New Supreme Court of Canada Library Catalogue

Tomorrow, May 31, 2006, the Supreme Court of Canada will launch its new library catalogue - the new system should (!!!) work in the morning.

The Court used to have a Bestseller catalogue system but has opted now for the SirsiDynix Unicorn library management system.

Among the many improvements everyone, including external users, will see are:

• an easy-to-use Google-like search engine
• default presentation of search results in reverse chronological order for faster finding of relevant legal material
• automatic translation of subject headings from one official language to the other - for example, a subject search for "Torts-Canada" will retrieve English material catalogued with that heading as well as French material filed under the equivalent French subject heading of "Responsabilité civile-Canada"; a subject search for "Droit international privé" will also retrieve English material under the heading of "Conflict of Laws"

Internal users at the Court will also be able to manage their checkouts, holds and ILL requests from their desktop. They will also be able to automatically have their catalogue search query launch in a variety of other external search engines for additional results, including Google Scholar, Vivisimo, various English- and French-language government websites in Canada and abroad, Findlaw, Lawcrawler, SOSIG, etc.

Later in 2006, additional functionalities will be added such as a link resolver for article-level linking to the full text of material in databases to which the Court subscribes, and SingleSearch, a federated search tool. These new features will be available to internal users only.