http://biall.blogspot.com/

List of Law Librarian Blogs - http://aallcssis.pbworks.com/w/page/1189465/Law-Library-Blogs

Birbeck Library Blog http://birkbecklibrarylaw.blogspot.com/

Uni of Hong Kong http://obelix.lib.hku.hk/cdblog/?cat=40

Exploded Library – Australia – http://www.explodedlibrary.info/

The Bodleian Libraries is one of the rare group of academic libraries that double as legal deposit libraries. This is a wonderful asset to have in a research library; a guarantee that any book published in Great Britain in the last 400 years is most probably available to you as a researcher within half a day of requesting it. But the pressure of housing over 11 million items in the centre of a busy town like Oxford has been growing over the past 20 or 30 years, with the Bodleian looking for solutions to the problem by sending material both to salt mines in Cheshire, and a warehouse on an estate in a village close to Oxford (fetches from both are done every day). But lack of space to expand in any of these three sites meant that planning for a purpose built book storage facility became vital, as the collection grows by some 3 linear miles per annum just from Legal Deposit books. Oxford made the decision to build its own site rather than share with another institution, because it has to retain all its LD books in perpetuity, so can’t collaborate in any ‘last copy’ retention schemes.

There were constraints, including a reticence on the part of some academics and library staff to accept the need for a radical approach to book storage; the book as object has been seen as the raison d’etre of the Bodleian collection. After managing these concerns, and also various setbacks with planning , a site was selected near Swindon, about 30 miles from Oxford, and in October 2010, just 12 months after the first sod was turned, the Book Storage Facility was officially opened.

Coming later to the issue of dealing with the storage problem has meant that the design and operation has been able to take into account the experience of many of the book warehousing projects undertaken in the past 10 to 15 years by institutions around the world. So the end result is a great solution which combines many lessons learnt elsewhere. The BSF building is made up of four sections which will be filled sequentially, with a capacity of 8.4 million items – books, maps, manuscripts, journals and newspapers – on 153 miles of shelving. For those who like statistics, here are the relevant details about the BSF, taken from the website:

The Book Storage Facility consists of an 11-metre tall solid shelving system comprising 31 Very Narrow Aisles (VNA), with seven different bay type configurations to accommodate the different sizes of books and other materials. It also has a capacity equivalent to 153 miles (230 kilometres) of shelf space and a five level multi-tier structure for map storage. To guarantee the books’ preservation for the long-term, volumes will be stored in 745,000 bar-coded and specially designed storage trays and boxes that are of archival standard. Floor area of the warehouse equates to 1.6 football pitches although the High-Density shelving provides shelf surface area equivalent to 16.5 football pitches.

This description does not give the sense of the scale of the project anywhere near the actual experience of seeing the site in action. Library staff were given tours in December so that we could see for ourselves what is being done. For those concerned about the treatment of the books, it is great to see the storage trays are designed to house the books in a vertical stack, and there are handles to pull the trays off the shelves. The retrieval is by human operators on forklifts with sensors fitted to them so they never knock into shelving, and a mechanical hoist that takes the operator/book retriever up the 11 metres to the top shelves gently to take or replace the tray of books. 

Each book/item is being bar coded – an enormous undertaking in a library system that never used a bar code until this past decade – and each box, and shelf, is also barcoded, so the location of each item is random as far as its relationship to other books on the tray or shelf is concerned, but is always recorded each time a book is moved for a reader request. Books are housed by size to maximize the use of shelf spacing. 

Ingest of the lower use six million items currently housed in Oxford and current offsite locations will take up to 2 years, although the current rate of about 31,000 items per week is exceeding expectations, and auger well for an earlier end date. Each week the overall totals are posted on a special Twitter feed; since October 2010 over 850,000 items have been transferred to the BSF. As the millionth book arrives at the Bodleian’s book store, it is timely to explore this huge undertaking in more detail.

The aspect of the project which makes the Bodleian Libraries venture unique is that we continue to offer a full book retrieval service throughout this project, irrespective of where the book is housed, so that in the majority of cases many readers will continue to be able to request items and have them delivered in the normal time frame. Readers can keep abreast of the progress of parts of the collection from the BOOK MOVES site. We have already tested this in the law library and books in the BSF were received within 5 hours of request. We are especially proud of this aspect of the whole book move process; the priority is to continue to get the book to the reader at all times.

The boffins will be pleased to know that the books are kept in a constant temperature of 18.5 degrees Celsius , with an ideal humidity level; fire safety precautions are state of art, and for many of the books that will end up in Swindon, they will be housed in far better conditions, and be far more likely to survive the ravages of time, in their new home.

As a sign of forward planning, the site on which the BSF is located has room for expansion into the future as needs arise; the University bought excess land which will lie undeveloped until new needs arise; we are guaranteed that while paper is discarded at an alarming rate in many libraries in favour of electronic, the Bodleian will continue to offer both formats well into the future.

Google Scholar supports most of Google Search’s advanced operators (e.g. “phrase search”, + and -). It also allows users to limit their searches by date with the caveat that “that some web sources don’t include publication dates, and a date-restricted search will not return articles for which Google Scholar was unable to determine a date of publication.”

If you are looking for court cases on Google Scholar, you can limit your search to a specific U.S. jurisdiction (federal or state) but there is no way of limiting your search to case law from jurisdictions outside the United States. Admittedly there is no real reason to use Google Scholar to locate Canadian case law for free as CanLII fills that role quite nicely. (As Simon Fodden has noted Google Scholar does not incorporate material from CanLII.)

Furthermore although you can limit your search results to just case law you cannot do the opposite and limit your search results to just legal journals.

Hein Online has allowed Google Scholar to index approximately 1,100 titles so that they are searchable using the Google Scholar interface. Although Hein Online is an American publisher, it includes Canadian journals. (A full list of the journals on Hein Online can be found here.) If you don’t have a Hein Online subscription, you may not be able to see the full text of these articles; however, for a number of articles there are links to free versions elsewhere on the internet. Given the scope of Hein Online, the inclusion of its materials improves the quality of the search results.

There is no easy way (yet) of limiting your Google Scholar search to just Canadian materials. Simply using site:ca to limit the results to those found on a Canadian site will mean that a number of relevant results may be missed, including those from Hein Online.

Another way of retrieving only Canadian articles is by using the journal name to limit the search results. For example, you could do this by going into the Advanced Search option and adding can OR canada OR canadian to the publication box. There are two problems with this method, the first one being that this search will return not just journal articles but also case law. The second issue is that the results will omit any Canadian articles published in journals that do not have “Canada” or “Canadian” in their name, as well as articles with citations that shorten Canadian to a “C” (e.g. CBLJ). If you’re searching for articles from within a specific subject area, it may be easier to limit your search to a specific journal or journals. You should make sure that you include all the various ways that that your journal might be cited. Currently Google does not allow you to truncate your search terms.

Using the intitle: operator to limit the search to having “Canada” or “Canadian” in the title (e.g. intitle:canada OR intitle:canadian) is not recommended as you will end up with a lot of case law where the name of one of the parties includes one of these words and you will end up excluding Canadian articles that do not include these words.

Although the bulk of legal materials on Google Scholar are American, there are enough Canadian resources on it to make Google Scholar a worthwhile tool for Canadian legal researchers.

At any rate, it was the title itself that drew me in. I recall an articling student asking for my help in a situation where a client was in trouble (aren’t they all?) because of the performance of a third party and he wanted to know what the responsibility of the third party was. My first question was, what was the qualification of the third party? Then I asked, what did the client ask of them? Did the client give them enough information? Did they perform their duties to the best of their ability, or did they have a disclaimer because they weren’t given enough information? Were they part of a regulated profession? The student had none of these answers. He returned to his principal for more information.

How do you come to accept that you don’t, and can’t, know everything? Each year I’m introduced to new articling students who I don’t think can top the previous year’s group, and every year I’m proven wrong. Yet, no matter how intelligent, and how keen, they are surprised by all the information they don’t know. I think it’s probably not for a number of years that they finally accept that there’s a ton of information available, and they’re never going to know it all.

Recently, on some of the listservs I follow, I’ve been seeing requests for alert services that provide 24/7 service. (Apparently some commercial services only provide updates during regular business hours.) Is this another example of organizations trying to keep on top of information? In my own practice, I have made a conscious decision to restrict my monitoring to weekdays and business hours, to ensure I’m not working 24/7. (Sometimes I envy Shaunna Mireau and her life off the grid.)

I have only been working in a law library for five years, and I am astounded by the advancements that have taken place in that short a time. I can’t imagine what it was like to be a law librarian before CanLII. Or how you found brief authoritative articles without Lexology. Yes, I’m familiar with the Index of Canadian Legal Literature, but that’s only an index, it’s not the full text article. In some ways our job has become so much easier and yet, so much more difficult. I was recently asked to find a tribunal decision for a particular organization based on who the lawyer was not, using free resources only. No, I didn’t find that. Kudos to law librarians in the 1990’s and earlier.

One way I’ve chosen to combat information overload is to review a select group of resources. Connie Crosby wrote about influencers the other day – I consider these resources my “influencers”. I use them to keep me in touch with the latest developments in the areas I’ve chosen to know about. I listen to other law librarians, lawyers who blog in areas my firm is interested in, as well as a few political pundits and policy wonks. I look for the “IF” – if everyone mentions the same topic, it must be relevant. But there are lots of topics I know nothing about, and that is the one lesson I’d like our articling students and new associates to learn. You don’t have to know everything, just find someone who does. That’s what I’m here for.

*Disclaimer: No actual articling student was used in the telling of this story. This is a composite of a number of requests I have received over the years.

In India, a woman may marry a goat. In Canada, it’s illegal to board a plane while it’s in flight. In Sweden, it’s illegal to buy sex, but okay to sell it. In France, it’s illegal to name a pig Napoleon. Dueling is legal in Uruguay – provided both parties are registered blood donors. Pillows are considered “passive” weapons under German law. Several countries have laws against kissing in public. Some laws make you laugh out loud, some make you shake your head in wonder, and some are just puzzlers. Could something have been lost in translation? Were these really laws? If so, are they still in force? Why were they enacted?

Simon Fodden’s post about New York City’s “Chocolate Library” ban got me thinking about similar laws and regulations in foreign countries. Finding fun, “silly”, or odd foreign laws is hard. These laws often come to light in newspaper stories, and sometimes in radio broadcasts and podcasts. Sometimes legislatures bring the laws to light when they make systematic efforts to root out outdated, antiquated laws (“Corrections Day”, “Fix-It Day”, “Common Sense Day”).

What are the typical subjects of these laws? Animals, marriage, attire (or lack thereof), sex, drinking, smoking, the body? And are older laws more likely to be funny or unusual than newer ones? Are countries with unique geography, history, culture, religion more likely to have these types of laws? I found no good way to predict. 

Who would have thought of the opera as harmful? Well, for seven years (from 2001 to 2008), Turkmenistan banned Turkmen from attending the opera and circus. The legislature considered these forms of entertainment suitable only for foreigners and ethnic Russians (Global Legal Monitor).

Typical sources for funny foreign laws usually do not include citations, so verifying them is difficult. It’s LOL, but was it really law? The sources usually give insufficient information – no specific jurisdiction (national/federal, state/province, city), type of legislation, date. The sources rarely say if the legislation is still in force. Some of the sources themselves look pretty wacky or vanity-published. It’s all fun and games…until you have to go hunt down the actual law.

Below are some resources for identifying funny, silly, stupid, crazy, strange, and other unusual laws around the world. A few include legal citations. Don’t forget to look at the Global Legal Monitor, JURISTNews, and general news sources. Forget that the laws listed are mostly not sourced, and enjoy! By the way, I did not verify any of these alleged laws.

Nathan Belofsky, The Book of Strange and Curious Legal Oddities: Pizza Police, Illicit Fishbowls, and Other Anomalies That Make Us All Unsuspecting Criminals ( Perigee/Penguin Group, 2010) (gives citations for some of the laws)

Fenton S. Bresler & Nicola Jennings, Beastly Law (David & Charles, 1986) (A Graham Tarrant Book)

Fuller Buhl, Loony Sex Laws Throughout the World: An Outlandish Collection of Rib Tickling Ordinances, Statutes and Decrees of Interest to All Law Abiding Citizens (Booksurge Llc/CreateSpace, 2010)

Ross Clark, How to Label a Goat: The Silly Rules and Regulations That Are Strangling Britain (Harriman House, 2006)

Lance S. Davidson, Ludicrous Laws & Mindless Misdemeanors: The Silliest Lawsuits and Unruliest Rulings of All Times (John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998) (includes citations)

• In Arizona, first cousins cannot marry…unless they are over sixty-five. But they still may have children (p. 107)

Dumb, Crazy or Stupid Laws Around the World (Duhaime: Bringing Legal Information to the World; includes citations)(see their “Law Fun” site generally for crazy English laws)

Dumb Laws (occasionally supplies references, usually to books about strange laws; website mentioned in ABA Journal, March 1999, at 74)

• It is illegal to wear hot pink pants after midday Sunday in Australia

Tom Ginsburg, “Constitutional Oddities” (University of Chicago Law School, August 13, 2010 lecture on comparative constitutions)

• The Swedish constitution protects the right of reindeer-herding
• Many constitutions protect the right to leisure 
• 15% of the Prussian Constitution of 1871 concerns the telegraph system
• Under the Chilean Constitution of 1822, the chief executive cannot get married or become a godfather without the consent of Congress

“Hunting For Silly Statutes and Loony Laws,” San Antonio Express-News, July 20,1997, at A19

Dick Hyman, The Columbus Chicken Statute and More Bonehead Legislation (Stephen Greene Press, 1985) (has a section on “Strange, Zany, and Archaic Laws of Countries Around the World” at pages 85-117, but no citations)

• A pig may travel on English railroads if accompanied by a passenger and a ticket (p.89)
• In Bermuda, public profanity is prohibited (p.99)
• Mexico prohibits under-balcony serenades of more than one hour (p.109)
• Section 122 of New Zealand’s Crime Act of 1908 made it illegal to write a letter to a pirate (p.110)

Jeff Koon & Andy Powell. You May Not Tie an Alligator to a Fire Hydrant: 101 Real Dumb Laws (The Free Press, 2002) (includes citations)

• In Schaumburg, Illinois, it is illegal to fly a kite (p.107)

And from the Simon & Schuster, 2006 ed.:

• In England, it is illegal for a lady to eat chocolates on a public conveyance
• In France, no pig may be addressed as Napoleon by its owner (note that there is a website which contends that France never enacted any such law)
• In Scotland, it is illegal to be drunk in possession of a cow
• In Thailand, it is illegal to leave your house if you are not wearing underwear

Legal Grounds (FindLaw Legal Humor Blog)

Legal Humour News (“odd or amusing ‘law-related’ news stories” by Canada-based Daniel & Marcel Strigberger)

Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts, Wacky Laws, Weird Decisions & Strange Statutes (Main Street, 2004)

• In Canada, it is illegal to board a plane while it is in flight (p.23)
• In Kentucky, “[n]o female shall appear in a bathing suit on any highway…unless she is escorted by at least two officers or unless she be armed with a club” (p.34)

Kathi Linz & Tony Griego, Chickens May Not Cross the Road and Other Crazy (but True) Laws (Houghton Mifflin, 2002)

Nigel Napier-Andrews, This Is the Law?: A Selection of Silly Laws from Around the World (Doubleday, 1976)

Joanne O’Sullivan, Book of Legal Stuff: Wacky Laws, Weird Decisions, & Strange Statutes  (Imagine Pub. Inc, 2010)

Odd Animal Laws, Odd Culture (AnimalBlawg, December 13, 2010)(includes some citations and links to sources)

• In India, it is illegal to maim or kill an animal worth more than 10 Rupees (22 cents)
• It is illegal to give alcohol to a moose in Fairbanks, Alaska (or keep alligators in bathtubs)

Robert Wayne Pelton, Loony Laws That You Never Knew You Were Breaking (Walker & Co., 1990)(has chapter on “Laughable Laws in Foreign Places” at pages 109-119; detailed descriptions, but no citations)

Robert Wayne Pelton, Loony Sex Laws: That You Never Knew You Were Breaking (Walker & Co., 1992) (covers laws worldwide)

• In Peru, it is illegal for unmarried young men to have female alpacas live in their homes or apartments (p.20)

Barbara Seuling, It Is Illegal to Quack Like a Duck & Other Freaky Laws (Lodestar Books, 1988)(no citations)

• Claudius II banned marriage – he claimed that married men made poor soldiers (p.16)
• In 19th century England, the penalty for committing suicide was death (p.40)

Stupid Laws & Dumb State Laws: Outside the U.S. (lawsome.net)

Weird News (CNEWS)

• It is illegal for men to wear make-up in the Sudan, and for a woman to apply make-up to a man

Onika K. Williams, “The Suppression of a Saggin’ Expression: Exploring the “Saggy Pants” Style within a First Amendment Context,” 85 Ind. L.J. 1169 (2010) (one of several articles on laws against sagging/saggy/droopy pants; see e.g. Angelica M. Sinopole’s “No Saggy Pants” (2008))

“In June 2008, a film crew from a Japanese television program, World Travelog, ventured to Opa-Locka, Florida, to shoot footage regarding the city’s ordinance banning saggy pants. The footage was for a segment on unusual laws in foreign countries…”

When I first met Morris in 1972, I was a second year law student at Harvard Law School. Sharon Hamby O’Connor, who had been my boss at the undergraduate library, suggested that I meet with him to discuss my very foggy career plans. (Sharon went on to become Law Librarian, Professor and Associate Dean at Boston College Law School, yet another of Morris’s mentees). Inspirational in every possible way, Morris told me to be a law librarian. Looking at him, at his work, and entranced, as so many were, by his sweet manner, he changed my life. I recall that on that day he told me of BEAL, his projected Bibliography of Early American Law. It was an ambitious project, conceived of with Balfour Halevy, that ultimately was designed to prepare a catalog that listed each and every legal imprint in the United States published before 1860. Ideally, Morris would look at each book in person. There were times when he had to settle for a photocopy of the title page, but that was never really satisfying. Though he had stalwart assistants over the years, he wanted as much personal control as possible. He was responsibl;, it was his project.

The project took decades. Morris first told me about it in 1972, it appeared in 1998. It contained 15,000 entries. The level of quality control is staggering. Each of the entries went through one filter: Morris Cohen. The sorting mechanism was his brain, the judgment his own. The size of the project was daunting from the beginning. The fact that in the end one human being stood at its center is, by the lights of 2011, staggering.

There was also the thrill of the hunt. Unearthing an obscure title, finding a variant printing, these were delights for Morris. There was a healthy measure of detective work in BEAL. He knew that when he finished it would be a complete record and that it would be done correctly. (Morris conceded that as time passed other titles would inevitably turn up, they always do, but it would not be for want of his trying.) Morris’s gift for writing pellucid prose was the whipped cream on top of the sundae.

This form of information verification is a shining artifact of the past. As bots and spiders crawl across the web pulling in data and compiling it, as Google scans and organizes the books of the world by algorithm and we fight about metadata, the thought of one man personally examining and verifying each item in a data base of this size approaches the level of science fiction. Nor was this man following a set of outlined instructions or taking advantage of existing work product. Morris Cohen could be as creative as needed. It was an intellectual exercise.

I will miss Morris for his wisdom, his humor and his friendship. But I also miss the world in which BEAL was possible, when humans with deep expertise used judgment to assess and to verify information. The scholar in the stacks holding the actual copy of the book in hand, compiling a great, comprehensive bibliography has evolved into a good search string made across the correct data bases. We will not see his like, or BEAL’s like again. I miss Morris and I miss the information world in which he worked.

When you walk into an academic law library, the first that meets your eye is row upon row of bookstacks as far as the eye can see, filled with published law reports. It’s an impressive sight; and, in the 21st Century, an anachronism. Fact is, our extensive collections of bound law reports are no longer used. Osgoode’s have been in storage for over a year as the new library is being built, and no one has missed them. Almost all the information contained in printed law reports is now available online. Law firms are already disposing of their collections. The plan for the new Osgoode Hall Law School library and my advice to my colleagues is to “let them go!”

The judgments of our courts are now born digital – written, distributed and stored in electronic format. The printed volumes of published law reports are offshoot of a digital production process; consequently, it is curious that the publication of law reports, simultaneous in both print and online formats, is structured in such a way that the print market subsidizes the online market, despite the fact that the online formats are used almost exclusively. As subscriptions to the print editions of law reports are cancelled, the ever fewer remaining subscribers must bear the cost not only of printing and binding the published reports, but of editorial and other production costs. As more subscribers cancel, subscription costs go up and up (as much as 20% annually in some recent years) to protect publishers’ revenues. Most series of law reports now carry annual subscription costs in the thousands of dollars. It’s considerably more expensive for a small firm to subscribe to a series of print law reports than to subscribe to Quicklaw or Westlaw Canada.

One reason some law firms continue to subscribe to print reporters is for photocopying, out of fear that online formats will not be accepted by a court or especially because they need to document page-specific references. If the imaged PDFs of law reports were available online for printing, I wonder how many libraries would continue to subscribe to print. Though Canada Law Book provides PDFs of its law reports on the BestCase service, other publishers are holding back. Carswell continues not to make imaged PDFs a printing option on Westlaw Canada, as it is for all West reporters on Westlaw; they say it is too expensive an undertaking in the small Canadian market – even though the PDFs are available to print subscribers and Westlaw Australia, serving an even smaller market, has made PDFs of its law reports available. 

Rather than embrace digital formats as a chance to re-invent and revitalize law reporting, publishers go to extremes to protect existing revenues from a declining print subscriber base. The Canadian market already offers proportionately more series of law reports than any other country. On top of this, as print subscriptions have declined, publishers have doubled and then redoubled the number of cases reported and the number of volumes published in those reporters. I was surprised to read in Eric Appleby’s recent post that fully 70% of judgments received from the courts are selected for reporting in Maritime Law Books’ print reporters; I would be interested to know what the proportion is for Ontario judgments and the Ontario Reports. The Dominion Law Reports now comprise fully 10 volumes per year (while England gets by with five slim annual volumes in The Law Reports). With so many cases to analyze and digest, publishers (some more than others) have attempted to control their costs by standardizing and minimizing the headnotes and other critical apparatus provided in their reports; in other words, more equals less.

Is there any value in the fact that a case has been reported? Someone from Quicklaw once told me that an absurd proportion of the Ontario cases viewed and/or printed from Quicklaw (more than 80%?) were from the “reported” Ontario Reports (ORs) database, the remainder from the “unreported” Ontario Judgments (OJs) database. Of these latter cases, the majority of cases were recent and ultimately reported in the ORs. Obviously, there is a reason a case is reported or not – and subsequent reference bears that out.

Is there a future for law reports? The Canadian market can no longer support the number of law reporters and the volume of cases being reported in print. If General Motors can cease production of half its marques, then our publishers can easily eliminate some of the reporters published and the cases reported in them. Then, print must be put to rest and online must be the official version of record, as is now the case with law journals. All case identifiers, references and citations must be vendor-neutral, in order to eliminate any systemic dependency on print. The selection of cases for reporting should be more restrictive and probably, as in England, delegated to an independent council of law reporting. Possibly, our rules of procedure should be revised to restrict references to reported cases only. And I believe that, now more than ever, we need professionally-written, quality headnotes with extensive critical apparatus (including a topical numbering system) for all “reported” cases. A mechanism for delivering these reported cases to the profession might look like Canada Law Book’s CaseAlerts service, with distribution by email, blog, RSS or tweet, customizable by the end user by jurisdiction and/or topic. Such a model would serve the needs of individual current awareness as well as provide researchers with value-added tools for discovery and evaluation of relevant law and precedent.

Law reporting has always served three purposes: to bring significant new decisions to the profession’s attention (the “current awareness” function); to build and preserve a record of precedent for the common law (the “precedent” function); and to facilitate researching case law precedent (the “research” function). All of these functions are best served by quality, selective law reporting in a digital environment. Freed from the burden of collecting, authenticating and preserving judgments, our libraries can concentrate their increasingly straitened resources on assisting researchers to access legal information rather than warehousing unused print volumes and risking becoming irrelevant. For more on this, I would refer you to a recent, thought-provoking lecture by John Palfrey, Director of the Harvard Law Library, on “The Path of Legal Information”, presented on the occasion of his appointment as Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
In the new Osgoode library, our extensive collections of law reports (some 20,000 linear feet, almost four miles of shelving) will either be sent to a collaborative offsite storage facility, put into compact mobile shelving in the library’s basement, or transferred to the rare book room. We are currently deciding whether we shouldn’t cancel our subscriptions and stop collecting law reports in print. (Harvard no longer collects law reports in print.) When you come into the rebuilt Osgoode library from the new Gowlings Hall, you will walk straight into the Harris-Taylor Reading Room, with windows on one side, group study rooms on the other, and direct access to the information desk and reference librarians. You will see no law reports; if you’re looking for them, you will naturally go online.

We saw that these practices seem unusual because they are inconsistent with industry trends, and because these publishers already use digital publishing processes, have access to free or low-cost ejournal platform and ecommerce software, often have access within their own corporate families to expertise in implementing such software and services, and, given the size of the global market and the interdisciplinary appeal of much of these publishers’ periodical content, seem to be foregoing substantial marketing opportunities and revenue streams.

Given all the factors weighing in favor of freeing up metadata and implementing article-level ecommerce on the Web, what could be holding these publishers back?

Here are some suggestions:

• Low levels of competition. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger has observed that legal publishers — like producers in other industries — when faced with minimal or no competition in a market, tend to resist innovation, due to a lack of incentives;
• Fear of cannibalizing print subscriptions. Some publishers may worry that improving Web access to periodical content will cause some print customers to cancel their subscriptions, resulting in overall declines in revenue for periodical content.
• Fear of cannibalizing online subscriptions. Legal publishers may worry that, if interoperable metadata and ecommerce for articles were offered on the Web, online periodical subscription customers might cancel their subscriptions in favor of purchasing articles on an ad hoc basis, and that this, too, would result in overall declines in revenue from periodical content.
• Failure to understand the scope of potential demand. Some of these legal publishers may not realize the scope of potential demand for their periodical content, especially among nonlawyers, in their own nation and in other countries. My previous post offered several examples of evidence of such demand.
• Failure to envision second-order benefits. Some legal publishers may not have considered desirable second-order effects of the new approach. Such effects include a higher Web profile for all of the publisher’s content; possibilities for engaging with existing and new audiences in new ways; receiving innovative ideas from customers and discovering new business partners through Web 2.0 technology; and developing innovative new products and services built upon periodical metadata or content.

How might the legal community and the broader scholarly/professional publishing community respond to these concerns? Here are some ideas:

• Competition: Members of the legal community who have not previously engaged in publishing could enter the legal periodical publishing market. Given the low costs of ejournal publishing today; the availability of a variety of free or low-cost publishing platforms including ejournal, blogging, and content management systems; and the abundance of legal academics and professionals willing and able to supply quality content, the potential for new market entrants to increase competition in the legal periodical article market seems great.
• Cannibalizing print subscriptions: Legal publishers’ concern about reduced print subscriptions’ leading to overall reduced revenues seems reasonable. Yet we saw in my earlier post that most major U.S. and U.K. scholarly and professional publishers have adopted the new free metadata plus article-level Web ecommerce model despite such concerns. The behavior of those publishers suggests that legal publishers’ concerns about cancellation-related revenue loss may be overstated. Alternatively, the conduct of most scholarly and professional publishers might reflect an industry consensus that print’s future is bleak, while Web ecommerce’s future is bright, and that those who act now to develop free Web metadata distribution and article-level ecommerce capabilities may realize considerable early-mover advantages. The legal publishers we are discussing might counter that their content is so narrow in subject scope compared to that of most scholarly/professional publishers (for whom law is just one of many subjects in which they publish), that a move to the free Web would present the former with substantial losses in print subscriptions without compensatory gains from ecommerce. One response might be to ask whether those concerns are based on empirical evidence or on speculation, and, if based on the latter, to encourage these legal publishers to experiment: these publishers should offer Web-based metadata and article-level ecommerce respecting a small number of titles, and then evaluate the results, both in terms of overall revenues, and in terms of second-order effects.
• Cannibalizing online subscriptions: This also seems to be a justified concern, respecting which two responses come to mind. First, many subscription customers subscribe to packages of content of which periodicals constitute just one item; such customers are unlikely to cancel those subscriptions if periodical articles alone are offered via Web-based ecommerce. Second, individual articles available via ecommerce could be priced — in light of the high probability that the customer base for such articles will include those who cancel online subscriptions plus a substantial number of new customers — so as to make up for lost online subscriptions.
• Potential demand: One way to help these legal publishers understand the scope of potential demand for their periodical articles is for legal scholars and practitioners to educate the publishers. Law professors, practicing lawyers, and legal information professionals could discuss this issue with publishers at programs and informal conversations at legal scholarly and professional meetings. Since much of this demand may come from beyond the publishers’ home-country borders, international conferences may be especially suitable settings for these discussions.
• Second-order benefits. Independent publishing consultants, epublishing and ecommerce specialists within the legal publishers’ own corporate families, and representatives from the broader scholarly/professional publishing community might be best equipped to help legal publishers learn about the kinds of desirable second-order effects that can arise from the provision of Web-based metadata and ecommerce.

The anomaly of some legal publishers’ declining to provide Web-based access to their article-level metadata and content need not occasion despair. Rather, this circumstance may yield promising opportunities: for the legal community to create alternative platforms for publishing their valuable article-level content; and for legal publishers, the legal community, and representatives of the broader scholarly and professional publishing community to engage in productive dialogue and collaboration.

Shel Holtz started the day with Tactical Transparency : the Value of Access to Information. He opened with a story from the Toronto mayoral race. It was the tale of QueensQuayKaren, the Twitter account-holder and Smitherman fan who turned out to be a Rob Ford staffer. As someone interested in the social media and who works in a political environment, this is a case study that prompted a lot of interest. Much to be learned here. 

Holtz then provided an interesting definition of “transparency”. It does not mean: “make everything available to your clients and competitors”. Holtz defines transparency as: “The degree to which an organization shares the information its stakeholders need to make decisions”. This includes:

• Values
• Culture
• A description of the decision-making process
• Business strategies
• Business practices and their results 

It does not include intellectual property, profit margins or those things that give you an advantage in the marketplace. He also proposes that organizations should stand their attitude toward information on its head. Instead of assuming that everything is important and should be kept tightly controlled, he advocates assuming that everything is open, and the organization should justify to itself what information needs to be protected. It’s a much shorter list. He also told the story of the U.S. Department of Defense, which recently opened access to social media to all employees. All of them. Their attitude was interesting – they decided to focus on training them how to be safe in social media, much as they train them to be safe on the battlefield. 

Don Tapscott presented an overview of some of the work he’s been doing lately, and gave some of the major points from his newest book, Macrowikinomics. As always, he brought some truly Big Ideas to the discussion, and helped to frame the rest of the day. From my terribly scribbly notes, some of his key points (with my notes in brackets):

• The “broadcast” model is changing. Communication is becoming a dialogue, conversational instead of one-way. (I suspect this is not news to THIS audience)
• In the old model, content was king. Now, it’s context. (How does this change librarianship? Training? KM?)
• Creators are becoming curators. (How does that change the skill sets needed?)
• Social networking is becoming social production – it’s not just about contact. Groups are forming to build something, then disappearing to reform with other collaborators. 

This being one of THREE presentations Mr. Tapscott was to give that day, he unfortunately had to leave us right after his address. 

Jon Husband gave the next session I attended, and Tapscott’s talk was an excellent launching-point for his presentation. A couple of important ideas I was able to capture:

• In the past, change was a periodic event in the life of an organization. NOW, organization is the periodic event. 
• Hierarchy is a prosthesis for trust. (Here, he was talking about how bureaucracy and “chain of command” is used to replace collaboration and trusting employees to work for the betterment of the organization. Engaged employees, he proposes, will always want to do the best for the organization – this links back nicely to the DOD proposition that you need to train people to be safe). 

It was Husband’s presentation which gives this column its title. He proposed that in the “old days”, knowledge was power. It’s a truism. We give money, power and regard to those with specialized knowledge, higher education, and abilities that others do not possess. 

Husband proposes that in the emerging world of social media and collaborative technologies, knowledge is no longer power. Power derives from control of access to information. 

Where this gets interesting, is that those who are opening up access to information seem to be reaping the benefits. Tapscott told the story of Goldcorp Mining (which I believe is also documented in Grown Up Digital). They opened up their geological information and maps to the world, offered a $500,000 prize to the person who could help them find gold, and reaped billions of dollars in reward for their transparency. Dazzling. 

As a government employee, I’m inspired to see how open data has lead to information tools that both engage citizens and serve them in ways that we would never think of. But how hard is it going to be to break the old equation? Will organizations, public and private alike, be able to stomach the risk of transparency? Will they really have the choice to remain closed? Perhaps not. 

For more information on Webcom, search #webcomTO on Twitter.

Our library is like many others – we have purchased e-books to provide the best range of resources to our academics and students. These are in addition to the paper, because we are lucky and for the UK at least we still get most paper publications via Legal Deposit. The e-books we can buy that are on reading lists vary from the very best publishing from our sister department, OUP, through to less critical but still handy collections on international law and commercial topics from Brill and Kluwer. Sweet & Maxwell – via Westlaw – provide e-book versions of the major Common Law Series titles, for a similar cost, law school wide, to that paid for a single paper copy. 

I am in two minds about e-books. I can see them as an invaluable addition to the suite of e-resources available to our students, and if they mean the user can get to to the page or chapter they need at a time they want, and from a location of their choosing beyond the law library, then this must be a good thing. We now have tens of thousands of titles, all linked from our catalogue, and discoverable if you know what you are looking for, or if someone has provided you with a link, eg, through a reading list. You can get a flavour of the coverage here, though you won’t be able to read any of them unless you are a member of our university. That’s a problem.

And this is where the Springer initiative is so interesting. They are not only providing the libraries with the e-books – they are ceding ownership of the e-book to the library, in exactly the same way they treat paper copies of books. And this seems only right. But the access will still be limited to members of our institutions, which concerns me. We do not restrict access to our paper books – anyone who comes to our library in person can read or copy any book in the library, whether they are members of our university or not. 

I agree with copyright restrictions up to a point, but it is strange that we continue to apply the concepts of an intellectual property right that was established in 1709 to e-books in particular, because they are not going to be used in the same way as paper. With paper books anyone could browse shelves and read or borrow books because of the copyright exemption rights given to libraries to provide books to readers. These rights have not been extended by legislation to e-books.

We have electronic publishing totally tied up by lawyers before the products even hit the ground on the one hand, and on the other, the internet generation who really do not care about copyright restrictions and the implications down the track of not protecting the author’s rights of ownership. The restrictions of access to e-books owned by an institution are put in place by the institution, through single sign-on protocols such as Shibboleth. That is so that we comply with publisher restrictions, but now, if the restriction is lifted, as with Springer, will the institutions be the ones to decide whether to offer a two tier system of access to e-books? 

It is unlikely that public libraries will be able to afford all the e-books on offer in specialist subjects, so these will usually be restricted to academic institutions, and non members will have difficulty getting access.

So my question is – if the tipping point is reached soon, and the publishers move to e-book publishing in preference to paper, will we still have libraries acting as silos, holding the same material throughout the country, but with only their constituents being able to read these e-books? Where will the ‘man-on-the-street’ go to consult law material? Will Springer’s bold move challenge their competitors so that the digital future will be a truly open virtual library? As consumers of academic e-book publishing we still have issues to address before we can be confident that an e-book library is the digital mirror image of a real book library.

Second, Frank Pezzanite, the director of Library Systems and Services, the corporation which, if taken as a single entity now operates the fifth largest public library system in the United States, sees libraries as poorly administered. “Atrocious,” was the word he chose. He sees library staff as people occupying chairs, doing little, serving time until that sweet, sweet retirement that awaits. Savings are easily found. Just fire the staff, get rid of any bothersome unions, and create new, sleeker jobs with less benefits.

Though newspapers are in sad decline (last year I chaired the search committee for the new Dean of Berkeley’s School of Journalism, and though each candidate for the job spoke to us of the impending doom of the printed newspaper,, no one had a way to prevent it), the New York Times still holds special cachet. It is the newspaper of record in the United States. To place this article on the front page puts the issue of the soul of libraries into play before the whole nation. Passionate letters to the Times followed; some filled with words of high praise for the public library. And of course, Mr. Pezzanite pointed out that he admires libraries, he just wants them to work better.

I see this as a battle for the soul of librarianship. Though I lived my professional life in the rarified air of an academic library, I knew who was really on the front line of the profession. It was the public librarians who represented the highest ideals of librarianship. Our professional identity was one of service, devoted to providing reliable information to the largest possible number of patrons. In a library that was part of a for-profit enterprise, these ideals might play out differently, but they remained our anchor. Librarians led fights for access to information, to protect unpopular literature and unsavory readers. Librarians never hesitated to take up the defense of unpopular causes. We are not a profession of masochists, but we were willing to do what needed to be done.

As information morphed into the digital world at the end of the 20^th Century, functions that had been ours were seized by the schools of management or business. The heads of the New York Public Library, the Harvard University Library, and the Library of Congress could not be librarians. Those jobs were too big, too capacious in responsibility and prestige. But we hung on. We kept saving society from itself.

Maybe I am a hopeless eccentric, but the touchstone in all of those fights was the public librarian. She or he epitomized all that was best about us. But now, that service is being viewed through a different lens. Where our hearts had been founded on service, now they would be judged by the numbers on the bottom line.

This change shifts a tectonic plate. If the core value of our profession is service, if the ideal is the soul of librarianship, then there can be noble sacrifice. If the core value is economic efficiency, there can only be rational judgments. Of course public librarians have always had to meet budget limits — all librarians are experts at doing more with less. But in the end, the way was lighted by something larger. There was a beauty and an honor there. There was something worth the sacrifice.

The librarians who work for Mr. Pezzanite will still do their best. Though they will do it without unions, and with new work rules, they will still try to help each patron. But a corner will be turned. This may be the thin edge of a very thick and very quickly approaching wedge. 

Sometimes it is good to be 60. 

Of course, Twitter is only as good as the people in it, so if you don’t have a Twitter account, please join today, and let me know so I can follow you. Take part in the international legal information conversation on Twitter!

Selected FCIL Folks on Twitter

Legal Information Professionals, Libraries, Associations, Publishers

@atweber (Andrew Webber, Law Library of Congress)

@AustLawLibAssoc (Australian Law Librarians Association (ALLA))

@biall_uk (British & Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL))

@bnaitax (BNA International)

@Chinese_Law (Laney Zhang, Law Library of Congress)

@clsellers (Christine Sellers, Law Library of Congress)

@cottinstef (Stephane Cottin; French law librarian)

@ecarr42 (Emily Carr, Law Library of Congress)

@HanibalGoitom (Law Library of Congress; Eritrea, African law)

@itspoppet (Clare Feikert, Law Library of Congress; UK law specialist)

@juriconnexion (French law databases/electronic resources)

@kiwi_in_dc (Kelly Buchanan, Law Library of Congress; NZ, Pacific law)

@KluwerLaw (Kluwer Law International)

@kurtcarroll (Law Library of Congress)

@law_book (New Law Books)

@LawLibCongress (Global Legal Monitor, In Custodia Legis blog, FCIL events)

@LyoLouisJacques (Foreign & International Law Librarian, Chicago)

@nats10mil (Mark Strattner, Law Library of Congress)

@peacepalace (international legal news, new library acquisitions, e-alerts)

@precisement (French law documentation specialist)

@rbharrington (Yale Law Library)

@sergiostone (Stanford Law Library)

@sioslo (Foreign and International Law Librarian, Texas)

@susankurtas (Librarian; United Nations documents)

@teresamiguel (Yale Law Library)

@thelawbod (Bodleian Law Library, Oxford)

@UNLibrary (United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library)

@yalelawlibrary (new foreign and international law books, databases, exhibits)

News & Articles

@BBCNews

@CFR_org (Council of Foreign Relations)

@CompPolicyInt (Competition Policy International)

@TheEconomist

@ForeignAffairs_

@FP (Foreign Policy magazine)

@FT (Financial Times)

@GdnLaw (The Guardian – law news, commentary, analysis)

@JURISTnews (foreign and international legal news)

@legalnewsfrance (daily French law news)

Foreign & International Law, Trade, Human Rights

@AmnestyOnline (Amnesty International)

@anticorruption (Transparency International)

@asilorg (American Society of International Law (ASIL))

@BIICL (British Institute of International and Comparative Law)

@bundesgericht (Bundesgerichtshof = Federal Court of Justice, Germany)

@BVerfG (Bundesverfassungsgericht = Federal Constitutional Court, Germany)

@ChathamHouse (Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA))

@clarinette02 (privacy law)

@CyndeeLaw (Canadian international trade & sales tax lawyer)

@dandrezner (Foreign Policy columnist; global politics, economics; international affairs)

@DanHarris (international lawyer, China law blogger)

@Donald_K_Anton (international lawyer, Australian National University)

@echrclfrance (European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) Case-Law – France)

@ecre (European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE))

@EILBlog (Joshua Lenon, Everyday International Law)

@forcedmigration (Forced Migration Online (FMO))

@humanrights1st (Human Rights First)

@humanrightsblog (Human Rights in Ireland)

@hrwnews (Human Rights Watch)

@intltradelawyer (Martha Harrison, Canada)

@IntLawGrrls (women’s voices in international law, policy, practice)

@JusticePortal (Hague Justice Portal; international courts; peace, security)

@lsolum (Lawrence Solum, Legal Theory Blog; SSRN international law articles)

@netlex (French lawyer)

@NicolasJondet (UK, US, French digital copyright laws)

@opiniojuris (Opinio Juris international law blog)

@privacyint (Privacy International, London-based civil liberties group)

@slaw_dot_ca (Slaw.ca, Canadian law blog)

@STF_oficial (Supremo Tribunal Federal, Brazil)

@STJBrasil (Superior Tribunal de Justiça, Brazil)

@SusanneUre (Web Editor for Amnesty International, Canada; human rights)

@tradelawyer (John Boscariol, Canada, NAFTA/WTO/FTAs)

@UKHumanRightsB (UK Human Rights Blog)

@USIP (United States Institute of Peace; transitional justice; constitutions)

@WorldTradeLaw (WorldTradeLaw.net; international trade law, WTO)

@wrcommission (Women’s Refugee Commission; detention, asylum, families)

There are many other international law and international relations-related Twitterers. See for instance, Foreign Policy magazine’s Twitterati 100 (login required), a list of think tanks and international organizations on Twitter. Also, Justia has a list of international law “Legal Birds: Legal Professionals on Twitter.” For more general information about Twitter, check Lyonette Louis-Jacques, “Twitter for Law Librarians: Real Life Happens Between Blog Posts and E-Mails,” CALL Bulletin, No. 209, Fall 2008, at 38.

One problem with the growing number of online database subscriptions is the associated increase in the number of passwords that librarians have to administer. It can be frustrating for lawyers and other end users of these products to have to remember a large number of user IDs and passwords; it may even act as a barrier to use of these expensive products. Therefore one of the goals of librarians should be to make it as easy as possible for the end user to access these products.

Obviously, how the resource is licenced is the most important factor. Some products require that each potential user be given a unique ID and password; other products only allow one organization-wide password. In some situations there may be a choice; for example, you may be able to choose between getting an enterprise-wide licence for a product or getting licences for a specific number of named users. You may not always be told there are options beyond what is initially offered, so always check with your vendor. Most vendors are willing to work with you to find the best solution to your needs.

There are several advantages to using individual user IDs and passwords. Individual user IDs mean that you can immediately cut off access when the user leaves. If the resource allows you track usage by user, having individual IDs allows you to see who is using a product and how much they are using it; you can see if a resource is being underutilized by a specific practice group. Being able to track usage may also give you a clue that someone is not using a resource properly. It makes it much easier to bill costs back to clients.

On the other hand, having only one organization-wide (or office-wide) password can make life a lot simpler for an administrator. The password can be easier to find (e.g. it may be published on the organization’s intranet) meaning that users are much less likely to lose access to the resource. Contrast that to the situation in which a lawyer goes to use a resource late at night only to discover he has misplaced his password and has no way of finding it.

A third possibility offered by some vendors is using IP authentication instead of requiring an ID/password for users to log in. Databases that use IP authentication make the login process even easier, as the only thing users have to remember is the database’s URL. In order to use IP authentication, your institution needs to have a fixed IP address or range of IP addresses. The downside is that users may not be able to access the database from home.

Assuming you have options, there are several things to consider when choosing between one password for all users versus individual passwords:

Are you charging back for this product? Generally a good rule is: if you are not charging back for the resource, you should have one general password. If you are charging back, have individual passwords. File numbers get entered incorrectly; it’s much easier to figure out what the real file numbers should be if you know who did the searches in the first place. Some products force users to use approved file numbers. While these products can be useful, they may also act as deterrents to database use.

Are you paying a flat fee for this product or are you paying by usage? If you are paying by usage you want to have an idea of who is using the resource. Every librarian has a horror story involving an articling student and several thousand dollars of database costs. If you do not know who ran up significant costs, you will not be able to tell whether these are legitimate search costs or the result of an articling student who needs some remedial database training.
How much personalization does an individual password allow? A number of databases allow personalization, e.g. the default email address for results to be sent to, preferred format of search results or having favourite databases appear on the front page.

Can the organization’s database administrator or user reset the password if they forget it? User IDs and passwords are easily lost, usually at the most inopportune time. If possible, it is important for someone at your organization to be given the ability to reset passwords rather than the vendor’s technical support being the ones to do it. With one general password, users are less likely to lose access to a product as multiple people will know what the password is.

What are the cost implications? Licencing a product that can be used by all members of an organization is generally more expensive than one is licenced to a specific number of people. (Note that this is not always the case.)

If you are using individual user IDs and passwords, you will want to try to minimize the chances that this information will be forgotten/lost by the user. It helps to have a consistent format for your user IDs; email addresses are ideal as they are easy for users to remember and should be unique. However, the vendor may restrict the length of user IDs resulting in an inability to use email addresses. My firm is a good example since the length of our domain name – lawsonlundell.com – can push email addresses past the 25 character limit imposed by some vendors. Furthermore, not all vendors give you the option of choosing what ID is assigned to each of your users; they choose the user ID for you.

One final note: if going the individual password route, make sure that the vendor sends the IDs and passwords to you so that you have a record of them.

Executive Director Karen Dyck envisions the Legal Help Centre as a place “… to assist disadvantaged members of our community to access and exercise their legal and social rights.” This agency will help people determine their next course of action in solving a problem, which may not even require a lawyer. Karen Dyck likens it to a “triage” service, where people can meet with someone who will listen to their problem, and then direct them to the proper channels, whether it’s getting your landlord to turn on the heat, or something for the Manitoba Ombudsman’s office. So many organizations are available to help resolve problems, yet most people aren’t aware of them, or don’t know the right language to use to get the help they need. The Legal Help Centre’s goal is to fill that void.

The centre has amassed support from a veritable who’s who of the Manitoba legal community. The Honourable Madam Justice Suche of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench is president of the board, and Sarah Lugtig, a Crown Attorney with Manitoba Justice is vice president. Sherri Walsh, a partner with Hill Sokalski Vincent Walsh Trippier LLP is a board advisor on the Community Resource Committee. What I think is most unique about it, however, is its multi-disciplinary approach, recognizing the sociological aspect of many legal problems. The University of Manitoba Law School, in conjunction with the Faculty of Social Work, has created a course for students in both programs. Completion of coursework will require a practicum involving volunteering with the Legal Help Centre. As well, students and faculty of the University of Winnipeg’s Global College and Departments of Criminal Justice and Conflict Resolution Studies will be tapped to help fill the many volunteer hours required to staff such a huge operation.

This summer the centre received a grant to hire two law students. They created a database of agencies and organizations that already provide the services potential clients will need. This illustrateded one of the challenges facing the Legal Help Centre: running on a shoestring budget, lacking even the funding to purchase licenses for the necessary software, and relying on open source and freeware like Google docs applications instead. Financial support has come from several law firms in the form of a per lawyer donation for start-up, as well as office furniture (from Tapper Cuddy LLP) and office space from the University of Winnipeg. Grant applications have been made to numerous foundations for operating funds.

Some of the programming the centre is working on is partnering with Pro Bono Students Canada to design a clinic to assist people bringing an action in small claims court. They’re also working on a family law clinic for self-represented litigants.

The Legal Help Centre plans to be in business by mid-January 2011. The University of Winnipeg has offered the physical space, and Karen Dyck is hoping for a storefront location to make it easier for people to find. While there isn’t a website yet, you can connect with the centre on Twitter – @legalhelpcentre.

For more reading:

News release: Legal Help Centre

The chief glory of the Osgoode Hall Law School Library is its world-class collection of early Anglo-American legal materials, including the largest collection of legal Canadiana anywhere. Despite pressures to recover space and plans to send some materials offsite (see my earlier column) when the Osgoode Library moves into its new facility in Summer 2011, we will not only be keeping our historical collections in-house, we will be showcasing them in a new, custom-built facility. Through the generosity of Mr Ian Cartwright, we are building the Canada Law Book Rare Book Room as the centrepiece of the new Osgoode Library and as a fitting home for the Balfour Halévy Special Collections. This state-of-the-art facility will not only be beautiful, it will feature full security and environmental controls for 150,000 volumes. The development and preservation of the library’s special collections will be a key feature of the library’s strategic plan going forward.

There are several reasons Osgoode is committed to its historical and special library collections. Most obviously, they are rare and valuable. Also, they are irreplaceable: It was difficult to build the collections in the 1960s and 1970s and it would be impossible to do so today. We view them not only as the library’s greatest material asset but as a national resource; having built the collections, we have a public duty to maintain them. These collections are unique in Canada; and, with time, they will become even more important, constituting perhaps the last extant copies of our essential, printed legal heritage. While the copies of early (pre-1930) law reports and statutes in both academic and private (law firm) libraries are disintegrating from age and overuse, mint-condition copies of them will be preserved in Osgoode’s special collections. But, with these nice clean copies locked away in an access- and environmentally-controlled rare book room, how will we balance their preservation with access to them by the communities we serve?

Much is written about “trends in libraries.” One of the more recommended contributions to the genre is “2010 Top Trends in Academic Law Libraries: A Review of the Current Literature” by the Research Planning and Review Committee of the Association of College and Research Libraries. One of the trends identified in the article is the “digitization of unique library collections.” Such digitization projects make a library’s otherwise hidden and underused special collections available to researchers everywhere, helping define the library as a nexus of content and technology to facilitate research, sometimes in extraordinary ways. There are many examples of such projects in Canada. York University Libraries is digitizing the Mariposa Archive, The University of Alberta and University of British Columbia Library also have digitization projects completed or underway. The Canadian leader, not surprisingly, is the University of Toronto Libraries, which has a considerable number of significant projects.

The identification of digitization of special collections as a trend will come as no surprise to law firm librarians, always in the forefront of developments in our profession. For years now, they have been digitizing their special collections of legal memos, closing books, facta, etc, and building them into databases that constitute the bedrock of legal research in their firms. In the public and academic spheres, however, not much has yet been done for the legal researcher, though the trend is developing. One of my favourites is the Old Bailey Online (Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674-1913), which contains contributions from the Osgoode collection. Here in Canada, the Gerald V. La Forest Law Library at the University of New Brunswick has developed a number of digital collections, including the collection of 1st-reading bills from the NB Legislative Assembly. But these projects – in both the academic and private law libraries – are small-scale, serving small audiences with specific needs. Are there any large-scale projects to digitize special collections of historical (pre-1990) legal materials that address specifically the needs of Canadian law libraries and legal researchers?

The work of two organizations comes immediately to mind. The Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) is an American non-profit co-operative of libraries dedicated to (and passionate about) the twin goals of preserving the print legal heritage of the Anglo-American common law tradition and providing access to them. LLMC has been a publisher in microfiche format since 1976 and launched LLMC Digital in 2003. LLMC’s collections of historical Canadian materials, both legislative and judicial, for both federal and provincial jurisdictions, is phenomenal. Unfortunately, the cost of subscribing to LLMC Digital is beyond the means of Canadian law firms and access is available only at our law schools. HeinOnline, on the other hand, though a commercial subscription service, will be found not only at all Canadian law schools but also in many law firms, and has recently been made available to all lawyers in Ontario through the library services of the Law Society of Upper Canada. Though legal researchers regularly turn to HeinOnline for its collections of law journals, it is not yet widely known that Hein has recently digitized Canada’s federal statutes (English only) 1867-1990 in its “Session Laws” library.

Though both LLMC and HeinOnline are great products and commendable for their commitment to Canadian content, their one drawback is that they are subscription services and not “free”. What work has been or is being done within the “free access to law” movement? The most important law-related open-access digital collection in Canada is The Alberta Law Collection, which is comprehensive (1905-1990), well-organized and easy-to-use, offering both browse and search options. Its only drawback is that it’s located on the Alberta Heritage website – Our Future, Our Past – and not integrated into more likely, law-specific sites; it isn’t even linked from the QP Source site for post-1990 Alberta statutes, regulations and other legislative documents. Still, once you locate it, it’s a wonderful resource that accomplishes exactly what a digitization project should: both preservation of and enhanced access to a special collection of historical and increasingly rare materials. With the advent of this product, Alberta law firms can dispose of their deteriorating collections of statutes, confident that they will have easy and continuing access to the materials.

In view of Alberta’s example, it’s that much more disappointing that no other Canadian jurisdiction can offer anything similar. The Ontario Digitization Initiative (ODI), a project of the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL), tries but doesn’t quite succeed. Though ODI has completed the digitization of the province’s legislative materials (statutes, regulations/gazettes, bills, debates, journals, 1867-2007), access to the materials remains rudimentary. The documents have been digitized by and reside on the Internet Archive, and can only be retrieved by keyword searching within “Texts – Canadian Libraries”. An additional impediment to legal research in the Internet Archive is that the materials have been digitized and can only be retrieved as “volumes” and not as discrete “documents”; i.e., you can find and retrieve v. 1 of the Revised Statutes of Ontario 1914, but it’s time-consuming getting to p. 317 of that volume if you’re looking specifically for the Succession Duty Act, RSO 1914, c 24 (though once there, you can easily bookmark the page).

(By the way: If you search the Internet Archive for historical Canadian texts, you’ll be surprised by how much of our print legal heritage has already been digitized, though almost none of it has been done by Canadians. Many of the great American research libraries, as well as Oxford’s Bodleian Library, have begun “mass digitization” projects to digitize their complete collections of out-of-copyright (pre-1923) texts, working with the Internet Archive, Google Books or the Hathi Trust. Because, before the 1960s, the largest Canadian law libraries were all in America (the largest being at Harvard), it is a happy consequence that a large portion of Canada’s printed legal heritage, both primary and secondary, is being digitized willy-nilly by Harvard, Cornell, Stanford and Michigan despite Canadians’ lack of initiative. The exception to this last indictment is the University of Toronto: of the more than 250,000 texts scanned to date by the Internet Archive Canada, the vast majority are from the University of Toronto.)

Which brings me back to the start of this article and its title: Everything Old is New Again. The Balfour Halévy Special Collections, Osgoode’s outstanding collection of historical legal materials, unmatched in Canada, will stand at the heart of our new library, both spiritually (as they always have) and physically in the new Canada Law Book Rare Book Room. But it will be a beating heart. Our rare book room will not be a mere repository for old books, preserving them by locking them away beyond the reach of unwashed hands. To be effective, preservation must proceed hand-in-hand with access. To achieve this dual goal and to ensure that our special collections contribute to the future of our profession as effectively as they did to our past, Osgoode is committing itself to a program of digitizing our historical Canadian legal collections, to building a “virtual Canadian law library” to mirror the physical collections we’re preserving for posterity. This digital library will be freely accessible by the public and offer enhanced levels of access and searchability. We anticipate the first stage of the project will be available to coincide with the opening of our new library in September 2011.

• Many of the articles in these journals are of substantial interest to legal scholars and practitioners, often in multiple jurisdictions;
• Many of the articles in these journals are likely of substantial interest to a large audience of nonlawyer readers, again often in multiple jurisdictions;
• Someone who is not a legal information professional may have difficulty learning — in a timely manner — what is in these journals, or whether those articles are relevant, because either tables of contents or abstracts of articles in these journals are not published on the free Web;
• If one learns of the articles in these journals and determines they are relevant, one may have difficulty obtaining access to the full text of desired articles, because one cannot purchase individual articles on these journals’ Websites.

In other words, these articles constitute hidden treasure: they are of potentially great interest to an audience of readers much larger than their current audience; yet many of these potential readers either never learn of the existence of these articles, or learn of them too late, or don’t receive enough metadata to determine whether the articles are worth reading in full text, or, having made that determination, encounter substantial obstacles to reading them.

Some Examples

Here are three examples arising from CLJC alerts I’ve recently received or CLJC searches I’ve recently performed (the indexing and computer assisted legal research (CALR) services referred to below are those commonly used by the U.S. legal community, so services such Legal Journals Index, Lawtel, and non-U.S. versions of the major CALR services, are not considered here):

The Environmental and Planning Law Journal, published by Law Book Company of Australia, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters, seems to offer no access to its tables of contents or abstracts on the open Internet, nor can one purchase individual articles via the journal’s Website. Further, though an online version of the journal appears to be available via fee-based subscription, the journal does not appear to be listed in the Westlaw database directory. The journal is not indexed in Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP), a table of contents service widely available in U.S. law schools. The journal is indexed in the legal periodical index LegalTrac, but the coverage is at least 21 months out of date; as of today, the most recent issue indexed is dated January 2009. The journal is indexed in Index to Legal Periodicals and Books (ILP), another well-known U.S.-based legal periodical index, but the coverage appears to be three months out of date; as of today, the most recent issue published is from July 2010. Access to current legal articles matters to academic and non-academic readers alike, because of the increased rate of change in law, policy, technology, finance, and related fields. Further, the citations for this journal’s articles in LegalTrac and ILP appear to lack abstracts. Abstracts are an important type of metadata for potential readers of legal articles because the article’s title, authors’ names, and journal title, considered by themselves, frequently do not furnish enough information about the content of an article to enable a reader to determine whether the article is relevant to his or her needs.

An article recently published in this journal — Cameron Holley, “Public Participation, Environmental Law and New Governance: Lessons for Designing Inclusive and Representative Participatory Processes,” 27 Environmental and Planning Law Journal 360-391 (2010) (Issue No. 5) — exemplifies some of the problems arising from the provision of metadata and electronic full text of articles in this journal. The Holley article is of potential interest to a broad audience, consisting of scholars, policy makers, scientists, and business people in a range of fields, including environmental law, natural resources, land use, political science, and economic development. The article is also of potential interest to citizens interested in politics or the environment. Moreover, potential readers for this article reside, not just in Australia, but all over the world, because individuals engaged with these issues share information with, and learn from the research and experiences of, their colleagues in other jurisdictions. Yet neither the basic metadata for this article, nor the abstract, are listed on the publisher’s Website. In addition, before I published the metadata and abstract of this article on my blog on 14 September 2010 — the author having kindly sent me the abstract and granted me permission to post it — CLJC appears to have been the only source of the author and title information for this article on the free Web, and the abstract was unavailable on the open Internet. As of today, only those who subscribe to the online version of the journal appear to be able to access an electronic version of the article.

Here is another, similar example:

The Australian Property Law Journal is published by LexisNexis Australia (formerly Butterworths Australia), a subsidiary of LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier. Like the publisher mentioned above, this publisher provides neither tables of contents nor abstracts of this journal’s articles on the open Internet, and the publisher does not appear to offer the means to purchase individual articles via the journal’s Website. The journal appears to be available on Lexis.com, so Lexis users who know of the presence of the journal on that service can use Lexis to learn of new articles and access full text. Though not indexed in CILP, the journal is indexed in LegalTrac and ILP, but apparently six months out of date — as of today, the most recent issue indexed is March 2010 — and the citations in both indexes lack abstracts. An article recently published in this journal — Justine Bell, “Greening the Land Title Register: How Can the Land Title Register Assist with Sustainable Decision-Making?,” 18 Australian Property Law Journal 263 (2010) (Issue No. 3) — is of potential interest to scholars, policy makers, and practitioners in a number of fields, including environmental law, environmental policy, land use, property, political science, and egovernment, as well as to citizens in Australia and other jurisdictions. As with Dr. Holley’s article, before I published the metadata and abstract of Dr. Bell’s article on my blog on 17 August 2010 — with the author’s permission — CLJC seems to have been the exclusive source for the basic article metadata on the free Web, and the abstract was unavailable on the open Internet. Dr. Bell has since posted the article, with title and abstract, to SSRN. Before Dr. Bell posted the preprint of the article, the only online access to the full text appears to have been via Lexis.com.

A third example concerns a journal published in the UK. Civil Justice Quarterly is published by Sweet and Maxwell, a subsidiary of Thomson Reuters. The publisher posts, on the open Internet, tables of contents, in PDF format, for selected recent issues — at the moment excluding the current issue — without abstracts. For example, at present, respecting issues published in 2010, only the contents for Volume 29 Issue 2, are available, without abstracts, but the contents for Volume 29 Issues 1 and 3 are absent. The publisher does not offer the opportunity to purchase individual articles on the journal’s Website. Civil Justice Quarterly is not indexed in CILP. It is indexed in LegalTrac and ILP, through the current issue, but without abstracts. Selected articles from the journal appear on Westlaw.

The circumstances respecting an article recently published in the journal — Christopher Hodges, “From Class Actions to Collective Redress: A Revolution in Approach to Compensation,” 28 Civil Justice Quarterly 41-66 (2009) (Issue No. 1) — are telling. No table of contents on the publisher’s Website lists the article’s author, title, or abstract. The article concerns class actions in civil litigation — also known as “citizen suits” or “collective actions” — an issue of wide interest to many kinds of readers in many jurisdictions, particularly in the wake of the recent global financial crisis and recent environmental incidents affecting large numbers of people. Because of its subject and multijurisdictional coverage, the article is of potential interest to legal scholars and practitioners in many jurisdictions, and also to a wide range of nonlawyers, including businesspeople, activists, representatives of labor, investors, and scholars in fields such as political science and economics. Indeed, the article has been cited in a number of policy resources — including the 2009 Report of the Scottish Civil Courts Review and a law firm’s response to the European Commission’s Green Paper on Consumer Collective Redress — as well as in several scholarly works. To this day, however, the abstract of the article appears to be unavailable on the free Web, nor, apparently, can the article be accessed online except via Westlaw.

Why Existing Approaches Are Inadequate

One might respond that interlibrary loan and document delivery services are adequate responses to the problem. Yet these services only address the issue of access to the full text of articles; such services cannot make potential readers aware of articles relevant to their interests. Further, these services sometimes fail to enable full text access, because of licensing restrictions, a lack of lenders, or the borrowing institution’s exhaustion of its borrowing quota respecting a particular journal. In addition, lengthy fulfillment times sometimes result in delivery after an article is no longer needed or no longer current.

A second possible response is that authors will solve this problem themselves, by taking the initiative to post article metadata, including abstracts, and even the full text if the publisher grants permission, on preprint services such as SSRN, or scholarly or institutional repositories, such as the bepress Legal Repository. To be sure, some authors of articles published in the journals discussed here have indeed taken it upon themselves to post their articles on preprint services, where they can provide abstracts and sometimes full text on the open Web. This results in improved awareness of — and often free or low-cost access to the full text of — the articles among the legal and nonlegal communities. See, e.g., Dr. Bell’s article described above, and the preprint of Surya Deva’s article, “Public Interest Litigation in India: A Critical Review,” posted on SSRN.

However, placing the burden on authors to publish metadata and full text of their articles on the free Web is an inferior approach to metadata and content distribution, for several reasons. First, authors may lack the time, staff support, or technical expertise to publish metadata or full text of their articles. Second, even if authors possess the time and resources to post article metadata and content themselves, an economist would regard such activity as an undesirable use of the authors’ time, because the activity squanders the social benefits arising from the division of labor. These authors specialize in research and writing in their areas of expertise. Worktime that they spend on other tasks — such as posting to preprint services — is time wasted in terms of social benefit. Third — and in notable contrast to authors — publishers are well suited to publish metadata about their articles, both because they have expertise in publishing, and because they have expertise in the processing and display of metadata.

Fourth, leaving the publishing of journal article metadata and content to authors and preprint services results in lost revenue to journal publishers. If these publishers were to post rich metadata about their journal articles on their own Websites, in conjunction with ecommerce services allowing readers to purchase full text of individual articles, publishers could realize new revenue. These online sales would likely augment, rather than cannibalize, the publishers’ journal subscription revenues, because most of these one-off online purchasers are likely to be nonsubscribers. Moreover, article ecommerce systems can be configured so as to cultivate repeat customers — for example, by offering new article alert services via email or RSS (see, e.g., here) — and to encourage those repeat customers to become subscribers. To the extent that some subscribers would cancel their subscriptions in favor of purchasing relevant articles piecemeal online, publishers can compensate for such cancellations by adjusting their ecommerce pricing models.

Do Other Publishers Hide Their Treasure?

Commercial legal publishers’ unwillingness to adopt these online metadata display and sales techniques seems particularly odd, since such unwillingness runs counter to industry practice. A large community of scholarly and professional publishers, including those who publish legal journals — such as Taylor and Francis, Springer, Elsevier, Wiley, and Oxford University Press, among many others — currently offers rich article-level metadata with abstracts on the open Internet — even for articles before they are published in print (see, e.g., here) — as well as opportunities to purchase individual journal articles online (see, e.g., here), and services alerting readers of new content (see, e.g., here).

The Costs of Hiding Treasure

That is, the current state of metadata and ecommerce provision by the publishers discussed in the “Some Examples” section above seems to result in a lose-lose-lose-lose situation:

• Potential readers in the legal community often do not receive timely news of articles relevant to them, and when they do, the absence of abstracts often leaves them with insufficient information with which to determine whether to acquire the full text;
• Potential nonlegal readers often never learn of articles relevant to them;
• Authors — trying to plug this metadata and content gap — waste precious time and resources better spent on research and writing; and
• Publishers leave untapped a potentially substantial stream of additional revenue.

What’s the Problem?

What could be inhibiting these legal publishers from exposing their metadata on the open Internet, and offering article-level online purchasing options, particularly considering that:

• These publishers’ production processes are already primarily digital;
• Effective ejournal platforms — such as Public Knowledge Project’s Open Journal Systems (OJS) — are available free of charge;
• Journal article ecommerce expertise and technology are readily available, and, in at least one instance, present within the publisher’s own corporate family; and
• Given the size of the global market, the potential revenues from individual article-level purchases, as well as from new subscriptions arising from repeat online customers, seem substantial?

What do you think is holding these commercial legal publishers back? I welcome your thoughts on answers to this question, which will be the topic of my next column.

Innovation, and creating innovative environments, was a common theme of my reading this summer. It wasn’t planned – it just seemed to be a topic that many of my favourite professional development sources. I thought I’d take this column to pass along some of the key messages from that reading.

Fail early, fail often, fail small

It’s true that we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes. But failing early in the process of developing a product or service allows us to recover, learn and apply those lessons.

It is also important to make the “right” mistakes – errors shouldn’t be calamitous, and should contribute to learning. Managers need to identify the tasks which absolutely must be right, communicate this effectively to staff, and support experimentation on the non-critical activities. In other words, loosen up.

Good managers free their employees to innovate 

Charlene Li, in her Conference Board Review article The Failure Imperative, urges leaders to learn to manage failure as well as they manage success. Organizations can tap into the creativity of employees by making it safe to err. By allowing projects to fail early, often and small, employees gain confidence in the safety nets that have been created for them. Toby Fyfe and Paul Crookall’s study for IPAC, Social Media and Public Sector Policy Dilemmas, suggests strategies which government can use to mitigate risk in allowing employees to use social media. I can see how these ideas may be adapted to many innovation projects. Cross functional teams, with clear goals, an understanding of organizational risks and ways to measure success are the tools which can create a safe environment for innovation in any area of endeavour. Trust is the key. 

I was particularly interested in Fyfe and Crookall’s suggestion that “good failures” be rewarded, that stories about mistakes should be framed positively and shared – rather than belittling the team that bit off more than it could chew, find out what they would do differently on the next project and build that into your strategies for your next project. (Doesn’t that sound remarkably like KM?)

Life is beta

This is probably the attitude that is hardest for librarians to adopt. We like “perfect”, and are not inclined to send out anything before it is the very best we can make it. If it ever was attainable, “perfect” is becoming less and less possible. The pace of change and the amount of information produced on a daily basis makes it nearly impossible to get everything completely right before rolling it out. The cultural shift to collaboration means that your users, interacting with your work, will push it in ways you may not have anticipated. If the product is going to change anyway, why not get it out where you can take advantage of your users’ imaginations?

At least one paper made the assertion that the “culture of expertise” is dying as the “culture of collaboration” ascends. I’m not entirely sure I agree with this. I think that there is still plenty of room for experts to use their experience and training, and to provide important services. I’m not sure crowdsourcing works in all circumstances. 

The summer issue of the Conference Board Review featured an article from James Krohe, If You Love Your People, Set Them Free. He opines that attitude of “perpetual beta” might not enhance employee engagement. “ What does motivate workers is work: interesting work, useful work, work that challenges them, work whose completion satisfies both ego and the social self.” (emphasis mine)

I didn’t promise you answers – I just want to show you what’s out there. I’m sure that the answer lies somewhere between. I hope that you use the comments area to share your thoughts on this. How do you determine when you need to be the craftsman, and devote a high level of care to your work? 

What advantages were there to these services? Unlike a book, which could only be sold once, publishers realised that they could charge for the original work, and then sell the service of updated parts as an ongoing subscription, generating a steady and reliable income stream. The cost of production would be less, as only packs of pages were produced, no hard backs, no need for new artwork, and little work for the publisher post production and mailout.

The looseleaf gained popularity with the profession because it was usually packaged to contain law and commentary – and later on cases, based on an area of practice, such as family law or tax law, etc. Suddenly the lawyers did not have to rely on series of law reports – a 2 or 3 volume ring binder set could provide the latest legislative changes, new caselaw, and commentary as well. As long as the lawyer had someone to file the updates – usually secretary or librarian, rarely the lawyer! – the services were an invaluable and usually reliable research tool. 

As with all money spinning ventures of legal publishers, these early successes spawned imitators, rival publications covering the same topics by competitor publishers, and a nightmare for librarians. In the 1990’s at law firms it was often deemed essential by partners that they have at least one or two of the leading looseleaf services in their office . Some would favour one publisher, others another, and all would expect the services to be updated on the day of receipt of the updated part. Librarians despaired. The time it takes to update a service varies on the experience of the updater and the complexity of the update and the number of volumes of the service. 

The frequency of updates was an issue – some arrived 4 times a year, others monthly, the nightmarish tax and company law as frequently as fortnightly!!! And a further complication arose when the postal service failed to deliver a part; subsequent updates would lie around waiting to be filed. Claiming missing parts was as frustrating and wasteful as the filing itself. In the good old days the publishers kept up their own master sets of services and offered advice and guidance on tricky updates. This service has gradually disappeared in many publishing houses.

The other nightmare scenario was the missing page – pages – sections, etc. Users would remove pages to copy them, or to hold on to them, and there was no way in a library that this could be prevented. So another form of chasing had to be done when missing bits were discovered by irate users. More frustration and time wasting for the librarian, and chasing up lost pages from many months/years ago relied on the publishers holding these in stock.

Other problems had to do with the expansion of volumes, taking up more and more shelf space.

Now this litany of woes, and historical review, serves as a reminder to us all of the loathsome nature of this form of publishing. The early attempts by publishers to transfer the contents to electronic format were laughably frustrating for users. The functionality of the looseleaf could not be replicated on CD Rom, although valiant efforts were made by publishers such as CCH. The static, unwieldy pages did not translate to flat files without hyperlinking and cross referencing of some sort. The lawyers rarely took a shine to this option, and the publishers continued to produce more specialised and costly services. 

Librarians were in revolt over the services from the early days, resenting the time consuming nature of the format; there would be few librarians who would champion the looseleaf and who would not have sad tales to relate of hidden piles of unfiled updates, of lawyers relying on out of date services to provide advice, and of chunks or sections of a service disappearing.

Publishers are now not holding masses of back stock of parts, storage is money and they are all more keen on the bottom line than they are on providing this sort of service to customers. PDFs are made available online for some updates – and again the librarian or the filer has to then cut these down to the right size, punch holes in the right spot (this varies from publisher to publisher – 2, 3 and even 4 ring binders, or clip-in binders, are all on offer) and yet be grateful that some sort of update/replacement service is provided in this format.

 The reason for this lengthy reminiscence is twofold. We recently got so fed up with being unable to obtain missing parts from publishers who no longer retain the stock on a just- in-case basis, that we employed a couple of postgrads for 5 or 6 weeks over summer to just get on with the filing backlog. We have over 300 multi-volume looseleaf services in the Bodleian Law Library, a truly horrendous number when you think of the rate of updates… So that project gave us a chance to gather our forces and bring things up to date, and to give up waiting for helpful cooperation from the publishers.

But perhaps the happiest development for me was the discussion I had with one leading publisher the other day as we looked at the totally new approach being taken to looseleafs online. At long last the publishers have stopped trying to convert static paper to static electronic flat content. They now see the information as an organic, interlinking resource that allows a serendipity of approach, hyperlinking and content are divorced from the format. And we now have to wonder how long the publishers will continue to produce the paper updates 

Will we lament the decline and fall of the looseleaf? I doubt it. Ask anyone who has filed updates – they won’t weep any tears. Nor would those who use the services and suffer the frustration of coming across missing pages – or worse than that, services that are meant to be up to date being months or years behind.. And those who have to check in the parts, claim the missing parts, and manage the subscriptions – they won’t be sorry either. I would be surprised to see this format around in another decade – another format that shot to prominence like a comet in the sky, and is now burning itself out after a 50 year lifespan…

The following is a list of the resources available for finding territorial legislation. Please note that in some cases a completely up-to-date consolidation may not be available and that you will have to finish updating the legislation manually.

Northwest Territories

Of the three territories, the Northwest Territories has the most up-to-date legislation available online; the consolidated acts and regulations on the Department of Justice’s website are current to May 19, 2010 (as of August 6, 2010). 

As CanLII downloads its legislation from the government site the consolidations found on its website are also current to May 19, 2010. A very useful feature of CanLII is that it indicates in the version history if there have been changes even when a consolidated version that incorporates those changes is not available. For example, if you look at the NWT Business Corporations Act on CanLII, you will see that the last version that CanLII has covers the period between Aug 1, 2009 and May 19, 2010, but that there is a subsequent consolidated version that came into force on May 20, 2010. The version history on CanLII looks like this:

8. since May 20, 2010 (missing)

7. between Aug 1, 2009 and May 19, 2010 (past)

6. between Jun 4, 2009 and Jul 31, 2009 (missing)

5. between Oct 26, 2008 and Jun 3, 2009 (past)

4. between Nov 2, 2006 and Oct 25, 2008 (past)

3. between Oct 27, 2005 and Nov 1, 2006 (past)

2. between Oct 29, 2004 and Oct 26, 2005 (past)

1. between Mar 13, 2003 and Oct 28, 2004 (past)

In order to determine what the changes are, you will need to bring the statute up to date manually. As an alternative, you can go to one of the paid sources and see if they have an up-to-date version of the statute. 

Both Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada have consolidated versions of Northwest Territories legislation but these versions are not always completely up-to-date. These services try to have legislation that is current to within four to eight weeks of today’s date. Both Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada indicate the currency of the legislation at the top of the webpage. 

You may also find a consolidated version of a statute on other paid resources. For example, CCH Online has consolidated territorial legislation for specific areas (e.g. business corporations, labour and employment).

Yukon

The Yukon legislation that can be found on the official government website has not been consolidated at all. What the website does provide is a link to the original act along with links to any amending acts. Yukon’s Table of Public Statutes lists all the changes and is updated four times a year with the last update on March 31, 2010. The Regulations of the Yukon are consolidated four times per year, with a table listing any changes between updates. 

Unlike the NWT legislation, CanLII does not have consolidated versions of the legislation. However it does allow you to see when there were changes to the legislation. For example, CanLII’s version history for the Children’s Act reads:

4. since Apr 30, 2010 (missing)

3. between May 15, 2008 and Apr 29, 2010 (missing)

2. between May 2, 2005 and May 14, 2008 (missing)

1. between Jan 1, 2003 and May 1, 2005 (past)

Both Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada have Yukon legislation; this is probably the easiest way to obtain a consolidated copy of a Nunavut statute.

Nunavut

Nunavut has a number of consolidated versions of acts on its website. Unfortunately not all of the legislation of Nunavut is available as an up-to-date consolidation, and of those consolidated versions, not all of them are current. For those acts that have been consolidated, the Department of Justice has helpfully noted any amending acts that have not been included in the consolidation so users can consult the Annual Statutes online to see what the changes are. It is considerably more difficult to determine how those acts which have not been included in the consolidations now read, as the Table of Public Acts of Nunavut only goes up to December 31, 2004.

CanLII’s coverage of Nunavut legislation is based on what Nunavut has on its website. For example, a consolidated version of the Nunavut Commercial Tenancies Act is not available on the government website. CanLII has a copy of the version that was in place until March 22, 2010, along with a note that they are missing the consolidated version of the Act that came into effect March 23, 2010. Knowing that the act changed on March 23, 2010 we can either go straight to a paid source for a consolidation, or we could scan through the 2010 Annual Statutes to find that section 9 of the Miscellaneous Statutes Amendment Act, 2010, S.Nu. 2010, c. 4 amended this act. 

Quicklaw currently does not have any Nunavut legislation although this may change in the future. Westlaw Canada is therefore the best choice for finding consolidated versions of Nunavut legislation. Note that Westlaw Canada does not have all Nunavut regulations, but does include all “key” Nunavut regulations and all new regulations since January 2008.

Citation of Nunavut acts can also lead to some confusion. When Nunavut came into being in 1999 it adopted the statutes of the Northwest Territories, and those adopted statutes are cited R.S.N.W.T. or S.N.W.T. (Statutes that came into being post-1999 are cited S.Nu.) All amendments prior to April 1, 1999 were also adopted. However because amendments subsequent to April 1, 1999 are specific to the territory, a Northwest Territories act may not read the same as a Nunavut act with an identical name and almost identical citation. For example, the Northwest Territories Business Corporations Act, cited S.N.W.T. 1996, c. 19 reads differently from the Nunavut Business Corporations Act, which CanLII cites S.N.W.T. (Nu.) 1996, c. 19. ** 

—

* We subscribe to a couple of B.C. specific resources, QP LegalEze and Quickscribe.

** The McGill guide uses the longer citation of “ Business Corporations Act, S.N.W.T. 1996, c. 19, as duplicated for Nunavut by s. 29 of the Nunavut Act, S.C. 1993, c. 28″

For the AALL Hall of Fame, “a nominee…must be or have been a member in good standing of AALL for 25 years or more, must have provided years of distinguished service to the Association over a substantial portion of his or her period of membership, and must have made significant contributions to the profession.” One can objectively measure longevity, but the other criteria are not so easily quantified.

However, the 2010 inaugural class of inductees gives us examples of the levels of career achievement to which future nominees should aspire. The AALL Hall of Fame automatically includes all winners of the Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award. AALL established the following criteria for giving the Gallagher Award:

The Marian Gould Gallagher Distinguished Service Award is presented to an individual who has completed or is nearing completion of an active professional career. The Award is given in recognition of a career of outstanding, extended and sustained service to law librarianship and to AALL. Honorees may be recognized for exceptional achievement in a particular area of law librarianship, for service to the Association that goes well beyond expectation, or for outstanding contributions to the professional literature. Nominees must be or at one time have been a member of the American Association of Law Libraries. The award may be given posthumously.

The 2010 AALL Hall of Fame inductees also include “other deserving deceased members or members who have been retired/removed from an active career for at least 10 to 15 years…[and] ”Pioneers”…because of the critical roles they played in the formation and early development of AALL.”

Several people who have made major contributions to the field of FCIL librarianship joined the inaugural class of 78 AALL Hall of Famers. They are:

• Sidney Hill, chair of the special committee to establish an index to foreign legal periodicals
• Blanka Kudej, 1993 Gallagher Award winner; key figure in the formation of the AALL FCIL Special Interest Section; author (with Simone-Marie Kleckner) of International Legal Bibliography; biography)
• Thomas H. Reynolds, 2004 Gallagher Award winner; former editor of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, and co-editor (with Arturo Flores) of the indispensable Foreign Law Guide; regular IALL meeting attendee
• William Roalfe, founding president of the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL)
• Fred B. Rothman, original publisher of Reynolds & Flores’ Foreign Law: Basic Sources of Law and Legislation in Jurisdictions of the World looseleaf service
• Adolf Sprudzs 2000 Gallagher Award winner; two-term IALL president; treaty law research specialist; co-editor (with Igor Kavass) of Current Treaty Index, A Guide to United States Treaties in Force, UST Cumulative Index, Extradition Laws and Treaties of the United States; author of several books of legal abbreviations; biography; memorial; pictured above
• William Stern, former IALL president; instrumental in the creation of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
• Diana Vincent-Daviss (1994 Gallagher Award winner; inspiration behind the University of Toronto’s Women’s Human Rights Resources Database, University of Minnesota Human Rights Library , and Yale’s Project Diana: Human Rights Cases)

Looking at this list, I started thinking of what librarians could be in an international law librarians’ Hall of Fame. Such a Hall of Fame would provide worldwide recognition of FCIL librarian contributions to the profession. Some of the following criteria could be considered:

• Has the candidate received award(s) for distinguished or outstanding service from his or her national law library association (similar to baseball MVP awards)?
• Has the candidate received recognition of important contributions in and out of the field of FCIL librarianship?
• Has the candidate received recognition outside the country or international institution in which he or she works as an FCIL librarian or legal information professional?
• Have others written Festschriften or other memorials in honor of the candidate?
• Did the candidate edit or found major FCIL print or electronic publications?
• Has the candidate made significant contributions to FCIL literature?
• How many citations to the candidate’s work appear in scholarly literature?
• Did the candidate help create or take on leadership roles in major FCIL library organizations such as ALLA, CALL, IALL, NZALLA, OSALL, etc.?
• Did the candidate mentor of other FCIL librarians?
• Did the candidate readily share information and generously help other FCIL librarians?
• Did the candidate recruit others and show initiative in promoting FCIL librarianship?
• Did the candidate build an excellent FCIL collection? The extent of interlibrary loans from a collection might provide one measure of its excellence.

Potential nominees for an International Law Librarians Hall of Fame include in alphabetical order:

• Claire M. Germain, teacher of French law and legal bibliography; author of Germain’s Transnational Law Research; creator of French Law in Action (240+ video clips of interviews with French judges, lawyers, and professors); recipient of the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur medal, France’s highest honor, for her efforts in bridging the American and French legal cultures; biography
• Jolande E. Goldberg, author of the Library of Congress foreign and international law classification schemes; recipient of the AALL Joseph L. Andrews Bibliographical Award; TS-SIS Long-Time Member Profile
• Igor I. Kavass, co-editor (with Adolf Sprudzs) of several U.S. treaty indexes; of KAV number fame (KAV Agreements); former editor of the International Journal of Legal Information (IJLI); co-editor (with Michael Blake) of United States Legislation on Foreign Relations and International Commerce which received the American Society of International Law Certificate of Merit; author of Soviet Law in English Research Guide and Bibliography, 1970-1987  for which he received the Joseph L. Andrews Bibliographical Award.
• Prof. Dr. Holger Knudsen, former IALL President; chair IFLA Law Libraries Section; biography; video of him talking about the Library of the Max Planck
  Institute for Private Law in Hamburg, Germany
• Denis LeMay, 2003 recipient of the CALL/ACBD Denis Marshall Award for Excellence in Law Librarianship; author of La recherche documentaire en droit
• Dr. Rubens Medina, spearheaded the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN) initiative
• Dietrich Pannier, subject of Festschrift für Dietrich Pannier zum 65 geburtstag am 24.Juni.2010 (Detlev Fischer and Marcus Obert eds.);co-author (with Helmut Dau) of Bibliographie juristischer Festschriften und Festschriftenbeiträge; videos of him giving a tour of the Library of the
  Bundesgerichtshof / Federal Court of Justice: outside, part 1, part 2, part 3.
• Ellen Schaffer, co-editor (with Randall Snyder) of Contemporary Practice in International Law; established the FCIL Schaffer Grant for Foreign Law Librarians to support attendance at the AALL annual meeting
• Dan Wade (oral history; first recipient and honoree of the Daniel L. Wade FCIL SIS Outstanding Service Award)
• Jules Winterton, two-term IALL president; editor of Information Sources in Law

Perhaps we could consider publishers such as William S. Hein, LLMC, and Oceana too. And libraries such as the Peace Palace Library and the United Nations Dag Hammarskjöld Library.

Who do you think should be in an International Law Librarians Hall of Fame?

Our ability to make advances in technology is outpacing our ability to understand how such progress fits in with law and politics at an increasing rate. Some serious political decisions about basic values will be forced upon us. The technology will be ready, human beings will not.

The Internet is a great, sprawling wonder. No one really planned it — a series of actions, some logical, some the expression of brilliant individual creativity both by institutions and humans — brought it into being. There was no instruction manual, no carefully considered plan for implementation and growth. David Post wrote a lovely book this year, In Search of Jefferson’s Moose, which explains, in readable prose, one version of how it came to be. Post uses the device of comparing Thomas Jefferson’s views on democracy with the ideal of a democratic cyberspace. One lesson I take from Professor Posts’s book, is that the Internet was developed and controlled by people who were technologists. The goal was to design a system that worked, one that delivered information as cleanly as possible. There was to be no responsibility for the content. The Internet was a highway, what traveled along its pathway was not its business. Given the restraint and purity of the vision, it is stunning how much revolved around individuals, information zealots who chose to rein in their own power. 

Another dusty memory pops up. Fifteen years ago a colleague served on a blue ribbon federal commission studying the future of the Web. When I asked him what the conclusions about the future use of this promising new bit of technology would be, he replied, “Sex, gambling and shopping.” That sounded offensively pessimistic to me. Could our culture be so puerile? Time soon showed that he was correct. H. L. Mencken once said that no one ever lost a nickel underestimating the intelligence of the public, and many nickels were accumulated by those willing to pander to human vices. But other uses arose as well. And one stream was political. If everyone with access to a computer had access to everyone else, entirely new forms of political action could arise. And they began to do so. The old epigram that freedom of the press applied only for those who owned one, went down for the count. Using Twitter, YouTube and other vehicles, political dissent could be spread faster than any paper-based system could manage. Many of us associated the Internet with a “wild west” brand of libertarian individualism. Governments realized that it was time for adult supervision. 

In one part of my life I study China, and I have watched with wonder as the Chinese government has labored to control information flow. The Great Firewall of China is very real, and China has no qualms about using the full power of the state to censor information. One can take a position about the evil of such censoring. Trust me. I can make a case for each side, but no one can argue with the fact that China is the indicator that state power and the Internet are on a collision course around the world. 

Beyond politics, the corporate world is now stepping to the fore. If the Internet can be divided into premium and regular bands, with those who can pay the fare getting the seats in the front of the plane, the very soul of the Internet will change. Corporate behemoths like Google will move to the front of the line. The Internet will no longer be the open highway; it will become a toll road. The fact that Verizon and Google frame the discussion of the premium service concept in the garb of ‘net neutrality’ adds a cynical twist to the process. One defines neutrality when one is about to end it. Let us hope that they truly follow Google’s motto and, “do no evil.” I always worry when someone promises not to do something. It almost always seems to end up being done. 

The answer here is government regulation, but the previous paragraph pointed out the problem with that solution. My faith in government regulation of information packed its bags and moved to the desert long ago. If anything it will make things worse. 

It must be the morning fog outside my window, but I see tough days ahead. Change is afoot.

So I was happy to come across this report from @woodsiegirl (Laura – an information assistant at a London law firm) from the 2010 BIALL conference. This session, entitled Emerging alternative models for managing information resources in law firms, sounded like it would be informative. However, instead it was more like a sales pitch. It even ran over its alloted time, which didn’t allow for the probing questions that could have provided the answers conference attendees were looking for.

What really interested me was how Integreon stressed that this was a great opportunity for law librarians. One firm had its entire library staff become Integreon employees. They emphasized that there was much more meaningful work because there were more clients, which I took to mean more research, analysis and report writing and less administration. There wasn’t much discussion about sharing physical resources, so I still don’t have an answer for that. In fact, they mentioned that under some circumstances, like a need for extreme confidentiality, some firms would choose to keep some work in house. But if you’ve got rid of your staff, who does it?

I’m also interested in the back story – how did staff feel suddenly working for Integreon instead of their firm? How do you change your feelings of loyalty, when unexpectedly you’re working for the competition? What about the knowledge these employees took from their firm, like which lawyers likes to receive their information in print form, who prefers “just the facts”, and who wants an indepth analysis. I realize I have far more questions than answers.

Laura’s position is that outsourcing library services is not a good idea, although she does admit she is biased. I don’t think I have enough information to take a position just yet. I can see the value of outsourcing if it’s a service you otherwise wouldn’t have. If you’re a large firm though, I would think having an in-house library is essential, and if your firm doesn’t believe it is, maybe the library director needs to do a better selling job. I know, I know, pretty simplistic. There are so many factors driving business decisions, and even when two organizations arrive at the same solution, their reasons for it can be diametrically opposed.

I believe that there are independent law library consultants here in Canada, although I’m not sure what services they provide. I think there could be value providing collection development advice, particularly to smaller firms who get all of their information from the legal publishers. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but vendors do have particular products to sell and an independent consultant could offer neutrality. Offering legal research training would be another niche, as well as current awareness. Subscription management is already offered by some firms. I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who does provide any of these services now.

And if there’s any more commentary about Integreon’s new service that I just haven’t found, please feel free to add it in the comments.

Since starting at Osgoode two years ago, nothing has consumed more of my time than planning the new Osgoode Hall Law School Library. The starting point for my planning has been the simple fact that the new library will occupy less than half the space of the old library. This reality has required me seriously to consider the function of an academic law library in the digital age. What is its place in the law school? What role does it play in the lives and work of students, faculty, researchers and the profession? What purpose does it serve in an age when information is digital and presence is virtual? I hope to talk about some of this in future columns; but today, I’d like to talk about book storage. I also pose a question for Slaw readers’ comments.

Since its founding in the late 1960s, the Library of Osgoode Hall Law School has always been reputed to have the largest collection of any law library in the British Commonwealth and, as far as I can determine, it still is. At last count, we have just over 500,000 volumes, and that’s just physical volumes and “volume equivalents” (microfiche and microfilm). If “digital volumes” were included, the collection would be much bigger still. So, in a new library with less than half the space, what do we do with all these books?

Traditional libraries with browsable collections displayed on open bookstacks have always been space hogs. Large university collections grew to the extent that the libraries could no longer contain them and the campus could no longer contain the library. Libraries have addressed the space problem in two ways. The first is to put as much of the collection as possible onto mobile, compact shelving. The advantage of compact shelving is that it holds as many books as traditional, open, static shelving in half the floor space. It doesn’t lend itself to high-traffic access but is perfect for storage of low-use, older materials. Once relegated to basements only, compact shelving has begun to replace all the shelving in some libraries. Here at York University, all the bookstacks in the central Scott Library will soon be compact shelving with open shelving in the reference area only.

At Osgoode, we did a study of how our print collections were being used. It should come as no surprise to anyone that our substantial collections of primary legal materials (law reports, tribunal decisions, statutes and regulatory materials) and bound law journals were barely being used, presumably because so many of these materials are now available in digital formats. It was an easy and logical decision that, in the new library, these materials – constituting 2/3 of our total collection – will go into high-density, mobile compact shelving. The remaining 1/3 of the collection comprises our text collection (monographs, treatises) and will be put onto standard, open, static shelving in spaces adjacent to study areas. Though e-book technology is improving all the time, our belief is that printed books will continue to play an important role in academic research libraries for the foreseeable future. Nor is it likely that our large retrospective collection of texts will be digitized. By putting our text collection onto open static shelving, we facilitate access, encourage use and promote the role of browsing as a research strategy. Compact shelving is essentially for book storage while open shelving is for working collections.

The Osgoode print collections occupy over 45,000 linear feet – almost 9 miles – of shelf space. Despite the decision to install mobile, compact bookstacks, there will still not be enough shelving in the new library to accommodate all our print collections when we move back after the renovations are complete in summer 2011. Private law libraries, faced with even more pressing space demands exacerbated by rising rents, are simply getting rid of their print collections, partly on the presumption that, if ever there’s anything they need that isn’t available online, they can order a copy from the nearest law school or law society library. It is no longer a safe assumption that something once as ubiquitous as the Dominion Law Reports or the Statutes of Canada, much less the Upper Canada Queen’s Bench Cases, will be available to a lawyer in-house in print. Consequently, as a law school library, we have an obligation not only to the School but to law firm libraries and the profession to maintain our extensive print collections of primary legal materials and law journals. If we no longer have room in our library to house all of our print collections, and simply disposing of them is not an option, then the only option left to us is to move some of the collections offsite.

High-density book storage facilities are common in American universities. Harvard has several, collectively referred to as The Harvard Depository, located in suburbs around Boston. The majority of Harvard’s library collections are now located in the Depository. The University of Chicago has a beautiful facility, designed by the renowned architect Helmut Jahn, under its central square. The University of Nevada at Law Vegas’s new Lied Library was designed for high-density storage. Such new high-density libraries are fully automated warehouses for books with bookstacks that are not only mobile but can be as high as 50 feet. A common feature of all these “libraries” is that any individual volume can be retrieved from storage and delivered to the patron at a central location the next day or even, if the facility is on campus, within hours. There are currently only two universities in Canada with high-density compact storage facilities: the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia. Since York University, where Osgoode is located, has no plans to build such a facility, we had no choice but to turn for help to our neighour, the University of Toronto, whose high-density facility is actually located just a few blocks from Osgoode Hall Law School. However, at the same time, we thought it timely to investigate whether we couldn’t turn Osgoode’s need to the advantage of other law libraries.

All of our law school libraries have extensive collections of primary legal materials and law journals. To a large extent, these collections are duplicated in all our libraries. Most of us are now in a position that we no longer have space to house these historical collections in our existing libraries. At the same time, these collections of primary materials have been made largely redundant (though in no way completely replaced) by online access to digital services such as CanLII, HeinOnline, Lexis and Westlaw. We’re all faced with the same problem: What do we do with our old print collections? If we all have the same problem, the same answer must apply equally: Put the collections into storage. 

Now, if we put the Osgoode archival collection into storage and the other Toronto research libraries (U of T’s Bora Laskin Law Library and the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Great Library) do the same, we will have three duplicated collections in storage. If the aim is ultimately to save space, why not put just one collection in storage and discard the two duplicate collections? If necessary, we can even come to an agreement on joint ownership of the stored collections. But in the end, we all win: we create needed space in our libraries, we store archival collections of older law materials in a clean and secure environment from which they can be quickly retrieved as necessary, and we guarantee the preservation of one “last best copy” of the books in Toronto. Similar programs are in place in Colorado and California: Why not here in Toronto or, by extension, in Ontario?

The Osgoode Hall Law School Library, the Bora Laskin Law Library and the Great Library are working out the details of an agreement that will realize this goal. We are unanimous in believing that this is good for our libraries, good for our institutions and good for the profession. We are convinced that this is the best way to guarantee the preservation of at least one print copy of essential primary legal materials in Toronto for the future. The most pressing and as yet unresolved question is: What constitutes “essential” legal materials? Are only Canadian materials essential? Is it essential or important that we maintain a complete set of American law reports or the Harvard Law Review in Toronto or in Ontario when all these materials are readily available online in imaged PDF formats and American libraries are preserving the print? What about Commonwealth materials? How essential is it that copies of “foreign” legal materials be preserved in Toronto (or Ontario or Canada) if 1) they are available to us online and 2) we can confirm that they are being preserved by libraries in their home jurisdictions?

These are the questions on which I hope Slaw readers will have an opinion and provide comments.

Citizen lawmaking seems ideally suited to today’s Web. Government social media and online deliberation resources, coupled with widespread access to broadband in many nations, and much improved Internet access to laws, combine to furnish citizens with abundant means for participating in the creation of laws online. The category of information and communication technologies (ICTs) that enable online citizen involvement in lawmaking has many names, including eConsultation, eDemocracy, eParliament, eParticipation, eRulemaking, and Dr. Beth Simone Noveck’s “collaborative democracy”.

In the U.S., citizens in many jurisdictions already have the opportunity to participate in eRulemaking — the promulgation of new or amended administrative regulations through notice-and-comment rulemaking processes operated on online platforms, such as the U.S. federal Regulations.gov system, and experimental systems such as the University of Albany’s DeER (Deliberative E-Rulemaking) Project, Princeton CITP’s FedThread system, Cornell’s Regulation Room, and WestEd’s GovPulse. Before long, U.S. citizens are likely to engage in lawmaking respecting statutes and constitutional amendments via initiatives, referenda, or ballot propositions administered online.

The Key Question

Given that today’s ICT environment seems a perfect match for citizen involvement in lawmaking, it’s natural that a great deal of eGovernment research and development activity concerns creating and improving eParticipation systems. Designers of eParticipation systems consider a host of factors when building such systems. This post will address just one of these factors: When nonlawyer citizens engage in lawmaking online, what do they need to know about the laws they are making?

How to Determine What Information Is Needed?

One approach to answering this question is to consider a closely analogous query: What information about proposed laws is needed by governmental lawmakers — such as legislators, and regulators in administrative agencies — who are not lawyers? For decades, most U.S. legislatures and regulatory agencies have employed lawyers — such as legislative counsel and agency general counsel — to help nonlawyer lawmakers acquire the knowledge they need to make informed decisions about proposed legislation or rules. Since these advisory relationships have developed over many years, the current practices of legislative and agency counsel in advising nonlawyer official lawmakers about proposed laws likely reflect the official nonlawyer lawmakers’ actual information needs. Nonlawyer citizen lawmakers likely need the same information about proposed laws that nonlawyer governmental lawmakers need. Therefore, there are reasonable grounds for believing that the kinds of information about proposed laws that legislative and agency counsel regularly give to nonlawyer official lawmakers closely resemble the kinds of information that nonlawyer citizen lawmakers need.

What Does the Literature Tell Us?

So what kinds of information about proposed laws do legislative and regulatory counsel in the U.S. give to nonlawyer governmental lawmakers? Here is a summary based on a preliminary examination of the literature:

1. Counsel often explain the policy objectives of the proposed law, the alternative means — other than enactment of the proposed constitutional amendment, statute, or regulation — of achieving those objectives, and the reasons for choosing lawmaking over those alternatives. Such alternatives may include:

• Taking no action, if an existing statute or regulation adequately addresses the issue;
• If the lawmaker is a legislator, and a regulatory agency has authority to regulate respecting the issue, allowing the agency to regulate;
• If resources rather than regulation could address the issue, taking fiscal rather than regulatory action;
• If clarification of the law is needed, requesting an Attorney General’s opinion or (where permitted) a judicial advisory opinion; or
• If the lawmaker is a legislator in a jurisdiction in which resolutions have some limited legal effect, pursuing a legislative resolution rather than a statute.

2. Counsel often provide a plain language summary of the proposed law, and a line-by-line, plain-language explanation of the law. The latter is analogous to a literal translation of a foreign-language work into a language understood by the lawmaker.

3. Counsel explain the language choices made in drafting the proposed law, what the alternative language choices were, and why the chosen phrasings were preferred over the alternatives. Counsel’s justifications for language choices often include achieving particular legal effects, avoiding legal challenges, or reconciling conflicting legal or political interests of stakeholders.

4. Counsel explain in detail the context of the proposed law. This context has at least five dimensions:

• First, there may be a broad policy framework for the proposed law. Often a law is proposed as a component of a largescale policy initiative that may be implemented by legal and non-legal means. For example, a governmental policy initiative to reduce cigarette smoking may include legal measures such as statutes and administrative regulations, but also non-legal methods such as public service advertising, voluntary collaboration between government officials and private healthcare providers to design health education materials, and industry self-regulation. Lawmakers need to see the full picture of the relevant policy framework, in order to understand the role and effect of the proposed law within that framework.
• Second, there may be a broad statutory or regulatory framework in which the proposed law will fit. A proposed law could take the form of an amendment to an existing, elaborate body of statutes or regulations. For example, much legislation and regulation today takes the form of long and complex laws having numerous components, but originally conceived as coherent systems, with discernible relationships to particular policy objectives. Notable examples include Revised Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code, and Canada’s Copyright Act 1985. In many instances, proposed legislation is intended to amend such an existing legal framework. Therefore, in addition to understanding the literal meaning of the proposed law, the lawmaker needs to understand the meaning of broader legal framework that the proposed law is intended to amend, and how the meaning of that broader legal framework would alter if amended by the proposed law. Since broad legal frameworks are often enacted with the intent of implementing particular policies, the lawmaker will need to know, not just the literal meaning of the existing broad legal framework, but the policies underlying that framework, the relationship between those policies and particular provisions of the framework, and how the proposed amendment will affect the way the framework achieves those policy objectives.
• Third, if the proposed law is itself a new, independent, “stand-alone” statute or regulation, then the lawmaker needs to know where the law will be placed in the jurisdiction’s statutory or administrative code, because the location of a law in a particular code title, and its proximity to nearby statutes or regulations within that title, affect how courts will interpret the language of the law. For example, a proposed new statute on pass-through business organizations could be codified in the tax title or the business organizations title of the jurisdiction’s statutory code, and that choice is likely to affect how courts interpret particular provisions of the statute. Lawmakers need to understand the legal implications of that codification choice, the alternatives, and why the chosen option is preferable to the alternatives.
• Fourth, the lawmaker needs to understand the origins and history of the proposed law. Such origins include the identities and affiliations of the drafters and sponsors of the proposed law; the statements those drafters and sponsors have made respecting the policy basis for the proposed law, as in committee reports or debates; and the statements of members of the public who have commented on the proposed law through hearings or notice-and-comment rulemaking processes.
• Fifth, the lawmaker must understand other contextual factors that courts are likely to consider in construing and interpreting the proposed law. These include canons of statutory construction, principles of equity jurisprudence, public policy principles that courts are permitted or required to consider in certain situations, and case law respecting the area of law addressed by the proposed law. These contextual factors may lead a court to give a meaning to statutory language not apparent from the face of the statute, as when a court uses case law to expand the meaning of a statutory phrase beyond its plain meaning, or interprets a statute as codifying, rather than overruling, a judicial precedent.

5. Counsel explain the likely legal effects of the proposed law. Such effects may occur within the area of law expressly addressed by the proposed law, or may arise in other areas of law. Delegation of regulatory authority provides an example of an effect on laws having the same topic as the proposed law. If the proposed law is a statute that delegates regulatory authority to an administrative agency, the lawmaker must determine whether the statute effectively grants the agency sufficient legal authority to regulate as the lawmaker desires. For instance, the wording of particular statutory provisions could expand or narrow the regulatory agency’s authority to regulate respecting particular issues, or render the agency’s regulations more or less vulnerable to challenge in court. Counsel also explain the ancillary legal effects of the proposed law; that is, the potential effects on laws other than the legal framework in which the proposed law will fit. For example, if the proposed law would amend a tax statute, laws concerning a range of other tax-sensitive subjects, such as business organizations or family law, could be affected.

6. Counsel explain the likely civil society effects of the proposed law. These may include economic costs and benefits, as well as social, cultural, health, or environmental consequences.

7. Counsel explain the likely public administrative effects of the proposed law. For example, if the proposed law concerns crime, counsel explains the likelihood that the law will be effectively enforced, the probable enforcement costs, and administrative problems likely to result from the law. If the law is a statute that delegates regulatory authority to an administrative agency, counsel explains why one agency was chosen over other possible agencies, the chosen agency’s ability to regulate effectively in this area, and the budgetary implications for the agency.

8. Counsel explain the bases for possible legal challenges to the proposed law. Such bases include the content of the record supporting the proposed law, the procedures used to enact the proposed law, and the inconsistency of the proposed law with controlling laws of the lawmaker’s jurisdiction, or of a superior jurisdiction (as when a state or provincial statute is arguably preempted by a federal statute or arguably violates a federal constitutional provision).

What Other Sources of Information Are Relevant?

In addition to the views of governmental counsel, the comments of nongovernmental lawyers who participate in the lawmaking process may also be valuable to the lawmaker. Such comments may reveal the interests of stakeholders whose views have not previously been considered, or may contain legal insights missing from official counsel’s advice. The lawmaker will want to consider the views of lawyers who testify at hearings or who submit comments through notice-and-comment rulemaking processes. The need for access to this information underscores the desirability for making such testimony and comments available online as soon as possible after submission.

Conclusion, and a Look Ahead

This glimpse at the kinds of information about proposed laws that nonlawyer official lawmakers typically receive suggests that nonlawyer citizens engaging in online lawmaking need a substantial amount of information in order to make informed decisions. In a future post, I’ll discuss how developers of eParticipation systems are dealing with the challenges of receiving, organizing, and presenting this information, to maximize the usefulness of this information to nonlawyer citizen lawmakers.

Sources

I consulted the following resources in writing this post. The following list is not a comprehensive list of resources on this topic, but rather represents the results of a preliminary literature review; it excludes treatises, among other important sources:

American Bar Association Section of Administrative Law & Regulatory Practice, Committee on the Status & Future of Federal e-Rulemaking, Achieving the Potential: The Future of Federal E-rulemaking: A Report to Congress and the President (2008).

Terry Carter, Silent Partners, ABA Journal, February 2001, at 22-23 (2001) (Vol. 87, No. 2).

Kathleen Clark, The Ethics of Representing Elected Representatives, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 61, No. 2, 31-45 (1998).

Jeffrey J. Coonjohn, A Brief History of the California Legislative Counsel Bureau and the Growing Precedential Value of Its Digest and Opinions, 25 Pacific Law Journal 211-235 (1994) (Issue No. 2).

Frank H. Edwards, The Office of Legislative Counsel, Georgia State Bar Journal, February 1987, 114-115, 154 (Vol. 23, No. 3).

Michael J. Glennon, Who’s the Client? Legislative Lawyering Through the Rear-View Mirror, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 61 No. 2, 21-30 (1998).

Michelle Grant, Legislative Lawyers and the Model Rules, 14 Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics 823-838 (2001) (Issue No. 3).

David A. Marcello, The Ethics and Politics of Legislative Drafting, 70 Tulane Law Review 2437-2464 (1996). (Issue No. 6).

Robert J. Marchant, Representing Representatives: Ethical Considerations for the Legislature’s Attorneys, 6 New York University Journal of Legislation and Public Policy 439-465 (2002) (Issue Nos. 1-2).

Thomas O. McGarity, The Role of Government Attorneys in Regulatory Agency Rulemaking, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 61, No. 1, 19-32 (1998).

Kevin C. Powers, Inside the World of the Legislative Lawyer, Nevada Lawyer, July 2002, at 7, 34-35 (Vol. 10, No. 2).

Roger Purdy, Professional Responsibility for Legislative Drafters: Suggested Guidelines and Discussion of Ethics and Role Problems, 11 Seton Hall Legislative Journal 67-120 (1987) (Issue No. 1).

The G20 was probably the biggest news story in Canada for at least a couple of days in June, and certainly for a longer period in Toronto. The preparations by the organizers of the summit were echoed by those of us living and working in the downtown. As we drew closer to the arrival of the world’s leaders, it became increasingly clear that Business As Usual was not an option. The clear message from the organizers was to stay clear of the downtown core if you possibly could. Hatches were battened, and employers scrambled to adjust.

It seemed like a perfect opportunity to test our business continuity plan. 

What a great chance! A controlled situation, no real emergency, everything functional, just somewhat difficult to reach. It couldn’t be better. We could test some of the assumptions we made when we wrote the plan, and check on the completeness of our planning. Here’s what I learned.

Does everyone know what to do?

Fire drills are important because they help people to rehearse in advance of an actual emergency. Have you ever tested your business continuity/business resumption plans? Are they “real” for people, or do they simply exist on paper? Does everyone know where to get status updates, how to use remote access (if available), and what is expected of them if the office is inaccessible? Does everyone know how to tell when business as usual has resumed, and when to report back to the office?

Do your plans reflect reality? 

We have a set assembly point where staff meets after evacuating the library. It’s in the middle of Queen’s Park – the designated G20 protest zone. The destination was temporarily changed, to ensure that staff didn’t leave one emergency situation to walk into another. What other plans and procedures do you have which may require flexibility in unusual circumstances? Does everyone know what adjustments to make?

Hope for tech, but have paper ready

Mobile technology makes it very simple to keep in touch and to get the message out to employees, managers and other affected groups. What happens if the technology isn’t there for you? Here’s a great story from the June 23 earthquake.

Make sure your information is up-to-date

Check your phone trees – do you have current, complete contact information for all of your staff? Has anyone moved or gotten a cell phone? A number of my colleagues have Blackberries – do I have their PINs as well as the phone numbers?

Are my assumptions valid?

Writing a plan and living the plan are two different things. Are there gaps between what you thought you could do and reality? An example: we can access our desktops remotely through VPN, but we cannot redirect our phones without being physically in the building. Once we knew that, we could adjust. But without this test-run, we would have had to scramble to cope. 

It’s not likely that you’ll be able to anticipate every possible emergency situation. Build a certain amount of flexibility into your plan. Situations to consider in formulating your plan:

• Evacuation scenario (with time to redirect calls and e-mail, and without)
• Remote access, with infrastructure intact (electricity, telecommunications available)
• Remote access with infrastructure problems (electricity, telecommunications not available or not reliable)
• Long-term inaccessibility (how do you carry on business when your building is fire-damaged or worse?)

Don’t be so prescriptive that an unanticipated event leads to paralysis. Communication is the keystone of your plan – can you reach employees, clients, and others who need to hear from you? Can you get the information that you need from your manager, your organization’s emergency response team, civil authorities?

When will I be needed?

Think about your role in the organization. What aspects of the business need to get back into operation first? Do you know when your services will be needed, and under what circumstances you will be expected to be available? Has your organization decided what the core services are, and the order of operations in returning to business as usual? 

When the Northeast Blackout of 2003 knocked out operations at the OSC, certain staff members were expected to report for work immediately. Everyone else was asked to stay home so that they would not impose an unreasonable burden on backup systems. If the emergency had become more protracted, different resources may have been needed. Does your plan address the variability of need over time? How far out does your plan go – one day, one week, one month? Longer?

Relying on a little help from my friends

Business continuity in the Ontario government includes agreements between ministries and departments to host key staff from the other’s organization when an emergency affects only one physical location. Can you find allies who will give you a home when your office is not available? Commercial options are also available. IBM, for example, will help you replicate your key business processes and can host key staff in their facilities. 

The home front

Are you ready at home? Do you own a battery-operated or hand-cranked radio? Do you have a paper copy of your phone tree and emergency contacts? Public Safety Canada has information to help you stock a home emergency kit, or to develop a Business Continuity Plan. 

A controlled situation like the G20 closing provides a useful opportunity to test and review your strategies. It forces you to articulate and examine some of the assumptions you made, and helps refine your plan and your thinking. Turn an inconvenience into learning!

Before I start on legal deposit, I know two good reasons why print is important, and they are both to do with personal experience. Firstly, when there is an electricity blackout you cannot access the internet. Mostly this is not a problem, true, but a sub-station outside the library went kaput one weekday, term-time afternoon, and was out for 6 hours. We became redundant real estate for some readers as they hightailed back to their college rooms for power… or did we? No, many folk just got off their backsides and made their way to the shelves, discovering the books they usually ignore.

Secondly, until everything we need is available free of charge on the internet how can we abandon all the print? The online legal publishers continue to increase prices above inflation most years, as if they’d never heard of the Global Financial Crisis. While there are others, Lloyds Law Reports are a classic example. They used to be on the UK version of both Lexis and Westlaw, and whilst not a core reporter series, about 2 out of every five cases in each volume is not reported elsewhere. So for commercial lawyers they are still an important source. Given the significant advantage that this exclusivity provides, it would not be surprising if pricing decisions took advantage of that – lawyers had simply nowhere else to go. That’s fine, we can’t quibble with that in a capitalist world, aiming to take advantage of market factors seems to be what it’s all about in the end. But they actually took it a step further, by imposing unrealistically high prices on the online subscription version of their products, and, to my way of thinking, took their position to the limit. Law firms in particular are charged quite exorbitant rates for access. Even in an academic setting, where we are often given favorable rates, we are required to pay an amount for the Lloyds database equivalent to nearly half that paid for all of the Westlaw databases. To my way of thinking, something is wrong here!!

So back to legal deposit. It seems like a ‘good thing’ to be a legal deposit library. You are entitled to receive a copy of everything published in your country to add to your collection. At the Bodleian Law Library we select all the law material that comes through to the Bodleian Libraries twice a week. The system evolved from the request by Sir Thomas Bodley (our great and glorious founder) in 1610 to the Stationer’s Company that Bodley’s Library should be provided a free copy of all books registered with the Company. (There is detailed information about it on the Bodleian Libraries’ website.)

The system would be great if we knew all publishers always deposited materials as legally required. But the sad truth is they do not. And the problem has compounded with the gradual ingestion by the publishing behemoths of many smaller, quality or specialized legal publishers.

This is a problem for any library which is meant to hold all the wealth of a country’s published material in its collection. For a law library the problem is made worse by the very serial nature of much legal publishing. Format is our enemy – during the course of a year we receive loose part law reports, single copies of acts, single issues of journals, and single releases of loose leaf services. IF we receive everything we still have all the staff time and effort to process all this material, much of which is peripheral to the teaching that takes place in our law school.

But the problem is that we do not receive everything that we should, and so for us, what should be a wonderfully comprehensive and representative collection does have gaps. The gaps come from missing parts, but also from the ebb and flow of ownership of titles. Some titles that were published in the UK have moved to new locations in Europe, even though the title is the same. So the title is now no longer ‘free’; if we want to keep it, we have to find the funds to subscribe to it. The administration involved in keeping on top of these changes can be daunting; the Agency manages some of it, making claims if it knows something is out of sequence, but with our complex materials, they often have no idea that a part or an act is missing until we let them know. And if it is more than 3 months since publication, chances are the publisher no longer has spare copies.

There is a lot more to legal deposit that I could write about, but I wanted to explain that legal deposit ties in with the issue of whether to keep paper or not. If I were back working in a law firm library I would expect the local law school to have paper copies of what I need. Law schools who discard their paper have a belief and expectation that a library like the Bodleian will always have the paper copies on hand to help fill their needs when they dispose of paper. We could be entering a dangerous phase where unintentional gaps appear, and the impact of these are not felt for the next decade or two. I wonder whether my concerns are ill founded, and no-one really cares, or if there will be future law librarians who will look back and wish we’d done things differently in the rush to abandon the paper?

A recent (and decidedly unscientific) survey of law libraries in the Vancouver area revealed that over the past eighteen months the majority had cancelled some of their loose-leaf updating services; some services were cancelled outright whereas with others the contents were now being replaced on an annual (or biennial) basis. The chief reason for doing so was cost; for loose-leafs that are updated four or more times a year, the cost of the updates can be double or triple what it would cost to replace the entire contents of the loose-leaf once a year. Whilst the 2009 economic downturn was the catalyst for a number of the cancellations, the general feeling seemed to be that the cancellation of loose-leafs was a trend that was only going to continue.

It should be kept in mind that not all loose-leaf updates are charged for on a per update basis. Other loose-leaf subscriptions are charged for on an annual basis meaning that the library pays a set yearly amount no matter how many updates come.

For many of these cancelled loose-leafs, the perception was that the regular updates did not provide value for money. In some loose-leafs consolidated legislation makes up a significant portion of the publication. Given that this consolidated legislation can be found online for free, and with the added bonus of (generally) being more current than the text in the loose-leaf, a release that contains only legislative material is not considered a good use of money. Both staff time and the library budget dollars can be better used elsewhere.

Another reason for cancellation was the staff time taken to file these updates. Although loose-leaf filing may appear to be straightforward, complicated page numbering and Byzantine filing instructions may mean result in materials being misfiled or inadvertently discarded. If the entire contents of the loose-leaf are replaced on a yearly basis, misfiling ceases to be a problem.

An additional concern is the fact that pages of loose-leafs do go missing, either due to misfiling or someone taking the pages out to photocopy and neglecting to replace them. Again, staff and lawyer time is wasted trying to get copies of the missing pages. Worse, if a page should have been replaced but wasn’t, a researcher may inadvertently rely on information that is out of date or wrong.

So, given these all concerns, what does the future of the loose-leaf look like?

Publishers are now offering the content found in traditional print loose-leaf services in different formats, including CD-ROM and online. Online “loose-leafs” are automatically updated by the publisher with no effort required by the library or the end user. With an electronic version of a loose-leaf there is no need to file materials and there are no problems with missing pages. These electronic versions of loose-leafs may exist as stand-alone subscriptions (e.g. Carswell’s eReference Library) or as part of an electronic subscription (e.g. Canada Law Book’s Labour Spectrum includes Brown and Beatty’s Canadian Labour Arbitration). Electronic versions of loose-leafs can take advantage of hypertext links, allowing publishers to either integrate materials from their own database systems or link to materials available freely elsewhere (for example, on CanLII).

Although there are a number of advantages to these electronic subscriptions, they do pose some challenges for librarians. One important one is the way in which online loose-leafs are licensed. With the print version, multiple lawyers can use a single copy of a loose-leaf publication. With an electronic version of the same publication, this might not be the case. Some publishers base their charges on the number of potential users, the cost of which can end up being prohibitively expensive. If a library has a loose-leaf that is used by a number of lawyers infrequently, but the licensing agreement for the electronic version requires a licence for every lawyer who might use the product, the print version may end up being more cost effective.

Publications that are currently provided in a loose-leaf format do not have to become electronic publications. They could instead be printed as books with yearly supplements (as is already done by a number of British and American publishers). Changing to a book format means no staff filing time, no missing pages, and (ideally) lower costs. Another solution is to remove legislative materials that can easily be obtained elsewhere from loose-leafs; this would reduce the amount of staff time spent filing and ideally reduce the costs of the loose-leaf updates.

Over the past eighteen months, many law libraries have dealt with cutbacks that have forced them to re-evaluate their collections policies. Publishers could make their publications more attractive to libraries through innovations that address budget concerns; loose-leafs would seem to be a prime candidate for such innovations. That does not mean the loose-leaf format as we know it is dead. Although it is probable that the number of publications in loose-leaf format will decrease over the next few years, there will always be situations where the format serves a useful purpose.

Questions like, “How can we organize a movement to determine exactly what types of information states already make available digitally?” sat side by side with questions like, “Can I get Twitter updates when a relevant case comes down?” The day ranged from cutting edge to old fashioned bibliographic planning. It was quite impressive. 

Almost a month later, on June 8, I visited Newgrange, a passage tomb mound in County Meath, Ireland. Five thousand years ago, the Celts erected this huge edifice, with a 60-foot stone tunnel leading to a cruciform vaulted chamber. The opening above the main entrance to the passage allows the rising sun to light first the passage, and then the central chamber, at dawn on the day of the winter solstice each year. The Celts had only stone tools; and did not possess the wheel. But they moved stones weighing more than 20 tons dozens of miles to the site. They also somehow calculated the correct angle to catch the winter solstice. The Celts had no written language, though there are symbols carved throughout Newgrange. No one knows what they mean. It was quite impressive.

Falling so close together, these two events created an information mash-up in my mind. Gutenberg figured out how to use movable type on a printing press over five hundred years ago. The technology of paper, book making, indexing, abstracting and libraries followed on, and before Gutenberg we had manuscripts and scrolls. The Chinese were ahead of the West on this point, but not by that much. In increments, our information worlds changed completely.

The movement to digital information has caused us to recreate the use of writing using new tools. But will the written word be the stopping point, or is it like the carvings at Newgrange — a means of communication that will be replaced and seem quaint in the 22^nd Century? Will our great monuments of information in the form of written communication amaze and puzzle future scholars? And what about social networking with its use of images, video links and ever-changing format — are they the beginnings of a new form of communication? Is our relationship with text changing? It has changed before. 

Peter Tiersma has written a fine article about textualism and the law. “The Textualization of Precedent,” 82 Notre Dame Law Review 1189 (2007). He follows the movement from the oral to the written tradition in the law. Will there be another step? A precious few scholars read judicial opinions from first word to last; and apparently no one is reading law review articles any longer. Google is taking us to a world of arrayed retrieval of snippets of information. Is the narrative form best suited as a medium for conveying information? Will we retain the written word but morph its usage into the text message abbreviations into a new patois?

Perhaps the Irish countryside and the lore of the Celtic peoples have addled my already questionable brain, but maybe we are at the endgame of print, and of print as expressed in digital form. Not that it will all change in the next year, or even the next fifty years. But 5,000 years from now? I wonder if the tourists will have reason to speculate. 

Discovery Tools

UNBISnet, the UN Dag Hammarskjöld Library bibliographic information system, indexes e-versions of UN documents and is a great starting point for finding them as you can search by the traditional library catalog access points and UN document symbol. AccessUN is a subscription database that indexes UN documents, and includes external links to free e-versions. PDFs of some UN documents are Google-able, and Bing-able. You can sometimes find random volumes from sets such as the Yearbook of the International Law Commission digitized in Google Books.

Official Document System of the United Nations (ODS)

The ODS database includes formally-published UN parliamentary documents from 1993 to date, and all UN resolutions (from the General Assembly, Security Council, Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), and Trusteeship Council) back to 1946 in PDF format. The majority of the documents can be found in six languages – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, and Spanish. For the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), documents related to its drafting history from 1946-1948, the “travaux préparatoires”, were added to the ODS.

The ODS database does not include UN publications and sales documents, the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS), press releases, public information materials, and “non-papers”. The ODS has multiple search interfaces and includes the ability to search by UN document symbol. It does not have browseability options, however. The UN’s “Documents” page provides that feature for selected UN bodies.

The UN aims to retrospectively digitize older documents. These documents are being scanned and added daily. The UN reached a major milestone in this effort in 2009 when it added Security Council documents from 1946-1992 to the ODS. However, S/AC and other subsidiary SC documents are not online. The UN now is prioritizing adding older General Assembly official records and meeting records. Pre-1993 Economic and Social Council documents (though selected documents of the Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, E/CN.4/Sub.2, seem to be in the ODS from 1949 to date) and the Trusteeship Council remain to be digitized.

I somehow expected the ODS to be a central hub for all digitized UN documents and publications, so there would be one place to check for them, but it is not. The ODS is easy to search, but it is not easy to link directly to documents therein from the library catalog.

United Nations Treaty Collection (UNTC)

The continually updated version of Multilateral Treaties Deposited with the Secretary-General (MTDSG, or formerly known as the “treaty bible”) is online at the UNTC website. In a May 5, 2010 statement, UN Legal Counsel Patricia O’Brien indicated that, as part of a “green” initiative, the paper version of the MTDSG will no longer be published. 2009 will be the last print edition. She also indicated that the Statement of Treaties and International Agreements Registered or Filed and Recorded with the Secretariat will only be available electronically after April 1, 2010.

The UNTC database includes all published volumes of the League of Nations Treaty Series (LNTS) and the United Nations Treaty Series (UNTS). A 1998 article on the UNTC on the Internet (92 Am. J. Int’l L. 140) indicated an eight-year gap between registration of a treaty and publication in the UNTS. Per Ms. O’Brien, The UN is undertaking a major initiative to reduce this gap:

As announced last year, a great effort is being made to make the texts of treaties registered with the Secretariat electronically available on the Treaty Section’s website, shortly after their registration. While treaties are today published electronically in their authentic languages, the goal is also now to publish on line the translations in English and French, as soon as they are received from the UN translation services. This will ensure prompt electronic publication of individual treaties registered with the Secretariat. The Treaty Section is looking at ways to maximize the opportunities provided by new technology to reduce the number of copies of the UN Treaty Series printed on paper and to make them available on the Treaty Section’s website as early as possible. Let me recall that nearly all publications issued by the Office of Legal Affairs are available through HeinOnline, a well-known internet source to which many libraries are subscribed.

More rapid dissemination of treaties online via the United Nations Treaty Collection will benefit researchers. However, the UNTC database has still one major flaw. Users cannot retrieve treaties by citation. They have to perform a keyword or popular name search to get the full text of the treaty for which they already have a UNTS citation.

International Law Commission (ILC)

Most of the International Law Commission’s publications are digitized – its yearbooks, reports, and other documentation, from the very first session in 1949 to present. Some limited publication (“L”) documents are not available in electronic format. Searches for documents with the A/CN.4 UN document symbol in the ODS system indicate that the ODS system has not incorporated most of these documents, although they are available at the ILC’s website.

United Nations Office of Legal Affairs

The UN Office of Legal Affairs has digitized all of the UN’s legal publications back to the first volumes. These include all the proceedings of UN diplomatic conferences on law-related topics such as the Law of the Sea (1958, 1960, 1973-1982) and the Law of Treaties (1968-1969), the Reports of International Arbitral Awards (RIAA), and the various UN yearbooks. They are browseable and full text keyword searchable. These publications are also available online via the United Nations Audiovisual Library for International Law (AVL)(winner of the 2009 IALL Web Site Award) and via the Hein United Nations Law Collection subscription database.

Documents of UN Adjudicative Bodies

The UN’s AVL Library and “International Law” page link to the webpages of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the United Nations International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), the International Criminal Court (ICC), the international criminal tribunals for Yugoslavia and Rwanda (ICTY and ICTR), the Permanent Court for International Justice (PCIJ), the United Nations Administrative Tribunal (UNAT), and other special courts. Most international tribunal publications, reports, documents, decisions are online. Notably, the decisions are not published online as they would look in official print reports.

Other UN Bodies

Publications and documents of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) are digitized, including meeting documents back to the first session in 1968 and the UNCITRALYearbook. The ODS database also includes these publications and documents (A/CN.9 document symbol). The Yearbook of the United Nations is online back to 1946. UN Disarmament Commission documents seems to go back to 1952. Apparently free e-versions of UN General Assembly Sixth Committee (Legal) documents pre-1993 are unavailable. Documents are also available via a new UN “Rule of Law” page.

United Nations Law Collection via HeinOnline

The Hein United Nations Law Collection enables users to immediately find full texts of treaties by UNTS citation, but is expensive to subscribe to. It also includes ICJ Reports, the RIAA, ILC, ICJ, and UNCITRAL yearbooks, ILC monographs (such as its Analytical Guide), the UN Juridical Yearbook, the UN Yearbook on Human Rights, UNCITRAL publications, official records of the UN Law of the Sea (LOS), Law of Treaties, and other diplomatic conferences, the United Nations Legislative Series, and multi-volume Documents of the United Nations Conference on International Organization (1945). The UNLC includes summary records for the 6th Committee (Legal) from 1946-1983. The UNLC duplicates many UN law publications available freely at UN websites. Its high annual subscription cost may make libraries wonder if the UNLC’s convenient get-treaty-by-UNTS-citation and other search features, and potential as a centralized, complete collection of UN legal materials, are worth the ongoing price.

What’s Missing?

As can be seen, digitized UN documents are all over. Researchers need a central resource for accessing all law-related UN documents and publications in electronic format. For the UN, that seems to be UNBISnet and not the ODS. I think it would be optimal for it to be both. Hein’s United Nations Law Collection could serve as that central hub, but it seems to be focused on UN publications and not documents. Also, for human rights research, digitization of pre-1993 ECOSOC documents is key and should be the next priority. And the Treaty Section should find a way to enable retrieving a treaty by UNTS citation via the UN Treaty Collection database. Because of the “green” initiative, print versions of the UNTS may disappear in the future. This prospect makes clear the paramount importance of enhancing and improving access to the online version of the UNTS.

In a library, information overload can mean a physical overload as well as mental. Reporting series, annual statutes, conference papers all take up shelf room; how do you know what to keep and what can safely be turfed? One of my colleagues recently called and asked if I kept a particular item on my shelves. No, I didn’t, since it was officially available online. After all, shelves do eventually fill up, and if some other organization is willing to store what I need, I’m quite willing to let them. However, no matter how long I work at my firm, I’m always wondering about what I should keep.

When I first started, the easiest thing to do was to do nothing; I was not going to throw out even a 20 year old CLE that six months later I would discover was indispensable to a senior partner. I watched what my clients used and asked why they used it. I read the CALL listserv and considered what other librarians were asking for. When it finally came down to actually removing something, I pulled it from the shelf, put it on a cart and hid it for at least six months, to see if anyone even noticed that it was gone. There actually were some items that ended up back on the shelf, but the majority headed for the garbage bin. So far, it’s been a successful strategy.

As I pondered what to do with the content in my library, I decided I also needed a policy, something that would explain to other people, particularly my clients, why I kept some books and not others. Of course, the first thing I did was search other libraries’ sites and see if there were any weeding policies already available. Naturally, there were. LibraryCo’s Collection and Highlights Standards were very helpful, and formed the core of the policy I ended up creating.

The other side of “decommissioning” material is to consider what other library carries what I’m discarding, and if can I get it somewhere else fairly easily. Since the catalogues of both the Law Society of Manitoba’s Great Library and the University of Manitoba’s Law School library are available online, it was easy, although time-consuming, to verify that older editions of some of the less-used items in my library were readily available. There’s also an informal network of local law firm librarians who I can contact to borrow other material. Sometimes I’ve been able to rely on the public library and other academic libraries for material as well. However, as Shaunna Mireau recently wrote, with the consolidation going on at the Alberta Government Libraries, I shall have to remain vigilant to make sure I can still get older material that I need.

The last time weeding was discussed on Slaw was in 2008, by Wendy Reynolds (funnily enough, I made the first comment!). Wendy used the phrase “just in time” collection development, as opposed to “just in case”. Just like the manufacturers who originated “just in time” delivery, libraries also face fiscal and physical pressures as we provide access to resources for our clients. We have to balance someone needing a copy of one particular journal article from 1986 at midnight on a Saturday night, with the cost of keeping every issue of that journal on the shelf. Every day I just hope I made the right decision.

The concept of the “elevator speech” has been popping up all over the place lately. At the Ontario Government Libraries Council AGM, keynote speaker Farida Karim challenged us to come up with a 30-second synopsis of what our libraries do. Umair Haque, blogging for The Harvard Business Review, has dumped the elevator speech in favour of the Dumbwaiter Speech. In other reading, I’ve seen librarians chastised because they are unable to explain what their library does in an elevator pitch. Stage fright? Humility? There’s a danger in this – some libraries are losing staff and funding because they can’t make the case. 

In a flat economy, we need to quickly, clearly and compellingly explain who we are and why we’re being paid. Deborah Copeman and Michel-Adrien Sheppard point out that statistics won’t cut it, in their paper “Best practices for demonstrating the value of your library services” (distributed in April on the CALL listserv). Statistics are easy to gather and interpret, but use them to create a compelling story about how your services improve decision-making, and help the organization meet its goals. Numbers are the foundation of your narrative, not a substitute for it. 

The trick with an elevator speech is that is should seem spontaneous. The reality is that it is a well-thought-out, crafted piece of wordsmithing. There are tools available to help you construct an elevator speech. Microsoft has a template for elevator speeches! Practice it until you cannot stand the sound of your own voice. Then, you can trot it out with enthusiasm and conviction when you bump into the Managing Partner, ADM, Chief Justice, Chairman or the new articling student. 

Humility is not your friend. I know, I know. We’re Canadians (for the most part). We are self-effacing. We suffer the additional disadvantage of being librarians, not a profession known for howling in victory. Michel-Adrien and Deborah based their report on submissions from SEVEN libraries, because, they hypothesize, we don’t see what we do as “best practices”. If we do something well, it must be what everyone does – there’s nothing special about this product or service. Instead of “it goes without saying that the library is the place for (answers, information, insight)” – SAY IT. 

Get used to telling your stories. If you don’t want to brag to your clients, share with your profession. The best-reviewed program for the Toronto Association of Law Libraries (TALL) in my year as Chair was one where we invited members to come and tell us about new products and services that they had created. Some of the projects were modest, aimed at making the lives of the librarians easier. Others were bigger, benefiting whole firms or, in one case, all of Ontario. The scale is not important – if you made things better for yourself or your clients, that’s a story that deserves telling. It will be news to someone else – an innovation that they can adopt or adapt, and a change in the story that they tell. It is story-telling that social media is great for – how many statistical analyses do you see in the blogosphere? Tell me your story, don’t inundate me with numbers. 

I had a very illuminating conversation in an elevator once. I was riding with a bunch of work colleagues, and one started to thank me for a complex piece of research that I’d done for him. I asked some quick follow-up questions and promised a bit more work later that afternoon. Not unusual at all. But another lawyer turned to me and (with wonder in his voice): “You do that type of work for us?” “Of course! I replied, “That’s what the library is for!” If I’d been smart, I would have spent more time in that elevator. It’s a way more effective method for reaching and developing relationships with our clients. 

Don’t get me wrong! It is neither the free-access nature of the product nor the giving of this award to librarians (of all people!) that I find so compelling. My colleagues in Nova Scotia deserve this award on the merits. At the development stage and in taking their product to market, they have proved themselves masters of the publisher’s craft. How? They have addressed themselves to a market they know well (Nova Scotia’s practicing bar, law students and the general public, especially self-represented litigants) and they have identified a definite information need (a free-access resource to interpreting and understanding the new Civil Procedure Rules). The content draws heavily on and repurposes work and information already produced in the regular course of business, so that on-going production costs are minimized. In addition to CLE materials (the “Educational Notes”), Annotated CPR uses for its annotations digests of cases evaluated, selected and prepared by a roster of volunteer lawyers and published first in the Nova Scotia Law News and then in the Nova Scotia Case Law Service. Finally, their timing was impeccable (the coming into force of the new rules in early 2009); and when the product was launched, they even provided training for lawyers across the province.

It is obvious that the librarians at the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society know their customers, understand their information needs and are well-acquainted with the information they’re working with. The Annotated CPR is content-rich, providing context-specific access to educational notes, forms and annotations for each sub-section. It is equipped with an excellent hypertext-linked index to the rules and forms and a Table of Concordance to the old rules. This mix of primary (both regulatory and judicial) and secondary (both CLE and commentary) materials is a perfect illustration of what John Palfrey, director of the Harvard law Library, in his recent article “Cornerstones of Law Libraries for an Era of Digital-Plus”, 102 Law Libr J 171 (2010), describes as the new “legal information ecosystem”. 

The Annotated CPR was developed in consultation with LexUM, with funding provided by the Law Foundation of Nova Scotia for development and ongoing costs as well as the training initiatives. It is built on LexUM’s LexActo platform for building and managing annotated legislation. Everything – rules, educational notes, annotations, forms, index – is full-text searchable using LexUM’s ELIISA search engine. All references within any text are linked to the full text of statutes and legislation in the CanLII databases.

The Annotated CPR further provides three outstanding features that I think especially illustrate the depth of perception and understanding of materials, resources and clients that are evident in this product. First, using an application called LexPress, developed for them by LexUM, the librarians are able automatically to generate and link fresh PDF versions of each section of the rules each time they are updated. Producing an analog version from the digital original is a nice twist on other products which were not born digital but digitized from print. Second, they track all amendments to the rules, with an annotation from the end of any amended rule to the official Royal Gazette text of the amendment. Finally, they are in the process of developing RSS feeds for sending new rule annotations to subscribers. I wonder if this latter enhancement mightn’t provide a model for our law societies and commercial law publishers of a possible digital alternative to the printed topical law reporter.

The librarians at the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society are to be commended on their achievement and CALL is to be applauded for recognizing and rewarding it. I hope all of us can recognize the significance of this award for the changes it presages in law librarianship, law publishing and legal information.

I was back in my home town of Melbourne last month, and it gave me the chance to catch up with my colleagues from my former firm, and others, and hear of developments there. As I was in Melbourne undertaking some research on legal information literacy, I was more attuned than normal to the issues being discussed, and when I heard the familiar complaints about the inadequacy of research skills of newly appointed law graduates, I felt as though the clock had been turned back 20 years, and I was the one complaining.

I came from a teaching background, and I remember vividly the groups of articled clerks I taught in my first firm. They were undoubtedly the brightest and the best; it was a top tier firm, the competition to get in was fierce, and great results at university were a key factor to selection. So why were these really bright young people unable to use the Digest, or the citator, or track the history of a section of an act without one-on-one guidance by a librarian? I was more than a little taken aback at this lack of ‘basics’. So I joined the chorus of law firm librarians laying the blame for this lack of fundamental legal research knowledge at the foot of the law schools, for their inadequate preparation of their students. 

The skills that students seem to lack compounded over the years, as digital resources became their mainstay, in place of the books that had formed our research world for hundreds of years. By the time the new century dawned, these trainees were the first of the digital native/google generation, and had a degree of confidence in their own research abilities that was quite frightening when their shortcomings were exposed in real life situations.

When I moved from law firms to academia I saw first-hand that students at law school were engaged in a form of legal research that was relevant to their task at university – to read the set texts and cases, to use the online resources in preference to coming to the library to read the cases, and to try to balance the reading required of them with their classes, tutorials, part time work and socialising. We made every effort to try to ensure they knew the importance of thorough research, but unless they could see it having a direct impact on their results, few took much notice of our words of wisdom. And I know that we covered all the same themes in law school as we had covered in the firms, in a precautionary effort to help them on their way. 

So the problem is not that law schools do not prepare the students for the harsh reality of legal research in a real life situation. The problem is that the nature of the research skills they need in law school is quite different to the skills that will be required of them as lawyers.

For law schools, trying to change what they do to meet the needs of firms is not practical. They need to prepare freshers for a whole new world of legal literature. The timing of the teaching in law school is geared heavily to the first year – how much will a third year remember of her first year training? The way legal research is taught is often still outside the ‘real’ curriculum, and the connection between theory and practice isn’t easily made.

There is also the issue that academics are not always that great at legal research methodology themselves, having developed their own methods for their discipline, and rarely refreshing their own skills. Often they think their e-research skills are less accomplished than their students, and can erroneously defer to student self-confidence with technology without really questioning the depth or accuracy of how the student is applying the technology.

Most new solicitors are asked to undertake research of a nature that is of little relevance in a law school, such as egislative research. In law schools students are handed a copy of an act, or a section of it. Law academics do not rate the currency of an act as relevant to their teaching the principles involved in the legislation. One academic recently insisted that his students only use the relevant Legal Information Institute’s copies of acts for research, even when he was told they are always months out of date. With academic gatekeepers like that, what hope do law librarians have of thorough training in a law school setting?

The reality is that most law firms of any size undertake some induction training of their new graduates, not only because they want the graduates to know how to research, but they also want them to know what that particular firm’s values are in research and house style. In England, between a third and a half of new graduates come from disciplines other than law, and bring with them a different, definitely non-legal, research skill set in any case. So the firms are well geared for training, and do not take it as a given that the new graduates will have well rounded, applicable research abilities.

A firm can, in this way, put its own stamp on the graduate’s approach, and guide the nature of the research experience. If the partners care passionately for the quality of their research so they can ensure excellent advice to a client, they will impress on the new lawyer that ‘perfect’ research is crucial to the firm’s reputation, and their own future in the firm. 

It is time for law firm librarians to accept that the research skills that new solicitors/barristers bring from university may not be specifically relevant to the workplace, because they were learned in a different environment and for a different purpose. Training new law firm graduates is vital not only for the new trainees, but it also provides librarians the chance to become a core part of their life in a firm. It’s hard to get young lawyers to move away from their desktops to the library, and for librarians to know how they are going about their research. If firm librarians spend time with them early on, and help them to learn the right way of going about their research, this will have improved their confidence and contributed to their success and that of the firm. How fortunate law firm librarians are to have this opportunity to enhance the crucial nature of their own teaching role within a firm! 

This experience illustrates a significant opportunity for librarians to take their experience as trainers and to become public speakers. Librarians are regularly called upon to provide training in how to use tools, but this presentation was different. Its key message was not a step-by-step instruction on how to use the tools being discussed (although some processes were demonstrated). Rather, the speakers emphasized the need for government organizations to be aware of RSS, Twitter, Facebook and like tools as sources of information and citizen engagement. This is a more strategic message than we may typically give, and a great example of librarians positioning themselves to become business advisors rather than “just” service providers. 

On the other side of the coin, more library cutbacks are happening in federal government libraries. CISTI, the science library at the National Research Council, was subjected to a 70% cutback earlier this year. The International Development Information Centre (CIDA’s Library) announced that it is closing in March 2010, and the Health Canada libraries will be undergoing a significant staff cut, outsourcing its document delivery and technical services to CISTI. Traditional library services are in trouble – again. 

As David Whelan pointed out in his guest column in September (thank you David), if librarians don’t figure out how they can meet the actual needs of their organizations (rather than the ones we have traditionally and recently less relevantly filled), we’re going to join those librarians who have been declared redundant. It looks like the IDIC is going to be redeploying its librarians into its Knowledge Management program. Was this at the suggestion of the librarians? If so, they should be commended for finding an opportunity and seizing it.

In the fall of 2008, Seth Godin presented a talk at Tools of Change, a conference on the future of publishing. He proposed that books are really souvenirs of ideas that people encounter in their daily living. If you need information quickly, he suggests, it’s less and less likely that you’ll go to a conventional print publication to get it. We’ve come to rely on the web to provide us with the quick answer. Once enough of those quick answers come together, someone may decide to publish an actual book, but it’s retrospective. A souvenir of the thinking or issues of that point in time – life has already moved past it. Librarians: Are we collecting souvenirs, or helping our organizations identify and learn from the data and information that they need to answer business needs right now? Are we speaking out on how our organizations can manage internally generated information, minimize risk by managing e-mail? Are we finding new ways to market our well-established skills?

We are well-placed to reinvent ourselves. All we need is courage.

Professor Guido Boella, Dr. Guido Governatori, and colleagues are exploring ways to model legal contexts to aid automated legal reasoning. In their recent paper these scholars show how defeasible logic can be employed to represent the policy context of legal rules. Their approach could improve computers’ capacity to assess legal compliance, and could contribute to the automation of the interpretation of legal language.

Recent research in law and psychology — particularly the research highlighted by The Situationist blog published by the Project on Law and Mind Sciences at Harvard Law School — emphasizes how context affects people’s understanding and use of legal information. For example, Professor Adam Benforado‘s new paper explores how spatial situations affect the law-related behavior and thinking of various participants in criminal cases, while another of his recent articles argues that the context of the videotape evidence at issue in Scott v. Harris had a profound and unacknowledged influence on the way the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted that evidence.

In her recent post and her dissertation in progress, Christine Kirchberger explores the importance of context for making legal information usable by nonlawyers. Kirchberger highlights legal Semantic Web technology — such as that discussed in Dr. N\’faria Casellas\rquote s recent post on legal ontologies — and government eportals — like Austria’s HELP service — as promising means of offering valuable context to nonlawyers using legal information. Kirchberger quotes Tom Bruce‘s 2001 paper on the need to build flexible systems that can present legal information in a range of different contexts, suited to the needs of different users of those systems.

Some free access to law services are providing this kind of contextual information by building secondary sources into their systems. For example, the Cornell Legal Information Institute‘s Wex legal encyclopedia — written collaboratively by volunteers — explains key legal concepts and terms that appear in the Institute’s primary collections. As Staffan Malmgren explains in this recent post, his lagen.nu free access to law service for Sweden includes commentaries, written by means of an innovative crowdsourcing method.

Automatic linking is another method of furnishing context to users of legal information, as hotlinked citations enable quick retrieval of full text sources that make up legal context. Free access to law services such as CanLII provide such technology for linking to primary legal sources — as Ivan Mokanov explains in this recent post. In his recent thesis, conference paper, and post, Olivier Charbonneau proposes several ideas for delivering contextual information to users of free legal systems. These include personalized user interfaces; automatic display of citing sources when a cursor is placed over a passage of a primary legal document; automatic display of relevant commentaries below or alongside a primary legal text; and user ratings of user-contributed commentary, to help nonlawyers assess the quality of content.

Dr. Floris Bex in his recent dissertation and post explains how argument- and narrative-mapping technology can provide valuable context for prosecutors conducting criminal investigations. Dr. Bex describes his and his colleagues’ research — and particularly the work of Dr. Susan van den Braak — respecting a variety of applications that provide visual displays of investigators’ legal and factual arguments and narrative accounts of alleged crimes. These tools allow investigators to contextualize each relevant fact and point of law within a conceptual framework for their case.

Two current U.S. federal court technology efforts aim to help nonlawyers put legal information in context. JERS, the Jury Evidence Recording System, enables jurors in four U.S. federal district courts to view digital representations of trial evidence and exhibits in the jury deliberation room, and navigate through the information — including via zooming and scrolling — by means of video touchscreen. This access to evidentiary information not only helps each individual juror attain a contextual understanding of the applicable law and facts of the case; it also increases the likelihood that all members of a jury will share the same understanding of the context of the case. On April 27, 2010, the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts announced that funding for JERS had been renewed.

Whereas JERS helps jurors place legal information in context, the E Pro Se document assembly application assists self-represented litigants in contextualizing such information. A customization of the A2J Author document assembly program created for use in law school clinics by CALI, the Center for Computer Assisted Legal Instruction, and the Chicago-Kent College of Law’s Center for Access to Justice and Technology, E Pro Se conducts automated interactive interviews with pro se litigants in U.S. federal district court — for purposes of gathering contextual information from the litigants — and then processes that information to assemble pleadings and other court papers for the litigants. E Pro Se is now available online from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. According to The Third Branch, the federal district court in Minnesota has begun a pilot E Pro Se project, and such a project will shortly begin in the Massachusetts federal district court. (Thanks to CALI’s Executive Director John P. Mayer for information on this topic.)

Nonlawyers who participate in policy discussions about proposed laws also need context to understand those laws. Researchers participating in the EU’s IMPACT Project are creating tools to provide this context. These tools include argument mapping applications and Semantic Web technology — described in new papers by Professor Tom van Engers and Dr. Adam Wyner — for organizing policy discussions into subject-related threads, with visual displays of the reasoning underlying the arguments that make up the discussion, translation of policy arguments into the preferred language of each user, and Web 2.0 services facilitating users’ participation in the discussions.

Professor Helen Nissenbaum has foregrounded the notion of context in the debate over privacy respecting court records. In her new book, Privacy in Context, and in her presentation at the 2010 Princeton Open Government Workshop, Nissenbaum defines the right to privacy as the right to what she calls “contextual integrity,” meaning the use or “flow” of information consistent with the norm for information transfer applicable in the particular context — such as home, school, workplace, court, etc. — where the information was first transferred. For Nissenbaum, key characteristics of an information context — the sender of the information, the intended recipient of the information, the subject of the information, the type of information that is shared, and the purposes and goals served by the information context — determine which norm governs information flow in that context. In Nissenbaum’s view, when information about individuals flows in a manner consistent with its contextual norm, “contextual integrity” — and those individuals’ privacy rights — are considered to have been preserved, but if that information flows in a manner inconsistent with that norm, contextual integrity — and thus the privacy rights of those individuals — are considered to have been breached. Nissenbaum argues that when a new technology — such as a publicly available online database of court records — arises that arguably violates contextual integrity, a presumption should arise in favor of preserving contextual integrity and rejecting the new technology. On Nissenbaum’s account, that presumption may be rebutted if the new technology can be shown more effectively to serve both general social values such as social welfare and national security, and also the particular purposes and goals of the original information context. Nissenbaum allows that the new technology might also prevail if it, or some aspect of the information available through it, could be modified to render it superior in vindicating both general and contextual values. Applying Nissenbaum’s model to court records would thus entail a careful consideration of a variety of contexts in which those records are generated, the rejection of certain new information technologies, and also negotiations with technologists to determine whether certain new technologies, or the data they process, could be modified so as to render those technologies superior to the original systems in vindicating general and contextual values.

Context thus appears to be a focal point for legal informatics research, at the levels of theory, policy, and systems development. Research activity in this area appears to be vigorous, and embraces many disciplines in addition to law, including computer science, philosophy, political science, psychology, linguistics, sociology, anthropology, and information science. As the disintermediation of legal information professionals, the unbundling of legal services, and the participation of citizens in policy- and lawmaking proceed, the need can only grow for greater knowledge of how context affects individuals’ understanding and use of legal information, and for systems that effectively provide nonlawyers with relevant legal contextual information.

Are you in it for the long or short term?

Job seekers: Think about what you’re looking for. Are you joining the organization looking for stability? Learning opportunities? Promotions? There are no wrong answers to this question, but you should give it thought before you walk into an interview. It’s very likely that you’ll be asked.

Employers: It’s easy to assume we’re always looking for someone we can train and keep forever, but this isn’t always true. The impending retirement of a significant portion of the labour force means that succession planning is (or should be) top of mind. Are we looking for someone we can develop and build into a management role, or someone that we can count in that position for years to come? Is it realistic to think that every applicant is looking to put down roots? It is important to ask the applicants how they see the position fitting into their career strategy. You may not be their ultimate destination, but perhaps you can offer a quality learning experience, while benefiting from their energy and ideas.

Get yourself known

Students have many opportunities to get their names before employers – practica, co-op placements, involvement in student government can all be excellent ways for the profession to find you. Librarianship is more about your ability to make connections than it is about your ability to study. I’m not saying that grades don’t matter, but given the choice between hiring a student with straight A’s and little presence, and a student with a professional presence and A-‘s or B+’s, I’ll take the student with the lower grades. They have already learned the essential lesson – librarianship is not about books. It’s about connection.

In a recent competition, we went looking for a research librarian. In the poster, we highlighted Web 2.0 awareness as one of the qualities we sought. After reading the applications, I Googled the top 20 candidates. My goal was to see how many of them I could find, and what platforms they were using. I also read what I could reach in the public sphere (I didn’t friend anyone). We screened some candidates into the interviews because of the quality of their blog posts. I was impressed by the quality of the thinking, their ideas and the professional tone of the blogs. Others didn’t fare so well. If you must vent, consider doing so by phone, in your diary or in some other private way. You never know who’s watching.

LinkedIn is a must for job-seekers. It helps you create that professional presence, and build networks. For the reasons above, I’m not certain that I would recommend linking your LinkedIn content to your Twitter account.

I’m in a quandary about Facebook. I originally set up my account for purely social reasons, and prefer to keep it that way. But there are so many professional resources arriving in Facebook that it becomes more and more difficult to maintain the divide! I also tried to set up two accounts – one for professional connections and one for personal. That didn’t work. My best suggestion is to make use of the privacy settings in Facebook. You can customize the settings to some extent. Perhaps it would be smart to block your coworkers from access to your photo albums, for example.



Make your case

Employers put a lot of time and thought into recruitment. It’s expensive. It demands resources. You should honour that by putting a reasonable effort into your application. This means writing a cover letter which directly addresses the qualities and experience that I put into ad, and tying your experience to what I’m seeking. Customizing the resume is even more impressive. It shows that you read the ad, have thought about it, and can see how your skills match. In our recent competition, the first thirty applications I received came in the first day – they were all boilerplate, and from only marginally qualified applicants. Not a single one screened in for an interview. The final thirty applications came in two weeks later, in the final days of the competition. They were impressive documents, and reflected real effort by the candidates. Most of the people we interviewed came from this group.

Make the case for yourself, especially if you don’t have precisely the skill set or experience that I’m looking for. Don’t expect me to do the work for you – tell me how your four summers as a barista has given you customer service skills which translate to your new career in libraries (and it does, by the way).

Know your audience

Are you applying to a private company or a government organization? There is a significant difference in how these two groups interview. Government tends to rely on a more formal approach. The HR department often does the first screen of the applications. Make certain to address each of the elements of the ad in your application – experience, training, skills.

If you get to the interview stage, you will likely face a panel of two or more interviewers. They will take you through a preset list of questions, which will be given to all of the candidates in the competition. These questions will be taken from the advertisement. Spend some time studying the mandate and structure of the organization – annual reports are a great source of information, as are planning documents.

Academic institutions are likely to resemble government in the structure of the interview. They may also require a presentation from you, depending on the nature of the job.

Interviews with private companies are not likely to be as formal. Don’t let that make you complacent! Do your homework – read what you can about the company. Try to think about ways in which this job fits into the goals of the organization as a whole, and be prepared to use this information as you explain why you would be a great choice.

LISTEN – what information can you get from the interviewers about the workplace? Is it still a good fit? Think about your career goals, and whether the job still matches your aspirations.

Employers: how do you make that final selection? What weight do you give the factual questions versus the “soft” skills? How successful have you been in determining fit, and how do you do it?

I have a colleague in a firm who prefers to hire new grads and train them in her own methods. What’s your approach? What tips do you have for applicants, and how is the job market looking from your perspective?

SLAWyer Jordan Furlong has taken on the task of articulating the value of the legal profession in his Law 21 blog. In his thoughtful, thought-provoking way, he has challenged lawyers and firms to rethink the practice and the business of law. Complacency is not an option. In his December 22 post, “Ready or not, here come the clients”, Furlong looks back on the significant changes in the legal culture, and sketches out his vision for the future. 

Lawyers have long felt like a special breed, in part because the loyalty and concern we show our clients sets us apart as a profession first, a business second. Noble sentiments, easy enough to espouse when we run the show. How well are we going to express those sentiments now that we’re losing our grip on power in this marketplace, sharing it not just with new competitors but also with clients? If we adopt the approaches of the music, media and automotive industries before us — ignoring the changes, fighting with our customers, raising barriers to competition, insisting that “we’re different”– we’ll end up in the same graveyard.

How can the future of the law librarian be any different? The profession has arguably grown up on the margins of firms, government departments and other organizations, seen in hard times as a handy opportunity for cuts, and even in good times a luxury according to some. Relegated to the ranks of “support staff”, we’ve never had the power mentioned in the quotation above. Libraries have always existed at the sufferance of the funding powers, and a library’s continued existence is by no means guaranteed. 

The latest issue of the Canadian Law Library Review includes an article by Anh Huynh, Justifying your existence during the economic downturn (vol 34, no. 4, p. 178). In it, she suggests strategies to help you make irreplaceable. Her ideas are based on building relationships and effective communication. She also pushes her readers to consider offering a more refined information product for client development, including offering analysis and including an executive summary in your response. I like the article, because it challenges us to think about untapped opportunities – delivering services to existing clients in new ways, finding clients we hadn’t previously recognized. 

At the Legislative Library, we’ve been interviewing candidates for a new position in Reference. I love interviewing young professionals – it’s a chance for me to reconnect with the reasons that I went into this career. It also gives me a chance to tap into ideas used in other libraries, and steal adapt them to my library. I’ll share one such idea: A large American university library system assigns a “personal librarian” to their freshmen. This person is the first point of contact between the library and the student – they aren’t necessarily the person who will deliver the training, answer the question or provide the service, but they are able to guide the student through the wealth of information sources, and a friendly face at a scary time. How can you adapt this model for your new hires and articling students?

Want to prove yourself as an innovator and as someone who understands technology? Consider offering help to colleagues who haven’t quite figured out the e-book reader they got over the holidays. I’m not suggesting that you have to devote your budget to the purchase of Kindles and trashy novels, but if you know how to download content from the Toronto Public Library’s e-books collection and get it onto a Sony reader or i-phone, you may win some friends. Know someone who envies the lucky e-book recipients? Show them how to add Mobipocket or another reader to their Blackberry or i-Phone. 

Looking for alternatives with more substance? If you’re one of the six people on the planet who have not yet read (or read of) the SLA’s Alignment Project, I urge you to do so. The library literature is full of articles advising us to understand, reflect and support the needs of the business – it appears that we still aren’t doing that. According to the results of the Alignment Project survey, business executives are open to librarians participating at strategic levels of the organization. And librarians are not seizing the opportunity. Can it be that we don’t know how? Or is it that we cannot embrace change? I hope that the SLA Executive doesn’t let the name-change controversy derail this initiative. We have much to learn from their boldness and vision. 

This experience illustrates a significant opportunity for librarians to take their experience as trainers and to become public speakers. Librarians are regularly called upon to provide training in how to use tools, but this presentation was different. Its key message was not a step-by-step instruction on how to use the tools being discussed (although some processes were demonstrated). Rather, the speakers emphasized the need for government organizations to be aware of RSS, Twitter, Facebook and like tools as sources of information and citizen engagement. This is a more strategic message than we may typically give, and a great example of librarians positioning themselves to become business advisors rather than “just” service providers.

On the other side of the coin, more library cutbacks are happening in federal government libraries. CISTI, the science library at the National Research Council, was subjected to a 70% cutback earlier this year. The International Development Information Centre (CIDA’s Library) announced that it is closing in March 2010, and the Health Canada libraries will be undergoing a significant staff cut, outsourcing its document delivery and technical services to CISTI. Traditional library services are in trouble – again.

As David Whelan pointed out in his guest column last month (thank you David), if librarians don’t figure out how they can meet the actual needs of their organizations (rather than the ones we have traditionally and recently less relevantly filled), we’re going to join those librarians who have been declared redundant. It looks like the IDIC is going to be redeploying its librarians into its Knowledge Management program. Was this at the suggestion of the librarians? If so, they should be commended for finding an opportunity and seizing it.

In the fall of 2008, Seth Godin presented a talk at Tools of Change, a conference on the future of publishing. He proposed that books are really souvenirs of ideas that people encounter in their daily living. If you need information quickly, he suggests, it’s less and less likely that you’ll go to a conventional print publication to get it. We’ve come to rely on the web to provide us with the quick answer. Once enough of those quick answers come together, someone may decide to publish an actual book, but it’s retrospective. A souvenir of the thinking or issues of that point in time – life has already moved past it. Librarians: Are we collecting souvenirs, or helping our organizations identify and learn from the data and information that they need to answer business needs right now? Are we speaking out on how our organizations can manage internally generated information, minimize risk by managing e-mail? Are we finding new ways to market our well-established skills?

We are well-placed to reinvent ourselves. All we need is courage.

Law libraries are at risk of becoming similarly out of touch. Recent research on behalf of the Special Libraries Association by Outsell, Inc. and Fleishman-Hillard suggests that special libraries may be out of step with their organizations. While SLA’s Alignment project is focused on positioning the association for future success, there is information there that can be used in any library operation.

Who wouldn’t want to think about why only 8% of users, as opposed to 28% of information professionals, believe that managing a physical library and print collection is an important role? 42% of information professionals answered that conducting research on a user’s behalf was important; only 19% of users agreed. (See Alignment Project Presentation 2 [PPT]).

Are we aligned with our business? It would seem that after all of these years, the clear answer would be of course! Nearly 15 years ago, Judy Meadows, Library Director at the State Law Library of Montana, wrote in Law Librarianship: a Handbook for the Electronic Age that “[T]he key to success in the future is to stop thinking about library needs and start thinking about user needs.”

But law libraries are being closed in some law firms and government sites, and funding is under pressure in many organizations. The reasons for each situation are complicated, but each decision is a fundamental choice that the resources that were made available to the library were better utilized somewhere else. The perception of the library’s value was less than the perceived value of some other activity.

How do we help our organizations make better choices? We need to make sure that the value that we offer is the value that the organization needs. Interestingly, the roles that users valued highly in the SLA Alignment project results were ones where the librarian either provided higher value services or were not involved.

This is not news. Outsell Inc. and Thomson-Dialog’s Quantum2 Leadership series issued a white paper analyzing value and, specifically, discussed how future librarian value is not at the raw data, quick question end of the spectrum [PDF]. Law libraries have always had this challenge: a user population already able to do essential legal research for themselves. But as more of the research is available at the lawyer’s fingertips, the value perception becomes even more difficult than it was. Not only is the bread-and-butter research commoditized, it threatens to make some library work a commodity as well.

Law firms are perhaps the most nimble when it comes to aligning collection to user needs. The bottom line ensures that materials are acquired (though not necessarily weeded) to meet lawyers’ needs. Other law libraries may not have the same guidance. They need to be proactively shifting their acquisition patterns, as Leanne Cummings, National Resource Manager for Deacons in Australia nicely puts it, from “just in case” to “just in time” [PDF], purchasing core materials and supplementing as use demands. The financial benefits are a clear value at any organization.

We also need to ask the Yirka question: what should we stop doing in order to address higher priority initiatives? If our users don’t perceive value in what we are doing, we should figure out what it is they want. But instead of service accretion, where we continue to try to do the same things we’ve always done, we need to weed our services as much as we do our collections. Why create the perception that we are continuing to do the same, low-perceived-value activities and have that overshadow new, more closely aligned initiatives?

This may lead to unusual possibilities. I was intrigued when I saw that the Harvard Law School library is hiring a non-librarian empiricist to assist faculty and student research. Why? Because they support a growing number of faculty who do empirical research. This additional support can move the library further up the value curve, and shifts the balance of what the library can provide back towards the library, re-intermediating the staff into their user’s research.

Mark Gediman, Director of Information Services at Best Best & Krieger, discusses at 3 Law Geeks and a Blog how his firm has adopted an Information Technology department-like service model for their library. Their focus has included staff specialization, greater focus on training, and being visible. These all contribute to being able to deliver higher value services as well as working on the perception of value.

If a library’s service model is primarily reactive, it may veer away from alignment with its organization merely because its staff can’t know what they aren’t being asked. All the marketing and re-branding window dressing won’t change the fact that the perceived value of the library is diminished. No library can be entirely proactive, but the concepts that Sheri Lewis outlined in her 2002 Law Library Journal article on faculty services librarianship [PDF] as part of the proactive approach are the higher value roles that users seem to want.

At the end of the day, that may be the best explanation for why we find ourselves considering our place in relation to our organization. Law libraries don’t die. They get out of step with their organization and wither.

It’s encouraging to see these projects – this willingness to adapt and to put information where the clients are may help, in the long run, to ensure that these resources remain available to future generations, and help to revitalize the profession of librarianship. It may also help to keep our libraries funded!

The Ontario Digitization Initiative has been making rapid progress through ancient legislative documents. I also know of small government libraries which have been scanning other key documents – internal reports, administrative documents and internal policies, statutory consolidations, photos, maps – anything they can get their hands on. To do it properly, the process is time-consuming, and requires a high level of attention to detail. All the more reason to do it right, once, and think about access.

Taking a lesson from Steve Matthews’ last column, perhaps the answer is to scan once, distribute widely. The Internet Archive is able to accept contributions, and suggests that they be made in pdf format. Knowledge Ontario is also willing to accept contributions to the Our Ontario portal. Instructions are available on the site. The Library and Archives Canada has a program to collect born-digital documents in the unimaginatively named Electronic Collection. Their selection guidelines are available at http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/collection/003-200-e.html – the sections for government documents and private donations are still in development. I’ve not inquired if the team at CanLII would be willing to accept donations of digital statute consolidations to bolster their historic statute collections. I suspect that a random collection of forty years of Ontario Human Rights Codes would be more trouble than they’re worth, and the ODI will have a firm handle on statutes in a short time.

For those of you who are digitizing collections, a few observations from the projects I’ve done to date:

• It’s going to take longer than you expect. Be prepared to test, tweak, retest.

• This is not a job for those who do not pay attention to details. Proofreading is essential, especially if you are digitizing in order to get rid of the paper originals.

• OCR everything
• Review every OCR job to make sure it interpreted the document correctly.
• If you’re housing the collection inside your organization, talk to your IT folk about where you’re going to keep these documents. Find out about limits to what they can do with them, and how you’re going to get them into the repository. Can they help you auto-generate metadata, or are you going to have to catalogue the documents to make them accessible?
• .rtf or .doc format works best with screen-readers and other assistive devices – think about your audience when you choose the document format. Pdf format may not be readable by some devices.
• .tif files are your last-resort choice. They aren’t searchable, you can’t cut and paste from them, and cannot be read by assistive devices.
• DIY may not be the best option for high-volume jobs. There are lots of options out there for out-sourcing, and large volumes of documents can be done for relatively little money.
• If you outsource the scanning, make sure you can recall documents on an as-needed basis – the job always takes longer than you expect, and you may need to access materials while it’s off site. Make a box list so that you make the process more efficient. It’s also a good way to make sure that you’ve gotten everything back.
• Document collections which are consistently formatted are the easiest to convert and to store. Variations in page size and layout will make the process longer and more difficult.
• Annotation is not your friend when scanning, but can be an important source of context/knowledge, so don’t discount it.

A new digitization project emerged as I was finishing this column – we have a small collection of cassette tapes of talks given by various staff and executives of one of my client tribunals. The technology to play them is rapidly disappearing, and it might be interesting to have these recordings available in future years. Fortunately, our IT department has an old Dictaphone which will accept this size of cassette. I set up a laptop, equipped with Audacity and a good microphone, and I’m just letting the two machines talk to each other. The beauty of Audacity is that I can go back and edit the sound file afterward, if needed. To compress the size of the file, we’ll run it through Flash, and I’m hoping we can catalogue the new digital file into the library catalogue in the same way we would an electronic document. If that’s not possible, we can always create an audio library in Sharepoint 2007.

Share your experiences and learning – what is the smartest thing that you did in a digitization project? What was your most profound learning? What collections are you developing, and where are you going to keep them? What is the best public repository that you have contributed to? What platforms are you developing to store internal documents?

Librarians are used to providing media monitoring and environmental scanning services. We’ve gone from clipping the local paper and photocopying tables of contents to harvesting RSS feeds, searching global newspapers on the web or through paid mega-sites. These tools have the advantage of a certain amount of stability and control. There’s a lot of information, but it’s manageable.

And then there’s Twitter. There’s been a lot of buzz on SLAW about what it is, who’s already there, how lawyers are using it or IF they should be. Librarians, heed the rallying cry — if your clients are in the Twitterverse, you need to be too.

Yes, I know. I have been publicly skeptical about the quality of the discourse possible in 140 characters, unconvinced that you can discover the content that you need to be aware of, and just generally curmudgeonly about this new toy. That’s my job. I let Connie, Steve and my other SLAW colleagues discover and explore new technologies at the bleeding edge. Once they have matured a bit, I look for practical reasons to care about them. I think we may be getting there.

I can certainly see that a mobile workforce would appreciate aspects of Twitter – it’s nimble, informal and fun. But for those of us who are predictably at the office most of the time, why bother? I’ve spent the last six months or so quietly fiddling with Twitter in different environments, and I think there may be something worth knowing here, even if you aren’t of the two-thumbs typing demographic (that is, Blackberry users).

The tipping point came for me when I heard that the Ministry of Labour and Ontario Ombudsman had accounts. I’ve also started to see bloggers create Twitter feeds for their posts ( HYPERLINK “” ComplexD, for example, and SLAW, of course) – this, I love – you can actually get a little bit of information about the post, so you can decide whether or not to go to the blog. Twitter Search is proving to be a valuable addition to the toolkit as well.

A couple of months ago, I had Tweetdeck loaded onto my work computer. Tweetdeck allows you to manage the flood of Twitter traffic. It breaks the Twitter stream into columns, which you create by writing searches. Several useful applications (such as a URL shortener similar to TinyURL) are available in a toolbar at the top of the display.

I’ve had it on my home pc for somewhat longer, but since I actually live on my work computer, I felt it would be a more useful experiment to try it there. My selection of Tweetdeck as the tool of choice for managing and filtering feeds was pretty random — I’d heard of it, and IT was willing to load it. My interest is in the possibility of usefully filtering the Twitterverse, not evaluating the filters themselves.

I’ve created a short slide deck [also on SlideShare] showing some screen captures of my work account. I have created two — a personal one and one for work, which I may share with the library staff. The work account is a lurker — I don’t ever plan to tweet from it. If you’ve never seen Tweetdeck, you might want to refer to the screen shots to better understand my comments.

The aim with any filter is to show you the useful chatter and minimize the noise. Filtering in Tweetdeck seems quite simple at the outset, but does take some getting used to. Each filter is presented as a column in what is essentially a portal. The first column you’ll see is the feed from everyone you’re following. By default, you also get a column for replies and direct messages. After that, each column reflects a particular search statement you’ve written. The left-right scrollbar is an essential tool here, as new searches are plunked to the right of your last column – you can move it to the left (and into view) by using a button at the bottom of the column. Other buttons in this area allow you to mark tweets as read, clear the column and clear only the tweets marked as read. Note that the results you see are from the Twitterverse as a whole — not from people you have specifically selected to follow.

As your list of those you are following becomes larger, the Groups functionality may become useful — it may also be necessary, should you create a large number of filters (it appears that you can have 10 columns, but no more). It allows me distinguish my librarian feeds from my government feeds, for example. This will allow me to review in a glance all tweets from particular sources, rather than the topical arrangement available through the search-based filters.

The toolbar at the top of the Tweetdeck screen includes a number of fun toys. You can get a feed of stock information (not in this market, thank you!). Just click the $ to activate StockTwits. Want to see the current buzz? Twitscoop creates a column with a cloud display of the most frequently occurring terms in the twitstream.

While I don’t pretend that I have all of the answers on effective filtering of the Twitterverse, I have learned a few things:

• Tweetdeck will not allow you to edit searches, so you’re best served to create the search logic in Twitter search, and the cut and paste into Tweetdeck. If you have made a mistake, or if the need to filter on that particular search goes away, just remove the column from the display.
• There is no controlled vocabulary in Twitter, so be creative. Use as many synonyms as you can think of. Try to anticipate abbreviations of your terms – 140 characters is not much space, so how likely is a tweet to include a term like “workers’ compensation insurance appeals tribunal”? Really.
• Think about what your clients are going to want to know from the Twitterverse. Firms may want to know what is being said about clients or about themselves. Government departments / ministries may want to know about reactions to policies, legislative changes or current events. Remember that there is no thesaurus, tagging or cross referencing, so if you want to see “everything” about a target, use lots of terms and OR in your search logic.
• Start broad, and be prepared to refine the search over time. I have several very specific searches created to discover comments about my employers, and I’m very happy that they have never activated. I also have a feed for the word “Ontario” which is endlessly busy. I may not read every tweet that results here, but I have discovered some interesting information (like the Ministry of Labour account and the Ontario Ombudsman).
• Don’t expect too much. The tweets I value right now usually include a shortened URL to a blog post. However, for those of you watching Twitter for reputation monitoring, every mention may have value.

These are early days for me in the Twitterverse (Twittosphere?). I would be very happy to hear from others who filter it for their own uses or as part of a current awareness or competitive intelligence program. What are your best practices?

A number of constraints faced us in this project.

• The solution had to be low or no cost.
• The library does not have access to the client’s servers, and their staff can’t access ours. Whatever solution we find has to be in neutral territory, but protected.
• The solution needs to keep these records private.
• The solution has to be easy to maintain, so that staff can take over the long-term management of the collection.

Clearly the library’s own catalogue was out – it failed on a number of the requirements. The client doesn’t own a document management system or intranet because of its small size, and we had to find a solution that didn’t rely on assistance from the government’s IT department.

Serendipitously, I remembered seeing a student project at an annual fair mounted by the Faculty of Information Studies (now i-School) at the University of Toronto. A student had used Library Thing to catalogue a collection belonging to the Toronto Book Awards. Could this be the tool for us?

Library Thing is similar to Facebook’s Shelfari application – it’s a way to list your collection, and to find others with “eerily similar tastes” (according to the home page). It pulls records from Amazon and over 600 library catalogues from around the world. Canada is well represented with CISTI and Library and Archives Canada records, and the catalogues of a number of notable university and public libraries making the list.

I’ve had a personal (free) account on Library Thing for a couple of years, and have used it to find books by favourite authors, or similar works by other authors. I’d never considered using it to catalogue an organization’s holdings. Upon further investigation I found that sure enough, there are institutional memberships, and you can make your collection private. After consulting with my clients, we purchased a lifetime membership ($15/year), and got to work.

The collection consists of a large number of file folders, and a small number of books. Contents generally include memos, cases, photocopies of news stories or journal articles on a given topic. Some files include legislative history or answers to specific questions. We were able to adapt the fields in the Library Thing interface to our purposes. The ISBN field became the folder title, and the Dewey call number became the collection designation (we distinguished between Library and Issues files, so that staff will know whether they’re looking for a book or a folder). Detailed procedures document the choices that we made, in the hope of ensuring consistency over time.

Using practicum students from Seneca College, we were able to catalogue the entire collection fairly simply. We used the notes fields to list the inventory of each file. Tagging replaces Library of Congress Subject Headings. It will be interesting to watch how this part of the catalogue evolves. The materials catalogued by library staff are fairly simply described, as we don’t “speak” the vernacular of the host organization. Once staff is responsible for the ongoing maintenance of the collection, there may be more subtlety and differentiation in the tag cloud. I plan to monitor the collection to see how it changes.

The cataloguing portion of the project is completed, and now user training begins. The product can be browsed using a half-dozen or so preformatted display styles (sorted by author, title, tags or date – and these can be customized). A simple “Google-like” search window allows you to search quickly from the home page. Fielded searching is also available. “Comments” is a searchable field, and we took advantage of this by putting folder inventories into the comments area. Users will be able to check for a particular memo or decision by searching the Comments field. It is also possible to browse the tags, which can be displayed as an alphabetical list, or as a cloud. The screen grab below shows part of the home page:

I think that this experiment may be interesting to small organizations which don’t have a full-time librarian. Although this product isn’t sufficient for serials management, it could be an excellent stop-gap for a small firm or government organization that simply wants to know what information is available. As I learned, it’s not that difficult to adapt the interface to control internally-generated information as well. The secret is in creating detailed notes, which are searchable.

In the mid-1990s to the early 2000s I worked in Alberta as a research lawyer in a mid-sized Edmonton law firm, a research lawyer in a large Calgary law firm, and as legal counsel in the Alberta Court of Appeal. In each of those positions I took great advantage of materials produced by the Alberta Law Reform Institute. In my early months in the field of legal research practice I discovered the usefulness of ALRI reports and working/discussion papers, primarily because Alberta was undergoing a major revision of its limitation of actions legislation, and sessions were hosted to introduce the Bar to the then-forthcoming changes. The litigation Bar in general was understandably anxious about the implications of those changes, and the limitations act publications were well studied.

Until then, as a recent call to the Bar, I had not been familiar with all ALRI (or law reform bodies generally) had to offer. I discovered that its print reports and discussion papers had been regularly issued to the Alberta legal community for years upon publication (prior to the ubiquity of the web and ALRI’s publication of its materials there). I saw the background analysis, comparative law discussion, and legislative history that was presented in the papers on that topic, and so made a practice of seeking out ALRI materials that might exist in respect of other Alberta legal issues. The limitations law reports also referenced the long-ago proposed legislative change in Ontario which had stalled when the then-existing law reform body ceased operations. Those references helped me realize back then that many reform issues are or have been analyzed in some other jurisdiction at some other time, so research in similar materials from other jurisdictions could be of great assistance.

Later, in the large law firm, in-depth legal analysis was often required, and law reform publications often proved to be an excellent resource. And, at the courts, the appellate judges often addressed difficult or novel legal issues that sometimes themselves led to law reform. Law reform publications were often referenced in factums, or consulted in the court’s analysis and discussions with appellate counsel.

Since then, I have always noted the importance of publications and web sites of law reform bodies in any coaching, mentoring, or formal training I have offered to students or junior lawyers. For reference purposes, here are some links to law reform body web sites or materials for Canada, some of which also offer links to law reform web sites of other jurisdictions:

British Columbia Law Institute,
Alberta Law Reform Institute
Saskatchewan Law Reform Commission
Manitoba Law Reform Commission
Law Commission of Ontario
Quebec Research Centre of Private & Comparative Law
Law Reform Commission of Nova Scotia
Uniform Law Conference of Canada
Law Commission of Canada (as archived with the Library and Archives of Canada)

I remember putting together a library open house some years ago. I deliberately chose Valentine’s Day as the day of the event, which I called the Library Love-In (yes, I know). The invitation went out via e-mail, with the subject line: “Chocolate”. Attendance was remarkably good, and a few people even paid attention to our presentation of the new library catalogue.

In mid-December, I put a call out to my library colleagues, asking how they use food to promote library services. The responses were varied and imaginative.

• The Legislative Library recently purchased a chocolate fountain as the centerpiece of its annual Open House in early December. Donna Burton, Director of Information Services reports that it’s a huge hit and a great way to launch the festive season.
• “When my library moved (for the third time in three years) into its current home, it looked like this was probably it for a while. As with the previous two moves, there had been a lot of upheaval.
  I thought a Grand Opening would be the way to signal the end to all that. So I had “champagne” in plastic wineglasses (gingerale) and cheese/crackers crudites, as though it was a cocktail party – and the people responded very well. It gave it a celebratory air, and they still remember my opening “ceremony” with pleasure.”
  Gabrielle Gaedecke, Public Health Laboratories Library
• “We had rebranded the library using the ALA @your library logo. In conjunction with that we released a new library page. On the day of the launch of the library page we had a box of Smarties with a label around them that said Get smart @your library on the box distributed. Every Legal Professional in the firm got a box of Smarties and to this day we still provide Smarties to Students when they arrive. The sugar helps keep them alert during Library Orientation, because no matter how interesting we make it, some look like they need the help to stay awake.”
  Joan Rataic-Lang, Osler Hoskin and Harcourt LLP
• The Fire Sciences Library hosts a library open house for staff and general public for one day during Fire Prevention Week in October. We have a display of new videos, books and purchase giveaways – stickers, pencils, pens, magnets, pamphlets on fire safety. We also have “refreshments” a big cake from Costco and serve juice/tea/coffee. The foodie items draw them in and then they get hooked into taking home fire safety materials.

  At training sessions we have prizes to give out to those brave souls who stick their hand up to offer answers to our quizzes. All are wrapped – Sparky Pencil Kit, Sparky Mug, OFM key chain, Sticky Pad with Safety Messages, also canvas co-workers for their unwanted conference toys to give out. We also offer, juice and cookies at the end of the presentation. I am always amazed at how excited folks get when they win a prize or just to socialized with their peers and enjoy some refreshments! –
  Martha Murphy

• Delinquent borrowers are encouraged to return books with a number of food incentives. Many university libraries reduce student fines for every Food Bank donation submitted during an annual food drive. Others report amnesty programs on overdues, with participants receiving donuts or baked goods for returning long-lost items to the library.
• A couple of libraries host “coffee break” training sessions – narrow topics delivered over a 15 minute pause in the day. Coffee and Timbits supplied by the library – just the quick hit you need. The Supreme Court library reports that these sessions have been very well attended, and allow the staff to get deliver very focused messages quickly. The staff at the BC Securities Commission held their meetings first thing in the morning, when coffee was most appreciated and the workday not disrupted by a learning break.
• Many colleagues piggyback on events already being held, and let their employer supply the lunch. In some ways, the library hires itself out as a Speaker’s Bureau, and provides training during student development luncheons, practice group breakfast meetings, and so on. One respondent notes that having an event in the student lounge backfired because, although attendance was exceptionally high, it was difficult to deliver the message because of the volume of traffic in and out of the area.
• Several colleagues maintain candy bowls. None of my correspondents are reimbursed for this, which seems to be true of a lot of the “feeding” activity of libraries. Snacks at training sessions or meetings are provided personally by the trainers, and seldom come out of the library budget. This explains why so many librarians are exceptional cooks/bakers, and why so many of them own Tim Hortons cards. (In fact, the two come together in the famous Tim Hortons Croquembouche – a pyramid of timbits glazed with sugar or chocolate. I’m serious – it exists).
• The most innovative use of food incentives was reported by Kim Rempel:
  I work in a prison library. In the prison culture coffee is like cash, and good coffee is like gold. I hadn’t worked here too long before I realized that to keep my inmate employees at work, or at least keep them coming back to work when they wander off, I needed to have “good” coffee. Not the bargain basement bulk stuff that everyone drank but the high test premium stuff, something foreign, something flavoured something French. Part of the deal with the guys was, I would provide the coffee pot and good coffee and they would provide the filters. This worked pretty well until the one day I arrived at work and no coffee. I was told we were out of filters, and everyone looked at me, like I was somehow going to solve this. “I refuse” I told them, “I have kept up my end of the bargain” – and the standoff began. Days went by and everyone got grumpier but we held our ground. I flaunted my resolve and started drinking tea, herbal no less, at my desk. The guys were weakening, and then it happened. I arrived at my desk that morning and looked over and saw an almost full pot of dark rich coffee just coming to a dripping end. I grabbed my cup and joined a couple of guys waiting for the pot to finish. No one said to much at first we all just got our coffee and settled into a morning chat. I finally asked who of them broke down and finally picked up the filters. Mike a rather big scary looking “lifer” smiled and pulled up his dirty sweatshirt to reveal, his old undershirt with a perfect square cut out of the centre of it, his belly hanging out of the hole. “This filter” he bragged “can be reused”.

  Problem solved

In short, it seems that feeding the minds and bodies of our clients is inextricably linked. You’re your session short and focused if you’re trying to train. Celebrations are great ways to share success with clients and subtly market your services. Creative types will go beyond the trip to Timmies, but woe betide the poor librarian who ventures forth without some sort of sustenance for his audience.

But, invariably, others carry out legal research or might even provide instruction in research. And this might include research of varying natures. That is, perhaps research or instruction in these other contexts is “peripherally” legal, or traditional legal research.

Librarians in law schools obviously carry out legal research and offer legal research instruction, but what about also business schools, or other university departments such as social or political science? Or professors or students in those contexts? Do they conduct research that is perhaps, if not legal research at its core, then peripherally legal? And if so, are they receiving instruction in the research they carry out?

There are also, of course, non-practicing lawyers or other legal professionals working outside the scope of traditional legal practice. For example, such professionals might be part of law reform agencies, or various other non-governmental organizations. Clearly a great deal of research would be carried out by (or perhaps commissioned by) professionals in these organizations.

Research that is legal at its peripheries might also be carried out by authors (i.e. apart from authors of legal textbooks; rather, authors of books that might touch on aspects of the law), or by researchers working in politics.

But can you help me think of others who do or provide instruction in research? And the follow-up question to which this leads is what the particular needs of these communities of researchers are, and to what extent they are met by the resources that exist. For example, is there a reliance (or over-reliance) on general web searches or cursory print material review? And to the extent those conducting research in these other contexts use specialized legal research tools, such as secondary and primary print materials or either free or proprietary electronic legal databases and web sites, do they use primarily print or electronic resources? And do they using them with training, or “off the cuff”? Or do they not use specialized tools at all, perhaps relying instead on the experience of or consultation with others? And, finally, depending on the answers here, is there more that specialized legal researchers (such as research lawyers and law librarians) can or should do? Opportunities? Obligations?

So, I’ve raised just a few questions. Now I’d love to hear your thoughts!

This spring, Karen left her long-time professional home at the County of Carleton (we’re not allowed to use the word “retired” since she has only “retired from this position” – not working life in general). Too young to consider Boca, she’s been looking for ways to use her experience and expand her horizons. And has she ever!

On November 25, 2008, Karen will be moving to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, as a CUSO-VSO Canada volunteer. The merging of CUSO and VSO on November 1, 2008 “makes it Canada’s largest international cooperation agency that works through volunteers.” Their aim is to fight global poverty and disadvantage. Karen will be teaching and training students and continuing the set up of a resource centre for the English Department at the Pedagogical University in Maputo, which also has four (4) other campuses throughout the country.

I caught up with her via e-mail and voice to find out more.

This is a big change – what inspired the decision to opt for a volunteering adventure?

I have always wanted to work overseas – since I was a child. I really felt the need to do something meaningful and good for the soul – my way.

How did you come to choose the VSO? (We researchers want to know the resources available to vet service organizations, etc).

Since I live in Ottawa, I am familiar with VSO and CUSO as volunteer organizations with good reputations. I went onto their websites and realized that VSO seemed like a good match for my skills. They have six (6) programme goals around the world and I thought I fit into two (2) of them ie. education or governance & participation.

Tell us about Mozambique — what do you know?

For the readers out there (okay everyone), I read a wonderful book with the crazy title of Kalashnikovs and zombie cucumbers: travels in Mozambique by Nick Middleton. It helped explain the civil war which ended in 1992 and left the country extremely poor and with a high rate of illiteracy (plus land mines particularly in the north).

Mozambique is a former Portuguese colony, settled by Portuguese traders in 1507. It was granted independence in 1975. The country has been ravaged by war – the Portuguese Colonial War 1961 to 1974 which also involved Angola and Guinea Bissau and the civil war from which ended in 1992. It has approx. 2500 kms of white sand beaches on the Indian Ocean –- due south of Tanzania and bordered by South Africa, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Swaziland on the west. The population is about 20 million and roughly the same size as Turkey. Like Darwin, Australia where my son and I lived in 1997, it has a tropical climate with two seasons – the wet and the dry. The government is trying to rebuild the roads and infrastructure, increase tourism, improve education and deal with a population suffering from HIV/AIDS.

What does your project entail, and what resources are available to you?

I will be working in the English Department of the Universidade Pedagogica Maputo developing the resource centre there, print and electronic resources, and also ensuring more computers with internet access and other equipment necessary for a university educating teachers. Mozambique is in desperate need of trained teachers. The objectives are to provide quality education focused on distance teacher training (there are four other satellite campuses in the country), building human resource capacity and working on advocacy. In terms of resources – it is my job to provide more equipment and resources and fund-raising is a key component of that role.

How does the process work in international volunteering? What are the bureaucratic hurdles? How does VSO help you find the information you need, and to what extent do they assist in things like arranging housing, transport, etc?

I highly recommend it to anyone considering volunteering abroad. The process requires patience and you need to get started early on the paperwork. Mozambique requires my original diplomas (couriered there and back) and I had just packed up and sold my home – so the diplomas were in boxes. VSO Canada has provided excellent training and support. First, you apply (forms to fill out), then you attend an Assessment where you work together with other applicants and your interpersonal and problem-solving skills are assessed over several days. Next, there was a four (4) day Preparing for Change training session and recently a five (5) day Skills for Working in Development course. When I arrive in Maputo, I will be in six (6) weeks of further language and country specific training with four (4) other people volunteering in Mozambique.

Transportation to the country is covered by VSO, housing is provided by the institution you are working for there ie. in my case the Pedagogical University. Housing can vary from shared accommodation with two or three other volunteers or a small apartment on your own. There is no way of knowing until you are in-country. You are paid a small stipend ie. about $10.00 a day to provide a healthy and modest lifestyle. VSO covers medical insurance while you are volunteering.

How much of your time is committed to the project – will you have an opportunity to travel in Mozambique (or more broadly?)

I am certainly hoping to travel throughout Mozambique and visit Pemba in the north and the old capital city of Ilha do Mozambique (a UNESCO World Heritage site). Air travel is expensive and roads are still fairly rough. Travel by bus could take 10 to 30 hours to get to your dream location. I already have friends lined up wanting to visit me and my son is hoping to fly from London to Nairobi in February where, hopefully, we can meet up. Kruger National Park in South Africa is nearby and there is an Elephant Reserve near Maputo –- all very exciting.

What excites you most about this new chapter in your life? What do you think you will get out of this experience?

Everyone has been really supportive of my finally doing this – including my 82 year old mother, Peggy, who I hope will come to visit escorted by my son David. I love travel and adventure so volunteering in Mozambique certainly fulfills those deep personal needs. The opportunity to meet new people and learn from them and grow as a person is an amazing adventure to me. I know I will learn more from those I work with and meet in Mozambique than they will learn from me. Right now, I need to do something meaningful for me and this seems like a good fit. Financially, it is not my smartest move but money isn’t everything.

************

I know that the best wishes of the library community (and a certain amount of envy) go with Karen as she opens this exciting new chapter in her life. It’s received knowledge in librarianship that we follow a calling as well as a profession, and Karen’s certainly living that message with this project. Those interested in following Karen’s adventures will be able to follow her through her blog, http://kareninmaputo.blogspot.com. If you wish to support Karen’s project and the work of the VSO, Karen is also fundraising. Best wishes, and many happy adventures, Karen!

I have been wondering about the extent to which instructional programs dedicate enough time to non-legal research, specifically using electronic (non-legal) resources, including the Internet. I haven’t participated in a survey of this question recently, so I don’t know what is done in different law firms, courts, legal departments, universities, and the like. My own experience is that there has not been any solid coaching in these skills. Subscription databases of non-legal information generally have been off-limits to students, instead being the realm of what we used to call the “power searchers”.

There was a time when legal research programs in which I was involved offered a couple of hours exploring different Internet search engines and those pages that we used to call metasites, on various subjects beyond the bookmarked legal sites. We discussed what Boolean searching meant, and in which search engines the use of “AND” between terms or the use of quotes had any impact. At that time, it seemed – to teacher and, I believe, student – that information professionals and experienced researchers actually had some useful insights to share.

Has this all changed? Has the obviously ubiquitous nature of web searching changed the dynamic or relationship between student and teacher when it comes to instruction in electronic non-legal research and, as a consequence, the need for this instruction? I do believe the perceived student-teacher dynamic on this subject has changed. Because many students are clearly quite experienced in the use of the Internet, they may not necessarily believe an information professional has anything to offer them. Similarly, there is a risk that more experienced researchers perceive their own experience as old-school or out-of-date, given the pace of creation of new resources and tools.

I also do believe that the need for instruction in electronic non-legal resources does exist, and this instruction definitely should be retained or incorporated in student programs. I know research exists on the way newer graduates – or a younger generation (an unfortunate generalization of the demographics of law students) – access information on the Internet, but I can’t point to any results at the time of this writing. (If others can, please feel free to comment.)

I can offer some observations, though, based my own experience in working one-to-one with students. I have seen very few students type a URL or part of a URL directly into a browser location bar. The default means of accessing web information seems to be to open Google – and only Google – and type words into the search box. I can’t say I have often seen students use any search syntax, even if only quotation marks. This might be a testament to the quality of the results produced in the type of search very frequently carried out, which is a search for the home page of an organization. Or it might be argued that, as search algorithms and design improve, advanced techniques are redundant. However, when the task is to use the web for actual in-depth research such as background information on a subject, a person, an organization, an issue – anything beyond the location of a previously-identified web site or a crossword-solution type of answer – the results most standard search engines will produce from a single-box, syntax-less search will be pages and pages long, with little indication of what is useful and what is junk. The most likely outcome in this scenario will be a quick skim of the first page or two of results. The information professional, though, can illustrate the benefits of a strategic approach to searching. For example, one can show demonstrate whatever functions are available for the particular search engine – for example, boolean connectors and date restrictions – whether on an advanced search page or by using known syntax. Or one can show the advantages of using tables of contents and drill-down menus rather than a search box in the upper right-hand corner.

We often emphasize secondary sources as a starting point in legal research. There is no denying, though, that students tackling a research problem (strictly legal or not) will often head to the Internet before even using an established legal database. Any research instruction program should also include a component on skillful Internet searching. And coaching students in this skill should have the effect of improving their techniques in those established databases and in internal knowledge management systems as well. A nice side effect should be to affirm the relevance and expertise of the experienced information professional.

Shifting books is one of those activities that permit contemplation. As I muscled OLRB Reports from one bay to another, I started to muse about how library collections are evolving. Expectations have certainly changed over the past forty years. I grew up in a small town outside of Ottawa. Homework assignments were answered using local resources – the high school library WAS the public library for much of my childhood. If the assignment was really important and your parents willing to drive you, you could take advantage of the vaster resources of the Ottawa Public Library, or the university libraries. But most of the time, local was good enough. I remember writing a project on Wales based on three paragraphs in the Encyclopedia Britannica and the reminiscences of my maternal grandfather, who’d grown up in Cardiff. Grade Three was a much simpler time.

How things have changed! Students, professionals, and citizens – we want it all, and want it now. It is possible to gather statutory comparators from around the globe (not every country to be sure, but you can easily go beyond the British and American examples on which we humble Canadians have traditionally relied). A staggering amount of analysis, from journals so obscure as to be laughable – is now mere clicks away (with a PayPal account or credit card). With so much available to us virtually, what do we need to keep in our physical collections?

Not so long ago, every law library worth the name housed numberless volumes of the various law reports, federal and provincial statutes, Now, the listservs are full of notices of freebies available for the cost of shipping. We’re dumping our reporters in favour of online. A straw poll among colleagues indicates that this is happening not only in the small organizations, but also in the big collections – The Great Library, Supreme Court and law school libraries are also making changes.

Fair enough – the space and financial constraints are universal, and I certainly can’t expect the big libraries to keep an obscure journal on the odd chance that I might, some day, need that article on wage discrimination in China under Mao. Chances are I’ll be able to obtain it by contacting a source in China. I call this “just in time” collection development, as opposed to “just in case” collection development.

But a little voice in the back of my head continues to ask that nagging question: “Am I going to regret this?” What is everyone is throwing out the same stuff? Should I be checking with my favourite ILL partners to see if I should be keeping this, or am I safe?

Not surprisingly, our professional associations have been grappling with these issues for some time. AALL has many several groups addressing questions raised from a number of perspectives – collection development, resource sharing and preservation. A subcommittee of CALL’s Preservation Needs Committee has been wrestling with the issue of “last copies” since the 2007 conference. The leaders of our profession are addressing the larger strategic issues. How does that guide my actions in my own collection?

How much trimming enhances the value of a collection, and how do you know when you’ve reached it? Do institutional and specialist libraries have a duty to think of the larger community when they weed, or is the mandate solely set by the funding institution? (Just to be clear – I count my own Ontario Workplace Tribunals Library as a specialist library. Size is not the sole determinant of the need to think broadly). Is more consultation needed between libraries before cuts are made? Should we be sharing our collection development policies with each other, or developing them cooperatively? How can we fill collection gaps effectively?

Who keeps the last copy? Does it have to be a paper copy? The mandate of the Library and Archives Canada to collect Canadian publications can give us some comfort on that front, but where do I turn for the esoteric international materials? I see lots of traffic about serials and case law reports, but I seldom see notices about monographs being discarded. What are we risking by not sharing those lists as well?

A conversation is needed. I look forward to your comments.

The story got me wondering about what exactly is taught in law schools specifically in the way of legal history, and whether this can or should be improved. As I recall, historical case law or concepts were taught course by course as foundations or background for the material in the course – which seems a logical way of presenting material and the concept of precedent in the common law courses. It makes sense to me that legal history be taught contextually; to understand where the law comes from should help the student understand what it is now and where it is going. However, it seems to me that, for the most part, what students retain for the purposes of exams is current statutory or case law or very recent precedent. This may differ for courses in which a student must or chooses to research and write a paper. Perhaps legal history is somehow incorporated in legal research and writing courses today, but I don’t recall this being the case when I was in law school. And unless the real emphasis (by schools, students, and potential employers) on legal research has also changed, the influence of mandatory legal research courses is minimal, despite the real importance of the practical skills they offer. I seriously doubt that most students believe that an A in legal research land them their coveted jobs. If I’m wrong, that would be a good thing.

The difficulties carry forth into practice. In my experience, researchers place heavy reliance on recent case law. As well, many researchers understandably prefer to use CanLII as a starting point because it is free but, as we know, the starting point of most of its collections is fairly recent. For example, I’ve seen several instances in which lawyers base legal arguments primarily on recent case law located from electronic databases or from judicial consideration of current statute only, without reference to earlier versions of the same provisions. Of course, apart from the “living tree” example, this approach may offer the most recent law, but the precedential basis of those cases might not be understood or might, indeed, be altogether misplaced. Without an appreciation of the historical development of the law in the particular area, the lawyer can be without an appropriate depth of understanding of the legal position and risks missing arguments by distinction or analogy, as well as flaws in the parties’ respective positions. Most recently I’ve seen legal reasoning blunders on limitations law issues, because of misconstruction of precedent, failure to look at the law of other jurisdictions, or lack of awareness of the basis for limitations principles or origins of statutory provisions.

What can law schools do differently to help students retain or at least better understand the importance of legal history? I’m not an expert on pedagogical matters, so I don’t expect I can answer as well as many who might have read this far. Perhaps simple things such as incorporating some legal foundational elements into exams in various courses. Or perhaps a required course in legal history, or a capping exercise that addresses some aspect of legal history or foundations. How to address this problem in practice? This depends on whether employers or practitioners themselves recognize a problem and are willing to direct resources to train students in in-depth research, and to provide them with (or allow them to access) research tools beyond those of recent coverage. Some of the best research I conducted was at the courts, where I was able to refer to older editions of Halsbury’s, to UK and US resources, and even to Blackstone’s Commentaries. This is probably most challenging for lawyers in smaller communities, who don’t have ready access to large courthouse or law school libraries. Do others see any other challenges for lawyers and students in larger firms or in larger centres? Or any other solutions? Or do you see a concern at all?

Jordan Furlong identified trust as a challenge in the world of law firm KM, prompting me to ask the question: Do librarians have trust issues with the emerging world of 2.0?

In Wikinomics, Tapscott and Williams talk about the Net Gen — those growing up with Web 2.0 — and their impact on the culture of business and the Web. “The Web is no longer about idly surfing and passively reading, listening or watching. It’s about peering: sharing, socializing, collaborating, and most of all, creating within loosely connected communities.” (p. 45) “While their parents were passive consumers of media, youth today are active creators of media content and hungry for interaction.” (p.47)

This change in attitude toward media and information could have a profound effect on libraries. Just think about your collections — in the past, a subject-matter expert (the librarian) was delegated to select, collect and control information that came into the organization. Purchasing books and subscriptions, licensing databases and other digital content was all handled through the library. Usage was monitored and controlled. Reference consisted of leading the user, helping them “refine” their question, and matching it to the available resources. But we’re seeing a change in the way that information is consumed by Net Gen.

“Rather than being passive recipients of mass consumer culture, the Net Gen spend time searching, reading, scrutinizing, authenticating, collaborating and organizing…” (Wikinomics, p. 47)

Web 2.0 is taking information out of the established pipelines and putting it “out there.” Wikipedia, blogs, and even Facebook are seen by the Net Gen as legitimate sources. How many librarians out there shuddered at that last statement? I know I felt a frisson of concern when I read the passage for the first time. But this is where trust comes in.

According to Tapscott and Williams, the collaborative nature of Wikipedia actually may make it more accurate than the Encyclopedia Britannica (p. 75). More eyeballs reviewing the information may make it easier to spot inaccuracies, and because Wikipedia is created on a dynamic platform, errors can be corrected much more quickly than the hard-copy publishing cycle permits.

Darlene Fichter identified trust as an issue a long time ago (first take) (followup). In order for libraries to keep up with Net Gen, we’re going to have to learn to trust our users more. I confess that I rolled my eyes when I first read about folksonomy and tagging — how can one ever get consistency in describing like items if you don’t have authority control? Library Thing is teaching me that many hands make consistency.

I’m not suggesting that we abandon all pretence of filtering — librarians can help to abate the risk to their organizations in many ways. Information literacy becomes even more important as information sources proliferate. Libraries may not themselves be the filter, but librarians can continue to help users become savvy in evaluating information sources. There is a role for us if we’re willing to play by the new rules: openness, peering and sharing. See Joan Lippincott’s detailed and insightful review of the challenges and opportunities, Net Generation Students and Libraries. Taking initiative from Educause, how can our firm, court and government libraries learn from the experiences of universities and adapt as their students become our colleagues?

That conversation, coupled with the invitation to contribute to SLAW, has given me a chance to really think about the relevance of librarianship. Is there a future for the profession?

According to the New York Times, librarians have never been cooler. Friends in the know at UWO and U of T report that enrolment in the library sciences is increasing. A quick e-mail to a newly graduated librarian elicited this response:

To begin with, I got to the point around my 3rd year of undergrad where I needed to consider this [career options]. I had one prof trying to groom me for a PhD program in the UK in a totally obscure historical field. It would have been fascinating, and probably fun, but would have left me no good to be anything else other than a university professor – and an incredibly marginal one at that. I thought about this and realized that I didn’t want to become that highly specialized and end up limiting my horizons so early into my 20s. Furthermore, the prospect of spending the next 20+ years fighting for tenure, research grants and with my colleagues just didn’t appeal to me. I thought about continuing with poli sci, but couldn’t really see the point – again fearing the clank of a large lock on an Ivory Tower.

So, I sat back and thought about what I liked and what I was good at. Conclusion: I was organizationally minded, enjoyed the challenge of research, was tech-savvy & generally just loved learning.

I realize that as data-gathering exercises go, this one is woefully unscientific. But I’m sure that the explanation given above has resonance with many of us -– “I don’t want to lock myself into a narrow specialty. I want to learn, and I want to work with information and ideas.”

As the pace of growth of information accelerates, we need people who are trained in gathering, assessing and redirecting it to users and to repositories. Who better than someone who is trained to be inquiring, obsessive about detail, and who keeps the long-term value of information foremost in mind? Having access to this mind-set frees those in other professions (law, medicine, IT, teaching, whatever) from having to worry about issues which may not be foremost in their minds, but which could pose a long-term risk for their organizations if not addressed.

Are we graduating the type of professionals we need? I’m not certain. An interesting conversation with our summer student indicates that “classic” books-and-research librarianship is the attraction, not the “Access databases-and-information-architecture” crowd that I was expecting.

Although Information Systems courses appear in the catalogues of Ontario’s “library schools” , there is no requirement to take them. Based on my own experience and career path, it’s essential for us to graduate librarians who embrace technology, have the insight to evaluate new technologies to assess their value and application in their organizations, and who can contribute to the design and delivery of technology-based services. According to several younger librarians I know, we’re not there yet.

The Nexgen library Usenet group recently hosted a similar discussion. Several students asked what technology they should learn in order to be credible candidates for library jobs. Some of the suggestions from the discussion included familiarity with HTML, XHTML, SQL, CSS. While I’m not certain that the average librarian needs to be expert in any of these languages (after all, that’s what third-party editing packages are for), I would argue that a minimum, the reader should at least know what all these acronyms stand for! (They should also live by the rule that you have to reboot a recalcitrant computer three times before calling the help desk, and be able to calmly describe the problem and corrective steps taken).

So, I guess I’ll continue the campaign to have my niece follow me into a profession which I have found to be endlessly engaging, confident that she will develop attitudes and abilities which will serve her well throughout her professional life. And perhaps I’ll encourage her to tilt her learning, where possible, toward learning how information systems work, to developing a comfort level with the IT vocabulary, and to understanding the machinery which powers the Information Age.

As we all know, over the past several decades it has become not uncommon for law firms of various sizes to have in-house research lawyers. Similar functions to those of law firm research lawyers are also carried out by dedicated individuals in government departments, courts, tribunals, and other organizations; these persons are often referred to as advisory lawyers, counsel, or some other term conveying the same meaning – to provide advice to their colleagues rather than directly to external clients (although they may do that also).

One of the questions that arose at our meeting, which I’d like to repeat here, is whether the position of research lawyer is still alive and well – or, indeed, if it ever really was. Do law firms have a need for internal research lawyers? If so, has that need diminished or increased over the years?

Some might argue that the wider availability – ubiquity, perhaps – of on-line research resources and databases now as compared with a decade or two ago has made the formerly specialized skills of the research lawyer redundant. In essence, the argument might be that the outcome has been what Google has done for Internet searching. In relatively earlier times on-line searching was expensive, generally being strictly time-based, so when it was done it had to be done efficiently and this required the talents of an experienced and skilled researcher. Today, electronic legal research costs often are measured differently, access to the databases is usually much more widely available in a given firm than was previously the case, and use of electronic research is seen as necessary to complete most research assignments.

I have a couple of responses to this view. While the foregoing points might be valid, the current omnipresence of electronic legal research resources doesn’t translate to omnipresent skill in their use. Just as entering one or a few words into a search box in simple Google web search generally will not efficiently produce in-depth, accurate, and reliable results, having access to the key legal research resources does not mean that one will come up with good solutions to legal problems. Familiarity with the databases, their contents, their search syntax options, general skill and experience in constructing efficient and reliable search queries are all required. A good researcher also must be well-versed in the variety of print tools and textbooks that might be useful in addressing a given problem. It might be fair to say that law librarians, in general, fit this description better than does the average lawyer who does not focus on legal research. On this analysis, it seems the research lawyer can make at least as great a contribution as ever.

Beyond this even, legal research involves much more than searching, whether expertly in an electronic database or even with print tools. A bent for and experience with legal analysis and reasoning are essential. This is really at the heart of legal research beyond the student level. To find, or propose, a solution to a legal problem first requires an understanding or, at least, a basic grounding, of the law in the area. This gives the researcher a basis on which to frame the issues to be addressed and a starting point from which to proceed with the legal analysis. It is true that a lawyer who has significant experience in te particular area of law is well-placed to reach this point. However, this lawyer, unlike a research lawyer, would not necessarily have the hands-on, efficient print and electronic searching skills described earlier, nor the interest in developing them.

Familiarity with case law precedents and legislation – and a desire to keep that knowledge current – are also required if one is to carry out effective legal research. This is also a description that also quite likely would apply to an experienced lawyer practicing or building a practice in a given area. However, a research lawyer may be inclined – or required – to maintain this kind of knowledge and current awareness in many different areas of law – an option not likely available to lawyers, other than generalists or some sole practitioners. And, depending on the nature of the firm in which the research lawyer practices, there may be several different jurisdictions for which he or she must keep current. In some firms, this “generalist” approach may not be preferred for a research lawyer; instead, different departments may have “specialist” research lawyers. If this is the case, then there surely is a requirement that the research lawyer be extremely well-versed in the law in that area as well as maintain the utmost currency in it and areas touching it.

This raises another question: Assuming a research lawyer is still seen as desirable, to what extent can (or should) he or she be able (or be required) to focus on the investment (read: not billable) tasks of (1) keeping current in the law, whether broadly or in a particular area; and (2) sharing this earned knowledge with the rest of the firm? Is this a question for which the answer might have changed over the years, given the burgeoning availability of legal resources and specialization of practices? Should this be a primary role for research lawyers today? A secondary role? The only role? For larger firms, does this depend on how many research lawyers are in the firm? And the more sensitive question is whether, if the role of the research lawyer is not primarily to generate revenue, how does this (or how should it) affect the compensation, position, and recognition of the research lawyer?

My own view is that a weighting in favour of sharing current awareness is preferable, especially for more senior research lawyers, who may be able to offer some personal takes on legal news or draw parallels and connections with previous law and other elements of the law. This, like any suggestion that has a negative short-term impact on the bottom line, obviously will not be popular everywhere. Your views will be received, of course, with great interest.

This goal applies equally to the specific context of legal analysis and legal research. Those of us who earn our livelihood by conducting or instructing legal research are aware that it is not simply an exercise about locating the silver bullet case. Effective legal research requires the researcher to be information literate, which itself requires legal analysis – the elements above: knowing (or finding out) the relevant legal issues, knowing how to find the information – cases, legislation – that will help resolve the issues, and the ability to critically analyze what they discover. Again, the last point is crucial and is at the heart of the lawyer’s or student’s responsibility.

Where is this long lecture in the application of library principles to legal research in practice (or study) going? My point is that the way that many current legal researchers and students carry out this work is not centred in information literacy. Many students have as their goal finding that silver bullet case. And the unfortunate consequence – or perhaps cause – of this, in my view, is an over-reliance on full text on-line searching, as a first step in research – whether full text on-line in the commercial legal databases or even full text searching in an in-house knowledge management system.

I think effective information literacy in the context of legal research and, therefore, proper analysis of a legal problem, requires a road map of some sort. The research issue cannot be resolved if it is not first properly understood. A road map often exists in the form of traditional legal finding tools that help the researcher determine the appropriate context for the research – help the researcher more precisely identify the issues being addressed. The finding tools are familiar but often overlooked in an impulse to get on-line for some quick full text searching in what often turns out to be an unnecessarily large haystack. Those in private practice know well that there are several reasons for this type of research. Quite often there are heavy demands on students’ time, so the urge to take shortcuts is understandable. A desire or instruction to keep costs down can pressure researchers to minimize time spent on-line, with the result that they do not always read the cases beyond the headnotes or the immediate context of the search terms. Time constraints and working on the basis of case law first also may mean that the researcher does not read the precedents cited within the cases they found, so really cannot properly understand the context or basis of the analysis in their search results. All of this defeats information literacy.

Legal encyclopedias, topically arranged digest collections (including topical case reporter digests) are the most basic finding tools. Tables of contents, back-of-book indexes, and tables of cases or statutes in these tools and in text books are all effective access points for locating information in these tools. And internal knowledge management systems – in terms of their controlled vocabularies, taxonomies, or indexing schemes – also satisfy the function of organizing thoughts and analysis. For more experienced lawyers and researchers finding tools may be less traditional: the experience itself, review of favourite secondary sources such as a textbook in the general area of law or topical case reporters and their digests, previous research and analysis in the area – perhaps in a knowledge management database – or discussions with colleagues.

Following the maps that these tools lay out, students and young lawyers can ensure, first, that they have identified the issues correctly, second, that they consider any additional relevant issues, and third, that they read and understand the legal context of the issues. Context allows the researcher to critically evaluate the cases where their research leads. On-line searching, particularly full-text, on its own or as a starting point may lead the researcher to what looks like the right answer when, in reality, it is to the wrong question. This happens so frequently in the research of students, even those who have great facility with on-line research. And once in a while this lack of information literacy is evident in de-contextualized research which forms the basis of faulty analysis which, in turn, leads to unimpressive case law decided in reliance on inappropriate case law cited to the court. And the existence of such cases on the books (or in the databases) makes future legal research even more difficult.

1. Commercial Databases – tips and gripes
   - On a monthly basis, we share idiosyncrasies, problems and new resources, largely on the “new Quicklaw”, and Westlaw eCarswell; one of us then takes on the task of contacting the vendor with respect to the problems that need fixing
   - examples of recent problems:

   * we’ve discovered that some of the databases on the new QL have a narrower coverage or scope than the databases with the same name on the old QL;ie. don’t assume you know what’s in a QL database by its name;

   * WeC: There have been problems printing out paragraphs from the C.E.D.

2. Knowledge Management
   - Our firm, like many others, is pursuing its KM strategy, which the research group is interested in, and which will be integral to its implementation
3. Costs of Electronic Research
   - There are issues over this, as some lawyers have a perception that electronic research is too expensive and desire to contain the costs; it does not occur on most files and seems connected to particular lawyers; a decision was made to “educate” those lawyers, and the firm in general, about the need for electronic research on most issues, but also ensure other resources are also consulted – quality product is the goal.
4. Students
   - Over the last few years our group has become more involved in the review process for articling and summer students. We usually meet as a group to evaluate the students. Because we often answer research questions from students and review their work (memoranda, etc.) we are able to comment on their work individually and as they fit into the group as a whole. By comparing comments, we can sometimes see a trend in the student’s research skills, habits, or lack thereof. For example, some students are not familiar to any of us, in which case we follow up to determine whether there are legitimate reasons for this. The students submit a detailed Research Plan with their memos, which give us a good indication of their skills and quality of work. Our comments are part of the review process and much valued by the Student Committee.
5. Current Research, Non-Billable Projects and Workload
   These discussions are extremely helpful, and sometimes we have found we are working
   on similar issues, and can pick each other’s brains. The non-billable work may involve preparing papers for journals or conferences, or being part of a legal text with other firm lawyers. It is always useful to know what your colleagues are working on and building a specialty in, and we can refer work to each other, eg. one of us specializes in damages, another in limitations law, and another in corporate issues such as director and officers’ liability.

I acknowledge that much of the research I do can be, and often is, conducted by searching online legal databases, as well as internet sites and search engines. In particular, the availability of law from other jurisdictions, both case law and legislation, has increased remarkably over the past ten years, improving the quality of our own research product in Canada. It also wasn’t that long ago that the librarians in our firm and elsewhere were debating whether legal publishers would continue to develop CD-ROM products or would convert to internet-based applications.

However, the urgency that often accompanies requests for research, and the demands of the billable hour combined with the many non-billable tasks that end up in the research group, leave little time for the interesting, but not immediately applicable, intricacies of emerging technology. The majority of my day is still spent reading, thinking, and writing, rather than in front of my computer.

It may be of interest to those of you who do not practice research law, that the textbooks and loose leaf editions, and yes, even the hard copy of the encyclopedias and Words & Phrases, are still used on a daily basis. Browsing and musing are still essential research skills that extend one’s searching and analysis outside of the box, compared to the narrowness of online searching. We need to understand the scope and limitations of the technological tools available to us, but the focus, at least in my practice, remains on the substantive law and its application to the factual circumstances and needs of the client, who is paying for the research and resulting product, whether it’s a factum, brief, opinion letter or memorandum of law.

I would be interested to know if other research lawyers’ experiences are similar to mine, in relation to keeping current with technological innovations. I enjoy reading the posts on Slaw immensely and thank those who contribute regularly. I suspect many of us are kindred spirits as we bemoan the shrinking hard copy libraries, public and private, while at the same time enjoy the efficiencies that the digital world offers. Without Slaw, I would be even more hopelessly behind in what’s happening in technology and law. Thank you, all, for keeping the rest of us informed!

In librarianship information is our business. That’s why I’m amazed that some of my colleagues express trepidation when faced with the welter of today’s M’s: you know the ones I mean — IM, RM, KM, ECM. Since the time of the Royal Library of Alexandria, librarians have been dealing with and organizing information. (What the heck do the worry-warts think were in those books anyway?) It’s just that today the format has changed. We’re no longer dealing with papyrus rolls, scrolls, index cards, or even books all the time; we use databases, portals, wikis, blogs, podcasts, video streaming — which is cool. But what do we do with these cool toys? Same old, same old: we find, organize and disseminate information. Pathfinders can become wikis, new acquisitions lists can go on the library blog, tips for online searching can be recorded as podcasts and can be listened to by patrons while searching. For example, the University of Alberta library catalogue can be searched on Facebook — because that’s where many patrons are. The way I look a it, with technology as our ally we are only limited by our imagination in its application in our organizations.

Today the scope/location/direction of our information foraging is not entirely directed to external sources; we also corral information found within our organizations. We create databases for content that can range from memoranda of law, opinions, expert witnesses, and staff skill sets, to corporate art work, and whatever else you and your organization thinks adds value to the services provided to clients. For instance, many librarians, especially in corporate libraries, are finding themselves entwined in Records Management. The skill sets inherent in librarianship come into play in RM; they just have to be adapted slightly to be applied. Call numbers = file numbers, subject headings = records classification, weeding = retention periods. This is an over simplification, however it shows that RM is nothing to cause you undue stress and angst.

(Actually, to be truthful, I’ve found records management always causes me stress and angst; if you believe organizations think libraries are unimportant try being involved in RM. RM staff are imagined to be toiling away in the bowels of the building moving boxes around. Only when that impossible to be found, but utterly vital, document is produced by the “file clerks” — aaahhh, priceless beyond compare! — is their value recognized.)

Knowledge management, the darling of the business world these days, follows along the same organizing themes. Who knows better than librarians which lawyer has done research on certain topics, maintains the how-to databases of firm research and precedents, and has the skills to stay on top of current developments? That would be your librarian. And that would be KM.

So from where I sit, the M’s are the same ones that the library professional has followed for centuries — all the M’s in information: get the right information, to the right person, at the right time. Mmm?