The BIALL Blog

Peter Scott's Library Blog is reporting that Google Scholar is now indexing the Law Journals in HeinOnline to make the more than 1,100 titles searchable in the Google Scholar interface.

Full instructions on how to search Google Scholar for HeinOnline journals are available here.

In a bid for best campaign name ever, They Work For You have started a campaign to 'Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st Century Way'.

They Work For You are encouraging parliament to release all bills in XML - not just legislation but actions of agencies, court rulings, budgets, etc... This is a great idea that will help make government data more searchable and accessible. You can see the technical details of their plan here .

Via Buzzmachine

Following on from the previous post on this topic the FT have now confirmed that West will be one of the channel partners licensed to carry FT content after April 1st where the client has a digital licence with the FT.

The FT remain hopeful that they will sign a licence with Lexis Nexis and will advise the Legal Information Group Vice Chair of any developments in this respect.

Posted on behalf of Chrissy Street;

A number of BIALL members have raised questions about the new licensing model announced by the Financial Times last year. As BIALL LIG Vice Chair I met with Caspar de Bono (Managing Director, B2B) and James Mann (UK Circulation and Content Sales Director) of the FT last week to raise some of the questions, the meeting was also attended by Jas Breslin (Council Member).
This document is the result of that meeting. If you have any further questions about this matter please contact me or your FT account manager directly.

...also known as the Bloomsbury Conference which is being organised by the CILIP Commercial, Legal and Scientific Information Group have a free delegate place up for grabs.

All you have do is write 200 words on:

"How attendance at the Bloomsbury Conference would benefit my professional development."

Entries should be submitted to CLSIG Vice-Chair, Bert Washington BertW@ecoanimalhealth.com to arrive no later than 17.00 on Monday 17 March 2008.

The Conference will look at many important issues currently facing information professionals including Enterprise 2.0, the issues associated with information resources only being available on the Desktop and much more.

...well the good news is no according to this article from the Birmingham Business Journal, the bad news is that more and more Libraries are being "downsized" in favour of less "traditional" means of finding information, in other words electronic databases.

Does removing book and hard copy sources from a Law Library really mean the Library is becoming obsolete though? I don' think so, in fact the opposite could be said. As the use of traditional sources has diminished the need for Law Libraries and Law Librarians has increased as users now require more assistance in using the sources available to them and with finding them in the first instance.

The article has already generated a number of comments from U.S Law Librarians which BIALL members might be interested in.

...this is big news okay mabye not that big, but it transpires that the Goverment is planning to make 200 years worth of Hansard debates available online.

The even better news is that some Hansard Debates are already available online and I'm not just talking about the debates available on the UK Parliament website. The site as it exists at the moment is only a sample of information from Hansard so there are a lot of gaps.

This is a great example of the government using some aspects of Web 2.0 to make information available to the general public. Not only is the site built using Open Source Software, but you can also bookmark any Hansard debate using Del.icio.us

If you want to keep up to date with what is happening with the Project, it has its own Google Group.

Apologies for cross-posting, but we'd like to get as many responses as possible!

We in the Web Committee are very much interested in getting some feedback from users of the BIALL website. In order to facilitate this, we have constructed a quick survey to gather opinions about the current BIALL website, and the direction that you would like it to go in.

This survey should only take five minutes of your time, and your valuable responses will be vital to rebuilding a BIALL website that's bigger, better and more in touch with your needs and desires.

Please click on the following link to take you to the web survey - http://biallwebcomm.websitesurvey.sgizmo.com/

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