ALLA (WA) News Blog

Canadian Law Library Review (CLLR) is the official journal of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries. It is published, open access, four times per year (Febuary 1, May 1, August 1, November 1).  Access the Journal on the CALL/ACBD website . 

AustLII , in conjunction with Open Access Australasia , is presenting a free webinar on the topic Re-thinking the economics of legal publishing in Australia Tuesday 19 October, 9am Perth Time Australian university libraries currently spend significant amounts on subscriptions to the main commercial legal services, via traditional subscription models.  In this presentation AustLII's Philip Chung & Andrew Mowbray will discuss how AustLII is seeking to develop a ‘post-transformative agreement’ with libraries that will sustainably fund open access publishing in the subject domain of law, leading to a new economics for open access and commercial publication generally. The webinar will be delivered via Zoom. Register here .  About AustLII The Australasian Legal Information Institut e (AustLII) is an open and free access publisher, which is the most relied upon provider of legal information in Australia. The core AustLII service contains an integrated collection of nearly 900 dat...

Legal Information Management have created a number of spotlight collections available through Cambridge Core. These spotlight collections highlight topical content published across the archives of the journal.  Each collection features content relating to these subject areas: COVID-19 Lockdown and the Legal Information World Metadata, Cataloguing and Classification in Law Libraries Information Literacy Women and the Law Knowledge Management Legal Publishers and Suppliers Law Firm Libraries Public International Law  The Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture Series The content in these collections is updated regularly, and often free for a limited time, and may provide you with some interesting and valuable content. Access the Legal Information Management Spotlight Collections here . 

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...

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.

The Queensland Judgments   website has just been launched by the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for the State of Queensland and the Supreme Court Library of Queensland. It contains a complete set of the Queensland Reports , published in both its original format (PDF) and in a searchable online format. The website also contains a number of other valuable features: a complete set of recent unreported Supreme Court judgments (from 2002), which is being gradually expanded as the Library’s full print collection of unreported Supreme Court judgments is digitised. an appeal database, which provides current and historical data about appeals from judgments in the collection. a new UCPR service, which seeks to identify the leading judgments on civil procedure in Queensland. The website is currently being published in a beta version, to give users an opportunity to suggest improvements. I encourage all members to visit the new website and r...

Today marks the start of Open Access Week . With that in mind, here's a blog post from Cornell University Law Schools VoxPopuLII Blog - home of the Legal Information Insitute [LII] which has been providing open access to American law since 1992. (Those familiar with our own AustLII would see the relationship here). The blog post, 25 for 25: A Librarian's Free Law Awakening  by Sarah Glassmeyer talks about her "free law awakening' and the process of law publishing, and how this challenged her "librarian perceptions of what really matters in publishing Free Law." It's a nice reminder of the value that free legal platforms do give us as law librarians (and practitioners). For instance, The public needs to be able to access legal information on the open 24/7 Internet in an easy to navigate, mobile friendly way, since most people – especially lower income individuals – access the web via mobile devices. .... Primary law needs to be published witho...