Canadian Association of Law Libraries 2017 Conference Annual Reports

The Canadian Association of Law Libraries (CALL) is beginning its 2017 annual conference this weekend in Ottawa.

Annual reports of committees and special interest groups have been submitted in anticipation of the general meeting.

Here are summaries of some of them:

• Professional Development Committee
  The Professional Development Committee (PDC) ascertains the needs and wishes of the membership in regard to continuing professional education. It has proposed to video record the CALL conference sessions to extend this educational opportunity to the members who cannot attend a conference. The CALL Executive decided to go forward with this initiative.  One of the PDC subcommittees is the Webinar Subcommittee:
• Webinar Subcommittee
  It has been very active in the past year with 7 successful sessions in 2016 and 3 so far in 2017. This includes offering 2 separate 2-part webinars in the past few months: two UN-related webinars, and two U.S. Legal Research webinars (first in February 2017, with the second coming in June)
• New Law Librarians Institute
  
  • Themost recent New Law Librarians’ Institute was held at the Brian Dickson Law Library at the University of Ottawa from June 12 – 16, 2016. This is an intense one-week course in law librarianship.
  • The 2016 edition welcomed 19 attendees, seven of whom were not CALL members.
  • The event, which generated over $12,500 for CALL, offered substantive law sessions, with introductions to constitutional law, criminal law, labour and employment law, torts, ethic, human rights and social justice, environmental law and copyright. More practical sessions covered secondary sources, finding and updating cases, training students and reference skills
• Membership Development Committee (MDC)
• The MDC is in charge of the recruitment, retention and education of members and also runs the Mentorship Program. In 2016-17, there were 16 mentoring partnerships with 14 mentees being students and two working professionals.  For the 2017-2018 year, there are 18 mentoring partnerships established through the Mentorship Program. Eleven of the mentees are students and seven are professionals.
• The MDC also produced monthly member profiles on the CALL website (until Dec. 2016), something that will start up again this year. The committee hopes to expand the scope of this project in 2017-2018 to include not only member profiles but also profiles of important work projects undertaken by CALL members.
• In terms of recruitment and retention, the MDC also conducts visits of educational institutions and also regularly reaches out to lapsed members. As well, the MDC has a close informal relationship with the New Professionals Special Interest Group or SIG (ex-Student SIG) which held a webinar in November 2016 entitled "Navigating the Mentoring Relationship" 
• KF Modified Committee
  
  • The committee oversees the development of the KF Modified cataloguing standard (KF Classification Modified for Use in Canadian and Common Law Libraries). It produced four quarterly updates and editorial adjustments in 2016 and published a final report on theKF Modified Linked Data Project, funded in part by a grant received from the CALL Committee to Promote Research.
  • The committee is considering tabling a proposal to the CALL Executive Board to make the KF Modified Classification scheme freely available as an open access product
• Vendor Liaison Committee (a lot of the information is in the Members-only section of the CALL website)
  
  • It has continued its semi-annual vendor calls with representatives at Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis Canada as a means to achieve greater engagement, deeper dialogue, and improved follow-up with the two main vendors of electronic legal information. 
  • While most documents are restricted to CALL members, the committee has sdecided to publish certain high-value documents (terms of reference, AGM reports, Best practices) on  the public side of the website.
  • In the new year, one initiative of the committee will be to update CALL's last comparative content analysis of Westlaw and Quicklaw
•  Canadian Law Library Review
  
  • A cumulative index for volumes 26 to 41 (2001-2016) is underway and will be completed in the next few months.
  • Most importantly, the CALL Executive has agreed with the editorial board’s recommendation that the Review become an open and free access journal. This will include moving the electronic versions from the member’s only section of the CALL website and making the issues in the ISSUU platform publicly available. 
  • This way, non-members will get an opportunity to see more of what CALL does as an organization; there will be an incentive to increase advertising as the CLLR would be more attractive to advertisers as a journal with an unlimited potential audience; and CLLR would become more attractive to potential authors especially those who are required to publish