: Hello. The CALL Private Law Library Special Interest Group met October 2 for the first meeting of the 2024-2025 session. This year we are going to focus on soft skills in private law libraries, and we started with reviewing statistics and data-driven decision making. These decisions can be as simple as which books to weed based on circulation statistics to as in-depth as which products to cancel based on little use. We welcomed a number of private law librarians for a rousing discussion on the use of stats, how we make decisions, how we report the statistics to our managing partner / C-level team / lawyers, and everything in between. We ended with a round table, as we often do, and came up with some ideas for future sessions, including how private firms bill / don’t bill for online research, how to use the stats to inform new training sessions, and will AI ever be able to run stats for us? We concluded with a call for private law librarians to volunteer with CALL’s mentorship program, which is making a com[...]
: CALL member Erica Friesen, Research and Instruction Librarian & Online Learning Specialist at the Lederman Law Library at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario recently wrote an article on " Thoughts on the New Lexis+ Brief Analysis Tool: For Law Students and Novice Researchers ". It originally appeared on Slaw.ca on September 28, 2022. It is republished here with permission of the author. New academic year; new legal research tools. Something new always comes out right as another cohort of students is gearing up to begin their law degree. And, as with many new product launches these days, “artificial intelligence” is often a prominently displayed term with accompanying materials. As legal publishers continue to launch AI-driven research tools in Canada, what do students and other novice researchers need to know to be prepared for their first forays into legal research? Lexis recently launched the latest version of their legal research platform, Lexis+ Canada, for Canadian law schools. It features signific[...]
: Dolores Noga, Manager, Library Services and Knowledge Management at McLennan Ross in Edmonton, is the Chair of the CALL/ACBD Scholarships & Awards Committee. She would like CALL members to consider applying for the new Nancy McCormack Emerging Leader Award which honours the memory of a fellow CALL member who was the Head Law Librarian at Queen's University in Kingston. Nancy died in 2019. The award goes to an association member in good standing who is normally in the first ten years of their law library career and who has demonstrated the qualities embodied by Nancy. The application deadline is April 1, 2022. Here is what Dolores asked the blog to share: The Canadian Association of Law Libraries recently unveiled criteria for the new Nancy McCormack Emerging Leader Award. This is a memorial award, intended to recognize and honour our former colleague, who dedicated considerable time to mentoring and encouraging others in the profession. Nancy McCormack was an active member of the Association and a committed[...]