The BIALL Blog

The Westlaw/Lawtel London User Group was held at the "hip" Adnaz Hotel on Liverpool Street yesterday. The most interesting things to come out of the meeting were the Westlaw developments planned for 2008, some highlights included

Cases

• The loading of more English Reports
• The loading of more unreported transcripts

Legislation

• More PDF's
• Cummulative footnotes
• Future versions (so now you can go back and foward in time!)

Journals

• 6 more journal titles
• Circulation list functionality and list management- this sounds great

In terms of the interface, there will links to and from Lawtel and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds for pre-defined content and content that you have searched for. Lawtel are also planning to add RSS Feeds and make enhancements to the adminstration functionality.

The American Association of Law Librarians (AALL) have developed a new page specifically for the work they do with Vendors and their relationships with Vendors.

There are a whole host of tools available on page of the AALL Group that works with vendors, The Committee on Relations with Information Vendors (CRIV) including the AALL Fair Business Practices Guide, the U.S. equivalent of the BIALL Code of Good Practice for Law Publishers.

An announcement today in the U.S. looks like it could challenge the dominance of Lexis Nexis and Westlaw when it comes to the provision of U.S. Case Law.

Public Resource.org and Fastcase.com have said that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. "The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose"

So the question is will this really challenge the dominance of Lexis Nexis and Westlaw? The immediate answer to this question is maybe and no I'm not sitting on the fence. I'm just not sure free websites can compete with the value added material like "Next Steps" and links to other relevant material that Lexis Nexis and Westlaw both provide.

Further to announcements by Lexis Nexis from the 1st of April 2008 Financial Times Content will only be available via third party applications if you have a content licence from the Financial Times, the reasoning behind this is as follows, with more information on their website;

"As third party channels multiply, we want to ensure a fair and transparent means of delivering our valuable content. We're also concerned that the current practice of bundling many sources of content with the cost of third party services does not reflect the fair value of the content we create."

So what does this mean for any organisation that currently acceses FT Content via a third party, for instance Lexis Nexis?

Well if you're an Academic Library then the situtation wont change as this change only affects the Corporate Market. If you work in a Law Firm Library then you may want to review the FAQ's on the their website.

This is an interesting move by the FT and only time will tell whether they will achieve their stated goal which is to work more closely with their clients.

There will be some changes taking place to the look and feel of the blog over the weekend.
Apologies for any inconvenience and strangeness that may result.

There has recently been a bit of a stir amongst the UK legal library bloggers regarding the issue of legal publishers and RSS for new books – namely, that they aren’t doing it.

Lo-Fi Librarian started the ball rolling with her post lamenting that the UK publishers haven’t quite caught up with their Canadian brethren. This then led to Nick Holmes of Binary Law setting up a prototype New Books Section for Lawfinder, where Nick is taking the information from new title spreadsheets and constructing RSS feeds from them. This is not official, and is not going to be frequently updated, but is more of a gentle pointer to demonstrate to the legal publishers just how easy it is and how useful it could be. There is even a Facebook group for those wanting to fight for the cause of RSS – UK Law Librarians For Publishers' RSS Feeds.

New publication information through RSS would be more timely and easier to manage, whilst freeing librarians from spreadsheets, flyers and email updates (and cut out the number of flyers we have to recycle!). Next stop - convincing the publishers!

The 2007 Livres Hebdo report has confirmed that Reed Elsevier have been the biggest global publisher in 2007, other Legal Publishers who rank highly in the report are;

• Thomson (3)
• LexisNexis (5)
• Wolters Kluwer (10)
• Informa (15)

There is some interesting information in the "Groups Close up" part of the report.

The UK eInformation Group (UKEIG) have established an Intranets forum for anyone who currently maintains or adminsters an Intranet and would like to hear from colleagues in the same field.

The next Intranets Forum meeting is at the Foreign & Commonwealth Office Thursday 13th December. If you want to attend a forum meeting you need to be a current member of the UKEIG.

The UKEIG have also just launched a new course "Information Law for Information Professionals" which might be of interest to BIALL members.