ALLA (WA) News Blog

ALLA Members are invited to join us at an online CPD event on Tuesday May 3 on the topic of current awareness.  This virtual CPD will be led by Clare Brown, Vable's in-house legal librarian. Over the past year, Clare has carried out interviews with a number of legal information professionals to find out how they are transforming their firm’s current awareness delivery - they all faced various challenges/frustrations and have gone on to implement solutions to drive them to greater success and visibility. Clare takes two common themes from these interviews:  dealing with an avalanche of information and  putting power in to the hands of your end-users.  This CPD will be a great opportunity to generate some discussion and engage in some knowledge sharing along the way.  When: 1pm (AWST) Tuesday 3 May 2022.  Where: Zoom. Register here . About the Presenter: Clare Brown believes a satisfying career should be intellectually stimulating and constantly mutating, s...

 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...

Details of the ALLA Conference 2022 are now available from the ALLA Conference website: allaconference.com.au/  The ALLA Conference 2022 will take place 24-26 August 2022 in Hobart, Tasmania at the Hotel Grand Chancellor .  The theme for 2022 is THE NEW NORMAL, with the following sub-themes: Post COVID considerations How has covid affected your work, your life, the library profession, the legal profession? Where to from here? How do we deal with fake information and disinformation, how do we respond to the changes in society with regards to gender and cultural inequality? How can we as law librarians help these changes and change makers? How have things changed? Legal history, how will legal history be recorded / accessed in the future? What is your favourite legal topic? Has it changed lately? How have the courts changed? Are trials now more like tv court? A call for abstracts is now open on the ALLA Conference website and closes 1 May 2022.  Conference registrations w...

It's ALLA Virtual Conference 2021 Month! Our first ever fully virtual conference takes place on Thursday 23 September and Friday 24 September 2021.  The Conference Program is now available in an interactive format allowing you to view session times in your own time zone - where ever you plan to tune in.  Sure, a 7am start might be a bit rough normally, but the perk of a virtual conference is: no one will know if you are logging on in your fuzzy slippers (hopefully, we won't need them by then) and munching away on your breakfast of choice.  Of course, if you would rather sign in at a "normal" hour, don't forget that the sessions are all being recorded and remain available to registrants for 6 months following the session.  Key note speakers and special guests this year include: Stephen Gagelar AC, Justice of the High Court of Australia Helen Murrell, Chief Justice of the ACT Supreme Court Meridith Leigh, acting First Parliamentary Conusel with the Commonwealth O...

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...

The ALLA (WA) Committee is excited to offer ten bursaries to cover the virtual registration costs for the 2021 ALLA Virtual Conference  taking place on the 23 and 24th of September 2021.  These bursaries are valued at $120 each and will reimburse ALLA (WA) members for the cost of registering to attend the 2021 ALLA Virtual Conference. Applications are open to ALLA (WA) Members only. To apply please provide a short statement (no more than 500 words in length) outlining why you believe attending the ALLA Conference 2021 would be beneficial to your career development.  Requirements for Successful Recipients: Successful recipients must register for the conference before seeking reimbursement from ALLA (WA). Successful recipients must attend the specific conference within the calendar year of receiving the award. If the award is not taken up within the time frame, the funding and registration will be void.  Successful recipients are required to either  Submit content...

 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.

With Feedburner no longer supporting email subscriptions to new posts on the ALLA (WA) Blog from tomorrow - this will be our farewell email update!  Even without the email subscription service, the ALLA (WA) Blog will continue, and as soon as an alternative becomes available, we will let you know.  As discussed earlier this month in the Keeping Up with the ALLA (WA) Blog post , there are a number of ways of keeping up to date with the Blog: follow us on Twitter @lawlibsWA  follow us on Facebook @lawlibsWA subscribe to the ALLA (WA) Blog 's RSS Feed - you will find this option in the right menu.  Key messages for ALLA (WA) members will be continue to be emailed directly to you, but not all of the tips and tricks shared through the ALLA (WA) Blog  (and  Facebook  and  Twitter ) Not a member? Why not join us!

The ALLA ANZ emailing list (previously alla.anz@list.alla.asn.au ) has migrated to a new email platform.  Please use the new email to post to everyone on the list going forward: alla.aus.nz@alla.asn.au To subscribe or unsubscribe, use the following link:  http://alla.asn.au/mailman/listinfo/alla.aus.nz_alla.asn.au The list is administered by the ALLA List Moderator and is governed by a  Code of Conduct . 

From the Hansard of 13 November 2019, we have a report of a significant development in Western Australian legislation and its future use by the legal profession in Western Australia. The relevant passage can be found on the WA Parliament website (page 8830 of 2019)  and is excerpted below. WESTERN AUSTRALIAN LEGISLATION WEBSITE — COPYRIGHT  Statement by Attorney General MR J.R. QUIGLEY (Butler — Attorney General) [12.03 pm]: I rise to inform the house of a change to the way that copyright applies to WA legislation and the WA legislation website. In June last year, while second reading the Legislation Bill 2018, I flagged my intention to consider relaxing the current approach, which is quite conservative and restrictive compared with other jurisdictions, such as the commonwealth, Queensland, South Australia and the United Kingdom. These jurisdictions take a more open approach to the re-use of legislative data. Their legislation websites are covered by what is kn...

The new look of the Department of Justice's Law Library website went live today: https://dojwa.ent.sirsidynix. net.au/client/en_AU/llwa The  link is also available on the  Department’s website . The website includes links to free resources where available, as well as the library catalogue. Services marked with a padlock symbol are only accessible from onsite within the library.

Of interest to those consulting Western Australian legislation, the Legislation Bill 2018 had its third reading speech yesterday in the Legislative Assembly. The Bill seeks to give official status to the electronic versions of the Government Gazette and other WA legislation! From the explanatory memorandum : This Bill proposes to modernise the processes for publishing WA legislation. It will enact a new Legislation Act that sets out the responsibilities for publishing WA legislation, provides for the official status of both hard copy and electronic versions of WA legislation and gives Parliamentary Counsel’s Office (PCO) a more useful set of editorial powers so that WA legislation can be kept up-to-date, modernised and simplified, and errors in it can be corrected, without the need for the changes to be enacted by Parliament. Important restrictions on the exercise of those editorial powers will remain. The Reprints Act 1984 will be repealed. In line with conferring official s...

Yes,Senator: behind the scenes of the Australian Senate | ABC Radio An interview with  Dr Rosemary Laing, Clerk of the Senate for seven years. Inside the jury room | Radio National A co-production between Law Report and the University of Melbourne law school, looking at what happens when the jury system goes wrong.

On Friday March 16 th the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office took over the hosting of the WA legislation website from the State Law Publisher. The new web address for WA legislation is now  www.legislation.wa.gov.au .   The website functionality is unchanged, but it is now badged as Department of Justice/Parliamentary Counsel’s Office rather than Department of Premier and Cabinet/State Law Publisher.

I know I sometimes turn to the Wayback Machine in my research; you might too. Hence I found this recent blog post about how Australian courts view use of the Wayback Machine very interesting. http://allensip.blogspot.com.au/2017/07/while-us-says-yes-to-wayback-machine.html

The Federal Court has expanded its subscription offerings with the addition of the Judgments & Events by National Practice Area (NPA) email alerts. Subscribers have the option to receive an email of judgments published each day by practice area, as well as an “All Judgments” option. Subscribers will also be alerted to any upcoming Court events, such as user-group meetings. You can subscribe from the Federal Court website . Once your subscription is complete, you will receive an email for each of the lists you have subscribed to. The frequency of alerts varies depending on what judgments have been published on the day. If you require assistance with the subscription process, please email query@fedcourt.gov.au . About the National Practice Areas In 2016, the Federal Court reorganised its workload into nine National Practice Areas (and where applicable sub-areas). The nine NPAs are: Administrative and Constitutional Law and Human Rights Admiralty and Maritime Commercial and Corpor...

Copies of the Commonwealth Government Gazette from 1901 to 2012 are now available on the Federal Register of Legislation as searchable PDFs.

A new book out this month is This Is What a Librarian Looks Like . It features photographs of over 200 Librarians along with original essays by such authors as George R.R. Martin, Amanda Palmer and Nancy Pearl. You can see some of the images at this gallery from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2017/may/29/tattoos-and-baseball-caps-this-is-what-a-librarian-looks-like-in-pictures I hope some Law Librarians are in there...

Hi ALLA(WA) Members Natalie McDonald, ALLA (WA) President Please see below for an update on the services and events of the ALLA(WA). Upcoming ALLA(WA) PD & Social Events The End of Year Celebration was held on Wednesday, 30 November 2016.  LexisNexis kindly offered their venue for the night where members enjoyed a selection of canapés and wine whilst they toasted the end of year with colleagues. A brown bag CPD session was held on 14th February 2017 where the membership gathered to discuss negotiations with publishers on subscription renewals.  The session stipulated no publishers.  The session was well attended and discussions very informative.  Members who attended received notes from the session. An Employment Law Fundamentals is planned for March. MOU Update On Wednesday 30th November 2016, the same date as the End of Year Celebration, the ALLA(WA) membership held a vote to sign the proposed new MOU with ALLA Ltd.  The vote was carried i...