CALL Conference 2007 - AGM Highlights

The AGM (annual general meeting) portion of the recent 2007 annual conference of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries in Ottawa was split into 3 mini-sessions over 3 days.

Among some of the highlights and reports that caught my attention:

• motions were adopted by the membership to encourage the use of the new proposed Uniform Case Name Guidelines as a means of standardizing the style of cause in legal citations; to encourage vendors to publish a case summary in English when the case is available in French only ; and to send a letter to the Premier of British Columbia and to the Speaker of the province's legislative assembly to protest the possible reduction in access to the collection of the B.C. Legislative Library. The Library is closing down indefinitely for a seismic upgrade, and there is widespread concern it won't reopen.
• CALL 2008 will be in Saskatoon, May 25-28, 2008. It was in Saskatoon in 1983 that the CALL conference moved out of university dorms for the first time. From that year on, annual conferences have been in major hotels and conference centres
• the new CALL executive will be led by new president Anne Matthewman, of the Metropolitan Toronto Lawyers Association, and by the new VP, Rosalie Fox, director of the Supreme Court of Canada Library (my boss)
• CALL Oral History Project: a few years ago, CALL decided to embark on an oral history project to collect interviews with past executives and key figures on the association's life as we approach its 50th anniversary. So far, edited transcripts and tapes have been deposited with the University of Manitoba for: Dr. Margaret Banks (the author of the well-known book Using a Law Library), Viola Bird (Bird Report 1975 on law library resources in Canada) and Roger Jacobs (president of CALL when it became independent of the American Association of Law Libraries). In progress: Dr. Marianne Scott, McGill Law Librarian, first president of CALL, former National Librarian of Canada; and Shih-Sheng Hu, author of standards for courthouse and law society libraries
• Vendor Liaison Committee: the committee is pressing editors to develop best practices related to the frequency of updates, contents, pricing and physical format of loose-leaf materials; as well, guidelines for client-vendor problem solving will soon be published on the CALL site
• Canadian Abridgment editorial advisory board
  - Canadian Encyclopedic Digest: the board has had questions regarding the publisher's plans to address the currency of the work. The publisher, Carswell, says new authors have been retained and a more formalized schedule for updating is being implemented
  - Index to Canadian Legal Literature: access has been obtained to materials of the Alberta Law Society Libraries cataloguing database and more CLE materials are being added; Carswell is considering digitization of the first volumes of the Index
  - eDigests - the Board wants judges' names, docket numbers, courts and dates added to the electronic updating service

In the weeks to come, additional decisions and presentations will, I am told, be posted to the CALL website's members-only section. I will attempt to report on any announcements that could be of general interest.