The BIALL Blog

Merry Christmas to everyone who currently reads the BIALL Blog and of course to all BIALL members. The BIALL Blog team will be back posting updates in January 2009...

Westlaw have very considerately consolidated all the new content and new features they have added to Westlaw during 2008 into a single email or if you didn't receive the email, online here.

My highlight of the year, RSS Feeds because we love RSS Feeds at the BIALL Blog.

If you do receive the email but don't like receiving it via email then you can sign up to the Westlaw What's new RSS Feed, there is even an archive of this years newsletters.

...you guessed it Librarian...

At least according to the US News.com website from the site;

"Forget about that image of librarians as a mousy bookworms. More and more of today's librarians must be clever interrogators, helping the patron to reframe their question more usefully. Librarians then become high-tech information sleuths, helping patrons plumb the oceans of information available in books and digital records, often starting with a clever Google search but frequently going well beyond"

We like to think we're "high-tech information sleuths" at the BIALL Blog, unfortunately there is some bad news from the site "Librarianship is an underrated career" that will be because people think we're "mousy bookworms" rather then "information sleuths" and what does the article say is the key skill that all Librarians must have?

..."persistent sleuthing" so get out there and start sleuthing...

Practical Law Company (PLC) have recently started rolling out RSS feeds for some of their modules:

The feeds currently available are:

PLC Corporate: - http://corporate.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Employment: - http://employment.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Finance: - http://finance.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Financial Services: - http://fs.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC IPIT & Communications: - http://ipandit.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Share Schemes & Incentives: - http://incentives.practicallaw.com/rss.do
PLC Tax: - http://tax.practicallaw.com/rss.do

Thanks to Information Overlord for pointing these out.

We couldn't resist a Christmas themed post title and they really are crackers! Both Binary Law and SLAW have both recently posted about two websites which AustLII and CommonLII have been developing. The first, LawCite is an international case citator, what this means when you use the site is that you can search for a citation or a case name and the site will return cases that match your search terms with the details of where the case has been cited or referenced including overseas cases.

So a search for 1963 2 ALL ER 575 (which is the example the site gives) will return the details of Cases from the UK and the US amongst others.

The second site, which has just been launched by CommonLII is a database of the English Reports (1220-1873) based on data provided by Justis, which is nice of them! Although the reports are scans in PDF they are full text searchable.

These look like useful additions to an already impressive set of free online tools available from the World Legal Information Institute.

If you have a subscription to Lawtel then you'll be pleased to know that the RSS Feeds described in a recent update are now available. From withing Lawtel click on RSS Feeds to start subscribing to the available feeds.

Ever wondered how a case goes from Court to Westlaw? Well wonder no more...the short video available from this post on the WestBlog explains the process in full.

Note - this is the US version of Westlaw.