Supreme Court of Canada to Celebrate its 150th Anniversary in 2025

The Supreme Court of Canada will turn 150 next year and has announced a series of initiatives and events to mark the occasion.

These include:

• visits by the Court to 5 Canadian cities
• a major legal conference
• an essay competition for law students
• an art competition for young people
• a reunion of current and former Supreme Court judicial law clerks
• a ceremonial ‘Opening of the Judicial Year’ on October 6, 2025

The Court has created a special anniversary website where more announcements will be published.

CanLII Survey on AI-Generated Case Summaries

CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute that provides free access to Canadian caselaw, legislation and commentary, has been offering case summaries generated by artificial intelligence over the past year.

It is now running a survey to find out how those summaries are being received by CanLII users:

"The primary survey will take approximately 7 minutes to complete and is being conducted in English. It is open to all users of CanLII who are at least 18 years of age. The survey targets users across all jurisdictions in Canada and is designed to gather insights from both the legal community and the general public. There is also a secondary survey which will involve in-depth, 45 minute-long video interviews with 16 selected participants who will receive monetary compensation for their contribution."

"The survey was launched on October 1st, 2024, and will be open until November 15th, 2024."

International Federation of Library Associations Publishes Trend Report 2024

The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) has released its Trend Report 2024.

"The IFLA Trend Report 2024 is the first major update of this publication since the 2013 original, and represents a key pillar of our work to support the library field to be ready to face the future. Through building the reflex and ability to integrate the future into our planning today, libraries can be more resilient and so more sustainable. This, in turn, brings benefits to the communities that libraries serve, be they the population of a local area, the students and faculty of a university, or a country as a whole in the case of national libraries."

"The report is made up of two major elements – a set of trends identified on the basis of a comprehensive review of the literature review, and then a set of scenarios which explore the different sorts of future that we could face."

The trends analyzed in the report are:

1.  Knowledge practices are changing
2. AI and other technologies are transforming society
3. Trust is being renegotiated
4. Skills and abilities are becoming more complex
5. Digital technologies are unevenly distributed
6. Information systems are using more resources
7. People are seeking community connection

September 2024 Issue of Governance and Recordkeeping Around the World

The Governance and Recordkeeping Around the World newsletter, published by Library and Archives Canada, highlights issues pertaining to government and recordkeeping practices in the public and private sectors around the world.

The September 2024 issue has just been published. 

It includes:

• news items from Canada and around the world
• announcements of upcoming Canadian and international events (meetings, conferences, seminars)
• project and product news in areas such as digitization, archives, open source, e-government, access to information etc.
• listings of papers and readings (white papers, presentations, reports)