University of Windsor Custom Search Engines on Policing

University of Windsor law librarian Annette Demers wrote earlier this week on Slaw.ca about 2 new custom or meta-search engines developed at her institution that search policing materials.

One searches policing journals, magazines, reviews, reports and news feeds, the other searches police review board decisions from across Canada.

The University of Windsor had already developed a custom search engine for military law journals.

Other free law-related meta search portals include:

• Slaw.ca's Canadian Law Blogs Search Engine
• Justia BlawgSearch searches across U.S. (and some non-American) law-related blogs
• the Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada's Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal searches through hundreds of thousands of provincial, territorial and federal government publications and legislative materials dating back in some cases to the mid-1990s
• Cornell Law Library's Legal Research Engine helps users find research guides on U.S. legal topics from authoritative sources. Authoritative as in Harvard Law, Georgetown, Cornell, Duke, New York University, etc.- it is going through a technical update at the moment
• IGO Search Engine and NGO Web Search from Indiana University Libraries in Bloomington find information from intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) such as the United Nations, World Bank, IMF, and related organizations and from hundreds of major non-governmental sites
• DRAGNET from New York Law School simultaneously searches dozens of U.S. and international sites containing governmental and legal information, from Amnesty International to the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII)
• American publisher bepress recently launched the Digital Commons Network that "brings together scholarship from hundreds of universities and colleges, providing open access to peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, dissertations, working papers, conference proceedings, and other original scholarly work" [About page]. One of the subsets is the Law Network, which already has more than 160,000 articles from some 200 institutions
• And many of us know of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN). The SSRN Abstract Database has abstracts on over 500,000 scholarly working papers and forthcoming papers and an Electronic Paper Collection currently containing over 415,000 downloadable full text documents in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. One of the SSRN subdivisions is the Legal Scholarship Network (which has lots of Canadian content).