The BIALL Blog

The Out of the Jungle blog has written an interesting post called "Why Westlaw and Lexis should not be like Google" in it they discuss why LexisNexis and Westlaw should not try to be more like Google.

The post identifies a number of reasons why Google type searching would not be appropriate for tools like LexisNexis or Westlaw. They include the following:

• Google flattens the world of information (it doesn't distinguish what type of information your searches are returning)
• While the goal of Google is to save you work, intellectual work is what lawyering is about, and what distinguishes the lawyer from the paralegal.

The author makes some interesting points in this post, which are well worth reading.

If you don't have an extra £793 in your training budget, the free seminars at the Online Information Conference are still nothing to be sniffed at.

From our own David Percik's negotiating tips to the Victoria & Albert Museum's open source CMS and SaaS success stories ....

From the latest developments in open access publishing, to using social media as a tool for rebranding, there's something for everyone.

And of course, to remind us not to post photos of ourselves passed out in the streets, CILIP presents professionalism in the digital world

As Ruth Bird posted on the Academic Law Librarian mail list:

'Yesterday a focus group of academic law librarians met with representatives of Eduserv, a body that evolved from CHEST, which now undertakes Licence Negotiation Services in the Higher Education sector. Eduserv were keen to get our input in relation to which resources are of most use to us, and thus would be most suitable for them to follow up, to see whether consortium arrangements could be achieved.

The focus group wanted to let you know that this meeting has taken place, and that there will be more to report at a later stage, including, we hope, an update from Nikki Green of Eduserv at the BIALL Conference in Brighton.'

Eduserv has negotiated successfully with companies such as Microsoft and Adobe and have a good track record of getting good value for money for Higher Education Insitututions. With many institutions trying to cope with shrinking budgets, a purchasing consortium couldn't have come at a better time!

Sara Batts of Uncooked Data has discovered a bit of a gem in "Always cited in preference" in her post she describes how the ICLR have launched a Youtube channel, which promotes and provides guidance on using the Law Reports they produce.

There are five videos in total, of which our favourite has to be "A tale of two citations" we're wondering if this really does happen?

As reported on the BIALL Solos/One Man Band blog in their post "Local Acts from Justis" Justis have entered into a joint venture with OPSI to increase the accessibility of local acts.

This should significantly improve the availability of local acts, although they are already available on Westlaw, OPSI and the Statute Law Database (SLD)

Interestingly Justis are asking for advice on how they should present these acts within Justis in their press release "Local acts from your local electronic publisher" so what do BIALL members think?

Changing the name of any organisation can be contentious so a recent blot post on the 3 Geeks and a Law Blog caught our eye. Called "Am I A Librarian Or A Strategic Knowledge Professional?" the post looks at the annoucement by the Special Libraries Association (SLA) to their change their name to the "Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals"

The EU Bookshop has launched their digital library where '12 million scanned pages in more than 110,000 EU publications are available free of charge for download', eGov Monitor reports.

The new digital library was launched at the Frankfurt Book Fair on the 16th of October and offers all publications edited by the Publications Office on behalf of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies since 1952.