Govt agencies move on social media policy

Federal Government departments have revealed they are moving ahead to implement social media policies, despite the government having not yet responded to recommendations in the Government 2.0 Taskforce report.

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Report from Berkeley School of Law comparing Information Privacy Attitudes amongst Young Adults and Older Adults

Information Privacy Attitudes and Policies, How Different are Young Adults from Older Adults

Many commentators claim that young people “are less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people are.” Surprisingly, though, few empirical investigations have explored the privacy attitudes of young adults. This report is among the first quantitative studies evaluating young adults’ attitudes. It demonstrates that the picture is more nuanced than portrayed in the popular media.

A gap in privacy knowledge provides one explanation for the apparent license with which the young behave online.

Get member rates at ALIA events

Thanks to the memorandum of understanding signed with ALIA, our members now get member rates to ALIA conferences and events.

The program for ALIA Access 2010 conference 1-3 September is shaping up to be really exciting. Find out more by signing up to receive regular updates. Registration opens 1 April.

BIALL Scholarship announced!

How would you like $A3000 towards travel and accommodation costs to attend the BIALL Conference ?

This scholarship, generously sponsored by Justis, is a great professional development opportunity, offered only to ALLA members.

The British & Irish Association of Law Librarians conference "Risks and Opportunities" will be held in Brighton, UK in June 2010. The conference program is highly relevant to Australian law librarians, including such topics as alternate models for managing information resources in law firms, outsourcing, and managing online library spend. Previous scholarship winners have reported that this is very worthwhile.

Applications close soon (12 April) so if you're interested, get yourself to the Scholarships page on the ALLA website to find out the selection criteria and how to apply.

CCHatter - keep up to date with CCH

To keep up to date with Intelliconnect developments, check out CCH's blog Cchatter .

This is where they release information about feature updates - like the recent inclusion of source details in the title of each search result, and the new "print for court" capability.

Not a lot of content there at the moment, but it does look promising and certainly worth adding to your RSS reader.

Podcast: RTI Act CPD event

Podcast of the Right to Information Act CPD event held 8 March 2010.

Podcast: QCAT CPD Event

Podcast of the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT) CPD event held 17 February 2010.

Podcast: National Model Discussion

Podcast of the discussion on the Proposed National Constitution for the Australian Law Librarians' Association, held 28 January 2010.

data.australia.gov.au

http://data.australia.gov.au/
data.australia.gov.au is the home of Australian government public information datasets. Currently in beta.

"The australia.gov.au search is a fast, current and comprehensivefull-text search service with access to over 4 million resources fromover 900 Australian Government sites as well as State and TerritoryGovernment sites."

It also has a RSS feed capabilityhttp://australia.gov.au/news-and-media/media-release-rss-feeds

Alerting services

Recently there was a product launched called FeedWatch, with combines RSS with InterAction (widely used as a client management system by lawfirms) - http://fellsoft.com/feedwatch.aspx

Moreover has been around for a while, but is now utilising Open Calais to create feeds on topics - http://w.moreover.com/

Ideas for CPD activities

Tell us what CPD activities you would like.

Email: allaq.cpe@gmail.com or add a comment to this post.

What would you like training in?
What training can you offer?
Who would you like as a speaker?
what subject areas interest you?

Media 140 videos

ABC Fora TV is streaming a couple of sessions from the recent Media 140 Sydney conference.

Tweeting Question Time: www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/11/20/2748926.htm
Twitter and the Iranian Democracy Uprising: www.abc.net.au/tv/fora/stories/2009/11/20/2748957.htm

More information on what Media 140 is all about can be found at www.aroundtheworldin140days.com

Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal starts 1 Dec 2009

From 1 December 2009 a number of tribunals will amalgamate into the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal (QCAT).

QCAT will hear a variety of matters including tenancy and building disputes, guardianship and discrimination matters as well as professional and vocational disciplinary matters.

For more information see http://www.tribunalsreview.qld.gov.au/

Queensland Industrial Gazette ceases publication

The last Queensland Industrial Gazette was issued on 23 October 2009.

The Queensland Industrial Relations Commission (QIRC) website is now the official publisher of decisions, awards, agreements, orders and other documents of the Industrial Court of Queensland (ICQ), the QIRC and the Industrial Registrar. Amendments to the Industrial Relations Act 1999 ensure that a document, decision etc. published on the QIRC website is admissible as evidence of the document in Court proceedings.[see s. 680 of the Act]

For a list of decisions from 23 October, see http://www.qirc.qld.gov.au/published/index.htm

The Industrial Gazette was also used by a number of agencies and organisations to publish important industrial notices - these will now be published in the Queensland Government Gazette.

A chance to win a $50 voucher - complete our 1–minute Member Survey

Your committee have commenced planning for the coming year, and to help us make it a memorable one, we'd like to hear from you

Completing our short Member Survey will give us information about your preferences and what really matters to you – and it gives you the chance to win a $50 Myer voucher!

• All members were sent the link to the survey via the ALLA-Qld list. Contact your Committee if you don't have it
  

CPE - Introduction to Repositories

Short on physical space in your Library? Perhaps creating a digital repository is the answer.

ALIA and QUT´s School of Information Technology are running a full day course on setting up repositories. Introduction to Repositories will introduce you to the key concepts, principles and skills involved in establishing and/or managing a successful repository.

For more information see the QUT Professional development courses website

Your new Committee

We held our Annual General Meeting on 30 Sept 2009

Your new Committee:

• President - Jeannine Goasdoue
• Vice President - Richard Vankoningsveld
• Secretary - Claudia Davies
• Treasurer - Deb Houlahan
• Member Services - Peta Dunbar
• CPE Co-ordinator - Helen Gambley
• Communications - Allison Jones
  

Lawbook/Thomsons - updated information on our problems

(1) Tagging across multiple pages - The online service has been deliberately designed so that you must tag each page (by actually selecting the "tag" option) before moving onto the next page. This is because it significantly increases the performance of the service, most particularly the searching capabilities. It is recommended that you set your preferences to show 100 results per page to minimise the impact of having to tag after selecting items on each page.
(2) Refine search functionality - We are still working on changing the "refine search" functionality so that it conducts an "AND" search rather than an "OR" search. I will let you know when this has been resolved.
(3) Navigation links not referring to certain publications under expected headings (eg Bankruptcy) - We are currently conducting the final testing stages of a new landing page for our online publications. This will have a much better look and feel and will resolve the navigation links issue that you raised.

(4) No indexes online - Another project is currently underway to re-introduce the index content, but in a way that will make finding similarly indexed content within a publication and across multiple publications much easier. This is still some time away from completion, but the project is well under way.

Thomsons/Lawbook - issues currently with them on our behalf

1. The search on The Laws of Australia is really not to be trusted. One of the bugs in the system appears to be when you do a search such as:

"deed covenant"@10 - in the free text search - results 10
and then refining the search using the word enforc* - results 3362

Thomson/Lawbook has responded to the search within a search issue with quite a good explanation, and the information that Thomsons were in fact working on a fix for it (but hadn’t let anyone know):

When you combine a phrase search (eg "deed covenant"@10) with another term (eg enforc*) and you don't enter "AND", it is conducting an "OR" search (which it shouldn't be) and is throwing up more results rather than less. This is in the process of being fixed - it appears that someone had in fact fed through your information to the technology team and they were working on a fix.

In the (hopefully very) short term the way to get around this is to combine the search (eg search for "deed covenant"@10 AND enforc* in the free text search box). This will give the correct results.

I will let you know when the searching functionality has been fixed and deployed online.



2. The subject navigation links along the left side of the screen no longer refer to the new commentary publication of that subject e.g. under Bankruptcy the Commentary does not appear when the javascript + sign is opened – this makes it quite difficult to browse (you can do it individually within the actually commentary document itself, but this is not so useful)


Thomson/Lawbook response (10/4/08) Thanks for passing these on. I'm looking into them and will get back to you when I have some more information.



BF: In my opinion returning the online indexes to the looseleaf services (which both CCH & LNAU have had the good sense retain online) would resolve most of the problems which relate to the inherent flaws of all search engines - (1. language is too variable so you miss something important or 2. the language has too many meanings so you get too many off the point hits). I have written to Thomsons more than once about this, but have not had any considered response from them. The idea they have is that the new commentaries will over-ride the need for an actual Index, although the commentary structure doesn’t particularly do this for fairly obvious reasons. Indexes will re-direct you from many different points, back to the legal issue. Browsing and searching are never as targeted. Thomsons print publications still have indexes; I use the Index to The laws of Australia quite often as a really useful way of getting to the legal point I want to read about. It’s much faster than messing around with their offputting interface (and the constant chance of faux results).




3. It isn’t possible to gather a list of 'hit' documents across many pages of a particular search results without losing the marked hits from the pages before. So on every page once you’ve selected the items you want you have to print out those hits before moving on. Saving them doesn’t really work as they usually only save as html pages and look like rubbish without the ‘complete files’ folder which accompanies them – and how do you email that?

Thomson/Lawbook response (I've put this up as a problem before) I have now logged calls to have the tagging issues fixed and will keep you updated on their progress. I apologise for the fact that these problems have not been remedied before now.



4. There are major discrepancies in subject headings within the ALJI.

Thomson/Lawbook response (9/4/08) : I have contacted the team responsible for ALJI and have asked them to contact you in regards to the subject heading discrepancies. If you don't hear from them within the week, feel free to let me know and I can chase it up again.

*****

So if anyone finds that any of these issues have been remedied can you email me - regards Barbara

lawbookpublishing.com - where are the titles now?

Building Law Queensland and the Annotated Security of Payment Act are both being published by Thomson Legal and Regulatory Limited

The online Building and Construction Industries Payment Act is available through the RICS website at: http://www.ricsdrs.com.au/6-sopguide.php

The Annotated Subcontractors' Charges Act is handled by Stephen Pyman himself.
stephen.pyman@holdingredlich.com.au

Presidian is publishing Boge's Annotated Land Act and Queensland State Lands Handbook but Chris Boge has update material available here http://www.queenslandstatelands.info/

That's all for now folks, but please email me if you have further and better particulars... Barbara