Canadian Association of Law Libraries 2014 Conference - Vendor Demos

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) annual conference started this weekend in Winnipeg.

A major segment of each annual conference is devoted to presentations by vendors of new products and product enhancements. 

Here are summaries of a few of the demos from earlier today:

Wolters Kluwer CCH:

This publisher has been adding "Roadmaps" and "Smart Charts" to many loose-leafs and online publications. Roadmaps are easy-to-use how to guides offering brief summaries of a specific area of law. Online Smart Charts are easy-to-build FAQ-style charts on a topic that can contain links to key documents such as statutes and other summary information.

They have also adding new precedents in corporate and commercial law (e.g. Non-disclosure agreements), tables of concordance, reference charts (e.g. In the case of guides on director's liability: Charts for statutes, what constitutes a breach, liability and statutory defences and limitation periods), as well as new commentary in the Ontario Real Estate Guide on mortgage guarantees, purchase of property, condos and equitable remedies.

The company is also commencing beta testing of a new version of Canadian Legislative Pulse, its legislative tracking tool. It will no longer use Java and will be viewable in browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

Justis.com:

Over the next few months, this British company will launch a new research platform that will combine its citator product JustCite with a vastly expanded collection of full-text caselaw including unreported judgments. It has been developing a new subject taxonomy for UK, Canadian and Australian caselaw that will offer multiple subject angles to the same case. For example, the same case may be findable under such  categories as construction, employment, damages etc.

SOQUIJ:

SOQUIJ, a Quebec public sector legal information publisher, has been developing a new "Recherche juridique" platform that will eventually replace its well-known Juris.doc caselaw / statutory / doctrine research product. The new platform radically simplifies the Juris.doc search interface. The user can add lines to the search, with each new line being for a different search field, add filters for sources, year, type of publication, jurisdiction, subject heading (using the sophisticated SOQUIJ topical taxonomy), launch the search, then filter and re-filter results all on one page. There is no firm deadline for the launch of the new platform, still in testing.

HeinOnline:

The American provider has been adding new "libraries" to its online collections, some of the most recent additions being the Women and the Law Library (books, journals and biographies, historical and comtemporary, on feminism and legal theory), the US International Trade Library and the Parker School of Foreign and Comparative Law Publications (from Columbia University). New libraries in development include the Revised Statutes of British Columbia and eventually of other provinces and a World Treaty Library.

The big news of the year was the partnership between HeinOnline and US caselaw provider Fastcase. Under the partnership, US federal and state case law citations in journal articles on HeinOnline have been turned into inline hyperlinks. All the user has to do is click on the link to be taken to the full text of the case on Fastcase, even without being a Fastcase subsriber.