ALLA (Qld) Blog: 2007

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Help, I think I've got search-engine fatigue..

I think I’m suffering from SEF. I’ve now been trained, upskilled, put on publishers focus groups, retrained and re-educated in dos-based legal research databases, the subsequent cd versions & now their online counterparts for the past 15 years and counting. And in turn I’ve trained clients, helped upgrade their skills, taken their concerns back and forth to publishers, and helped retrain them in all the things I’ve been retrained in. Like me they’ve mastered dos commands, keyboard control commands, boolean operators, folio grammar, field searching and the refinements of using butterworths, lexis, lawbook, westlaw, austlii, comlaw, timebase, capitol monitor, OQPC, QLI etc etc etc. We’ve all reminded ourselves daily of the variations from one database to another of truncators and proximity operators . We’ve considered cartwheels; we’ve dreamed of federated searching that actually works. We’ve collectively taken on board the concepts of keywords, subject headings, synonym, taxonomies, and folksonomies. And still, in almost every case the results they (and I) continue to get can be inconsistent, not on point or buried in unhelpful hitlists which don’t make sense until every single record is opened and read anyway. And that’s without even going into the mysteries of downloading or printing (have Thomson software developers ever tried creating a useful document from the results of any complicated research in their own databases?). I’m not knocking the wonderful availability of online materials. But wandering daily in Database-land has grown more, not less, wearisome over the course of time. Every ‘advance’ advocated to us by publishers carries with it some mysterious regression. It also means that our hapless clients must also start all over again when all they want to be able to do is find the area of law that's on point for them and keep doing the same thing when they need to read it again. What I’d like to do is to make video clips of some of our real life lawyers researching their way through CCH or Lawbook or LexisNexis. Then I'd post the results on YouTube. That would be at least as funny as March of the Librarians (not very).

Sunday, March 18, 2007

Publishers Liaison Update March 2007

PUBLISHERS LIAISON UPDATE MARCH 2007

Systematics - Quantum online - current only to mid 2005 - contacted 23/01/2007 - by email

RESPONSE - from Kylie Peterson - We are currently reviewing this situation with the content provider and I will come back to you as soon as I have further information about the future of the service. There has been no policy decision at this stage to discontinue the service and we are hopeful that we will indeed be able to return the product to its former level of currency.

OUTCOME : without any further response from Systematics BF emailed again 6/3/07 - nothing further yet

lawbookpublishing.com.au - Annotated Land Title Act - updates are infrequent, publication often lacks currency; there have been comments from members of the list that other titles from this Publisher are not updated often enough and that errors remain uncorrected from one issue to the next - contacted 22/02/07 - by phone

RESPONSE - publisher Devi Alberti reports that the Annotated Land Title Act is updated 2 x per year and that the scale of payment for each update is charged out at about 65c per page. His advice was that the last update was published 30/6/2006 and the next will be approximately 1/7/2007. A year for this publication is is a financial year. He has also requested that the ALLG(Q) approach him in writing and not by phone.

OUTCOME : the Committee is considering writing to this publisher to outline our problems with looseleaf titles which have very long intervals between updates.

Comlaw - ongoing problems with the interface, slowness of response time and inconsistent results ; responses harvested from the Queensland list were emailed 19/2/07 to National Publishers Liaison representativel Petal Kinder

OUTCOME : no response as yet

Thomsons - loss of visible online indexes - TLA and other services; these are available in the print versions, are a valuable resource for online users & we would like to have them; BF emailed as personal request 24/2/07 but received no reply; further emailed a list of responses from the Queensland list 18/3/07

OUTCOME : BF to meet with Thomsons representatives Wed 28/3/07 (updated on original info)

LexisNexis AU - Queensland Planning and Environment Reports online but no pdf version available : BF rang Printacular (the publisher in Moorooka) to see if there might be an impediment at their end 14/03/07 - left message

OUTCOME : no response as yet

Thursday, March 01, 2007

NLS 2006

On December 1 and 2 2006 hundreds of new Librarians converged on the John Niland Scientia building in Sydney to participate in ALIA’s New Librarians Symposium (NLS). This is the fourth event of its kind to be held in Australia. The theme pathways and possibilities matched the event’s purpose to facilitate lively debate amongst new Librarians on what we should be saying about our profession. Some delegates took this a step further by presenting their first conference paper.

Papers were presented on a variety of topics of interest to new and not so new Librarians. Many of the papers and presentations can be viewed on the Symposium’s website.

There was a strong presence from the Law Library field with the ALLG NSW Division staffing a stall in the Trade Exhibition. Aspiring Law Librarians were able to listen to the advice of Vanessa O’Meara and Melanie Adams in the session “So you want to be a Law Librarian?” Lisa Paul presented a very interesting paper on her involvement as an Academic Law Librarian in the review of undergraduate law curriculum at Griffith Law School and how this has benefited her in her career.

We can highly recommend NLS as an opportunity to learn, develop your networks and have fun! We’d encourage the ALLG to continue to support this event in the future. Keep your eyes peeled for the next issue of the ALLG (Q) Newsletter, out next week for a full report on NLS2006.

-Sally Manser & Kirsten Harte

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Update on Copyright Seminar

Hi Everyone, Moyra has clarified some of the information I posted yesterday.
Cheers
Helen

Dear ALLG members
I would like to clarify an item in Helen's report of the talk I gave last Thursday.
The existing Fair dealing exceptions are unchanged - in fact a new category has been added
Fair dealing now applies to
1. Research and study
2. Criticism or review
3. Reporting the news
4. Giving of professional advice
AND
5. Parody and satire
Two or more articles from the same journal issue may be reproduced if they are for the same course of study or the same research (Cf the original requirement that they be on the same subject)
A library may request another library
(a) to provide copies for a client for any of the above purposes
(b) for inclusion in the library's collection
If the request it for (b) it is not clear that more than one article may be copied (since it is not for the same course of research or study)
Please don't hesitate to get in touch with me if you have any further queries.
Moyra McAllister
ALIA Copyright Adviser
Mob: 0409 463 663
copyright@alia.org.au

Monday, February 19, 2007

Copyright Update

Hi Everyone
Richard and I attended a Copyright Seminar last Thursday at lunch time which was put on by ALIA Quorum. Moyra McAllister is the copyright adviser for ALIA. It was very good. Moyra went through some very basic points about what copyright is etc, but also covered some of the sections of the recent amendments to the Copyright Act. This is just an excerpt of what she covered and suggested.

The fair dealing provisions still exist but they are only for research or study - and that means course/study. The fair dealing provisions no longer apply to libraries copying for other libraries.

Moyra pointed out the definition does not say that the Library has to be open to the public - just that you have to be willing to supply ILL.

There are special case exceptions for libraries s200AB - but they are not really certain what "certain purposes" they are yet!

She suggests at a minimum we need to be listed on the Australian Libraries Gateway, need to list the subject areas we specialise and our willingness to provide ILL. CAL has also been recommending to people that our library catalogues need to online. She said that this is not correct and we don't have to do that. We do however, have to be part of the Interlibrary loan network - and we would have to do better than the ALLG Union Serials list. Something like GratisNet would be worthwhile.

There is also a Corporate Libraries Licence from CAL which she also thinks would be a good idea to get.

Friday, February 16, 2007

Our changing clients

Following on from the Talkfest on Wednesday, I came across a bibliography (courtesy of the ALIA Newgrads elist) on next generation librarianship that looked very interesting.

Lots of stuff about younger client groups, and as a contrast the "memo to baby boomer" article about teaching the boomers to let go seemed worth a read.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Membership Directory

The January 2007 edition of the ALLG(Q) Membership Directory is now available. If you did not receive the email with the directory attached but would like a copy of the directory, please let me know and I'll onf0rward to you.

Sandy