ALLA (WA) News Blog

The adventures of the Finding the Law Project continue!  So it’s time for another update from the Project Lead, Anastasia Stepanovic, and Project Coordinator, Alice Hewitt. Our last update on the ALLA (WA) Blog was back in June – and since then we have presented at the ALLA (WA) Conference, published articles in the Australian Law Librarian journal, and we’ve gained a lot of ALLA member feedback and suggestions – end even a few new members to the project team.  At the ALLA Conference 2022 in Hobart, Anastasia and Alice presented a paper paying respect and homage to the evolution of Finding the Law – including all its various names, formats, and teachers. The presentation was centred around where ALLA had began this sort of law librarianship skills training, the different names the course was titled over time, and the different divisions that took the lead over time. The conference presentation was delivered using Rise Articulate, the building ground of the new FLO Project and ...

You read that right folks,  ALLA Librarians have taken over the Lawfluent Podcast this week! Our friends at Open Law, an innitiative of BarNet Jade, have been kind enough to let some ALLA members grace the airwaves during their season 2 episode: Law Librarians from ALLA! Phil Mullen (ALLA NSW & ALLA Ltd), Anastasia Stepanovic (ALLA Vic) and Alice Hewitt (ALLA (WA)) joined forces for a round table discussion on everything from how we got to law libraries, how law libraries are all different, the book worm from Toy Story, and some very strange research requests.  Hosted by the wonderful Isabella Elena Carrozzi, and playing on a podcast platform near you.  Check out the Lawfluent Podcast now: Lawfluent Website Lawfluent Instagram Open Law LinkedIn

The ALLA Conference is a little over a week away!  Unfortunately our President David McDowell, will not be able to attend the Conference, but the ALLA(WA) Committee wish all our WA members who are attending a great Conference, particularly our WA Bursary recipients, National Fellowship recipients, and conference presenters.  We've compiled compiled some important ALLA Conference information below:    ALLA Ltd. AGM The ALLA Ltd AGM notice was sent via Google Groups. The AGM will take place on Thursday, August 25th at 4.00pm – 5.00pm EST in Hobart as part of the 2022 ALLA Conference. A webinar link will be distributed for those not attending the Conference.   ALLA Awards 2022 Don’t forget to nominate a law librarian, law library service or publisher for the ALLA Awards 2022. Nominations close this Friday, COB, 19 August 2022.  More information is available on  this post here ALLA (WA) Social Media During the week of the conference, the ALLA (WA) Soc...

Back in May we brought you an update on the start of the new National Finding the Law Online (FLO) Project (you can see it here Do you know about FLO? ).  Below is an update from the Project Lead, Anastasia Stepanovic, and Project Coordinator, Alice Hewitt. 

Get ready to conference! The ALLA Conference 2022 website is a great resource to find out all you need to know about the conference. Make sure you take a look to check out details about the conference, including special conference rates for accomodation . This year the conference is being held at the Hotel Grand Chancellor Hobart , Tasmania and the conference program looks to have some great events in the program! Workshops Per ALLA Conference Tradition, there will be a half-day MOYS Workshop held on 24 August 2022. This 3 hour workshop will be led by staff of the High Court of Australia Library. It costs $75.00 for ALLA members, and $95.00 for non-members. Get in quick though - the workshop will be limited to 12 people.  Tours What is a librarian conference without a tour of a library? There are two tours available to nominate for when completing the registration form . Conference registrants can nominate for a tour of either the State Library of Tasmania or the Andrew Inglis C...

ALLA members from around the country have joined together to work on updating and expanding the Finding the Law Online (FLO) course! This sub-committee, led by ALLA Vic. President Anastasia Stepanovic and along with ALLA (WA)'s own Alice Hewitt as Project Co-Coordinator, will see the development of a new set of online learning modules for FLO. Drawing upon the jurisdictional expertise of  FLO team members - Paula Jane Everett , David McDowell,  Kate Freedman, Alisha Nolan, and Amanda Surrey - we will develop a course for new law librarians, or law librarians new to a jurisdiction, or just librarians trying their hand at legal research. The FLO Team currently has volunteers who will share their knowledge of case law and legislation research for the Commonwealth, the Australian Capital Territory, South Australia, Victoria, and Western Australia. For New South Wales, the Northern Territory, Tasmania and Queensland - we are still looking for volunteers. Please get in touch...

 Jade BarNet and Open Law have just realeased a new podcast called The Lawfluent Podcast .  Everyone wants to keep up to date with the emerging legal trends and technologies transforming the way Australia’s legal system is practised, but not everyone has the time or patience to sit and read through a bunch of articles. Join Rhea and Isabella from OpenLaw and the BarNet JADE Team as they provide your go-to series for all things Law. Learn the tips, tricks and challenges of the legal industry’s best, challenging conventions and innovating the legal landscape, in under an hour with focused and curated legal episodes. The first episode was published 31 Jan 2022 and features Erica Taylor:  The legal landscape in Australia has undoubtedly evolved procedurally in the past 2 years. Today’s guest speaker is none other than Erica Taylor, the Director of Special Projects at JADE and the Victorian Reports. This episode explores: What her role as "Director of Special Projects" entail...

This year the ALLA (WA) Committee was pleased to offer ALLA (WA) members Kate Hewit and Vidagdha Bennett bursaries to attend ALLA's first ever, and slightly delayed, virtual conference. We congratulate them both on their successful applications for the bursary.  As part of the bursary both Kate and Vidagdha have written a short blog post recapping their experience of the conference.  To help them write this piece, the ALLA (WA) provided the following questions as prompts: How did you find attending the conference virtually? What were the advantages and disadvantages? Would you been keen to attend a virtual conference again or prefer a face-to-face conference?  Who was your favourite speaker / favourite session and why? What did you learn that you will find helpful in your current position?  Did you meet anyone interesting in the breaks / virtual meeting rooms? What was your overall experience with these meeting rooms?  What session would you recommend peopl...

Creating Engaging Online Content for Library Users: Introducing Kahoot! and Padlet Thursday 7 October 11.00am (AWST) Michelle Clarke from K&L Gates and Anastasia Stepanovic from the University of Melbourne will share their knowledge of Kahoot! and Padlet, two free platforms that have helped them create engaging online content for library users. Register online : NOTE: This event is open to ALLA members only, please have your membership number with you when you register. As online learning replaces face to face library sessions, librarians may find themselves looking for affordable options to create interesting course content.  In this session two experienced librarians share their knowledge of Kahoot! and Padlet. Kahoot! Kahoot! is a widely used cloud-based tool to create and deliver teaching and testing quizzes. It’s used in educational institutions as an online game-based learning platform and includes a free component. In this online session Michelle Clarke from K&L Gate...

Hi ALLA (WA) Members, Just a reminder that the ALLA Conference 2021 takes place this week – Kicking off on Thursday 23 September with a Welcoming Address from Her Honour Chief Justice Helen Murrell from the ACT Supreme Court, followed by a Keynote Address by the Honourable Justice Stephen Gageler AC from the High Court of Australia. Due to Covid restrictions, the conference is being held virtually. This allows us all to access the program of speakers and events this year from the safety of our home or workplace. If you want to know more about the presentations to help plan your schedule, including abstracts, click on the title of the session in the Conference Program . Be sure to register , if you haven’t done so already. Registrants will be able to access the conference recordings for 6 months following the conference. If you aren’t registering – all ALLA Members are encouraged to attend the ALLA Ltd. Annual General Meeting at 12:38pm on Thursday, where we can hear from Nat...

The 2021 New Zealand Law Librarians Association Online Conference takes place Monday 23rd - Friday 27th August, and registration is complimentary to ALLA Members.  The virtual conference theme is waiho i te toipoto, jaua i te toiroa - stronger together. The Conference Program includes a range of expert speakers and some standout sessions include: The Coming Storm: Value-added carbon zero knowledge services in the mid 21st century Te Ao Marama: The Response to calls for Transformative Change American Legal Research for New Zealand Librarians Australian Legal Research for New Zealand Librarians Building Resilience Lightning Sessions including - Flexible Working in Your Library, Opening Up in Lockdown - Parliament's Engaging Response, The Department of Mysteries, and more From Native Land Court to Maori Land Court 1865-2021 Cultural Confidence, One Word at a Time Each day of the conference, sessions are scheduled to run from 8.00-10.30am Perth Time - making this one of the easier int...

The latest edition of First Monday  includes the article the use and impact of metadata in civil cases . According to the abstract: This article is one of the first to explore and delve into the legal system, with a focus on the burgeoning use of metadata in civil cases. Although metadata is embedded in all kinds of digital files including text, audio, and image files, as well as many social media and game applications, few understand how both the visible and embedded information is being “mined” (collected) for a myriad of uses by organizations, such as, Google or even the United States government. Consequently, in this paper, we explore the implications of metadata use in civil cases and how it could bring a new era of evidence in litigation, which has huge ramifications for how the average citizen may begin to view their privacy in the course of everyday activities." While the article has and American slant, this article may still be of interest for those considering the eviden...

 In great news for those in Western Australia, the 2021 ALLA conference is now going virtual. The program will be much as usual, plus all the usual exhibitors, but tweaked to allow for a virtual conference.  This is a great opportunity for ALLA (WA) members to attend, without the pesky costs of flights, accommodation and of course, hard-borders.  The details for our conference are below: Dates: 22-24 September 2021 Theme: ALLA – Past / Present / Future Registration fees: Member – $120.00 Speaker Registration – $100.00 Non Member Registration – $150.00 To register for the event please go to the ALLA Conference website .  The ALLA (WA) Committee hopes 'to see' many of you at the conference.

So it’s that time of year again – lists and more lists – apart from Santa’s Naughty and Nice lists, there are lists of people and presents, food to prepare, what to pack for the trip [if you are lucky enough] and then there are the Lists of the Top whatevers for the Year. From the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog comes such a list: Top ten 3 Geeks blog posts for 2017 . Of particular interest are numbers 3, 4, 6, 7 & 8 by Greg Lambert, current President of the American Association of Law Libraries, with my favourite being "DoYou Miss Me Yet?" – Re-establishing the Corporate Librarians In this era of readily accessible information, we do not suffer from a lack of information resources, we suffer from an abundance of irrelevant information that looks on its surface to be relevant. Information professionals are your line of defense against the abundance of information, and are your due diligence agents for identifying the resources which best fit your needs and your budge...

From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of middle earth, libraries are places filled with magic. The magic of libraries infected Stuart Kells many years ago, when he picked up a very rare and beautiful book. Kells has been fascinated since and has dedicated his life to the study of rare and precious books. Take a look at the ABC Radio Conversations with Richard Fidler  episode 'The history of libraries from before stone tablets, to printed books' - I quite like the part where he mentions his wife is a Librarian!

Last week The Guardian (Australian Edition)  published an interesting article about the potential downsides of being professional services staff with an academic background at a higher education institution. The article, Work in an academic-professional hybrid role? Say goodbye to career progression was written by an "anonymous academic", highlights the position that many academic librarians face. We blur the lines of professional staff and academic staff, something that tends to not fit will within the traditional career paths of Australian universities. I now realise that some academics see me as someone who is just there to help them, while others see me as purely academic. But it’s also an inherent feature of the job: it’s hard to focus your work when you spread yourself thinly. Moving up within the institution is difficult when others are specialised, and you feel you do a bit of everything. Of course not all librarians want to be on an academic career path, but ...

There are 100 librarians, library technicians and library lovers today at Library Leadership: A Celebration! Speed networking with librarians is certainly not a quiet exercise! Check out our Twitter @lawlibsWA and follow #LibrariesWA for updates and more from speakers including Dr Carmen Lawrence, Jennefer Nichols and members of the LIS profession in Western Australia!

Last night on Biblia (ALIA West's Blog), we saw that our Vice President, Alice Hewitt, has been busy at work helping plan the Library Leadership: A Celebration. See if you can spot her in the post Collaboration in Action! Library Leadership: A Celebration For more information on the Library Leadership: A Celebration event, check out our previous post , or our Facebook event . Spaces are filling, but you've still got time before registrations close on May 12.

All members of the Western Australian Library sector are invited to attend this all day professional development event. Organised as a joint project by representatives from LIS within WA including, ALIA West, ALLA (WA), WASLA, ALIA ARL WA, ALIA HLA, WALTG, TAFE WA Learning Resources Services Network, CURTIS, and with special thanks to the State Library of Western Australia. This event will offer attendees the chance to improve cross sector networking, by getting together, discussing and exploring what we all how in common and how we can all positively influence our changing profession. The day will earn ALIA members 6 points for the ALIA PD scheme and include:     Guest Speakers Dr Carmen Lawrence, formed Premier of Western Australia and Jennefer Nicholson, former Secretary General of IFLA Workshops and Discussion Panels Speed Networking and Laughing Yoga Library Leadership: A Celebration will be held at the State Library of Western Australia on Friday 19th of ...

May 19, 2017 - State Library of Western Australia Save the Date A chance for the whole WA library sector to get together, discuss and explore what we have in common and how we can all positively influence our changing profession. Two pre-eminent leaders in their fields will be helping us to get the discussion going. Organised as a joint project by representatives from LIS within WA, including ALLA (WA), with special thanks to the State Library of Western Australia and Kerry Smith. More information will be available very soon.