Article on Access and Copyright Challenges for Canadian Libraries During COVID-19

The most recent issue of The Journal of Copyright in Education and Librarianship has published an article entitled Canadian Collaborations: Library Communications and Advocacy in the time of COVID-19:

"The COVID-19 pandemic forced libraries to unexpectedly and suddenly close their physical locations, necessitating a remote working environment and a greater reliance on digital and virtual services. While libraries were in a better position than most sectors due to decades of experience in licensing and acquiring digital content and offering virtual services such as chat reference, there still were some services and resources that traditionally had only been offered in a face-to-face environment, or were available in print only. There were questions in the Canadian library community about how, and if these programs could be delivered online and comply with Canadian copyright law. This article will describe the access and copyright challenges that Canadian libraries faced during the first nine months of the pandemic and will outline the collaborative efforts of the Canadian library copyright community to respond to these challenges."

Library Community Submissions to 2021 Pre-Budget Consultations

The website Librarianship.ca has posted an article on Library Community Submissions to 2021 Pre-Budget Consultations.

The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) and the Canadian Urban Libraries Council (CULC) recently submitted their proposals to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance’s Pre-Budget Consultations for the year 2021.

CARL is focusing on closing the gap in broadband connectivity between groups and regions in the country, whereas CULC is putting emphasis on access to e-content for libraries, support for vulnerable populations, support for Canadian publishers and booksellers, as well as better broadband connectivity.

COVID-19 - More Resources from Vendors

This is a follow-up yesterday's post entitled COVID 19 - Free Resources from Vendors.

Here are 2 more links relating to free and/or enhanced access to library research resources from publishers:

• Publisher Access Changes, COVID-19 (Bryant University, Rhode Island)
• Coronavirus – Accès à des ressources documentaires additionnelles (Université de Montréal)

COVID 19 - Free Resources from Vendors

In reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, many library vendors and publishers are opening up their collections and making at least some of them free.

Here are a few lists:

• COVID-19: Special Offers, Events, News, and Updates From Library Vendors, Publishers, Online Services, and Others (infoDOCKET, March 17, 2020)
• Free COVID-19 Resources from LexisNexis Canada (Off the Shelf, Osgoode Hall Law School Library Blog, March 20, 2020)
• Contenu gratuit chez plusieurs fournisseurs (blog of Kathleen Wynd, electronic resources librarian at UQAM, Université du Québec à Montréal, March 19, 2020) - her blog post links to a fairly long list of providers opening up their collections

CanLII Connects Content Now Searchable on CanLII

CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute that works to make Canadian legal information available for free online, now includes commentary from the CanLII Connects platform in its search results.

CanLII Connects allows publishers, law firms and academics to share commentary on Canadian cases and legislation for anyone to read free of charge.

University of Toronto's LiPaD Project to Digitize Parliamentary Debates

The University of Toronto's UofT News service published an article last week about the LiPaD project at the school.

It is a project to digitize and make public Canada’s federal parliamentary debates going back to the beginning of the 20th century:

"With a click, users can also find more information on parliamentarians, such as their party affiliation and gender. The site is continually adding more information on members, including demographic profiles and election outcomes."

"The process began with Canadiana, a non-profit heritage coalition, which scanned every page of the Hansard and posted them online. But as pictures instead of text, the documents could not be searched with keywords."

The article describes how project participants tackled problems such as bits of dirt or smudges in the print that make optical character recognition difficult.

LiPaD is also adding transcripts of parliamentary committees.

Law Library Benchmarks 2018-19

New York-based Primary Research Group has released Law Library Benchmarks 2018-19 Edition:

"The report looks closely at the current policies and plans of North American law libraries in many areas, focusing especially on plans for information spending, with specific data on databases, books, reporters, eBooks, directories, magazines, newspapers, and other information vehicles. It also gives detailed information on how a sampling of law librarians view the information use training and other policies of major vendors of legal information.  They also discuss their plans for information purchases in the future.  The report includes a highly detailed segment on what librarians are doing in the area of artificial intelligence, including data on use of products from many specific AI vendors, and librarians’ perceptions about how they view AI and how it is viewed by top non-library management in their organizations.  The report also gives trend data on overall library budgets."

"This biennial study of law firms presents data from 42 law libraries in the USA and Canada.  Data is broken out by type of law library (corporate, university, courthouse, other) and by number of librarians employed, and for US and Canadian law libraries."

Print and PDF versions are available for $139.00 (US). Site licenses are also available.

International Literature Review on Licenses

The International Federation of Library Associations: (IFLA) recently published a Literature Review on the Use Of Licenses in Library Context that looks at the impact of digital licenses on access to library materials.

From the Executive Summary:

"A growing share of library collections is digital. With books – a good – replaced by access to databases – a service – traditional acquisition is increasingly replaced by licencing agreements."

"This has brought many advantages – costs related to physical storage and upkeep are falling, and libraries have access to a wider range of content than ever before. However, the move from purchased ‘hard’ copies to licensed ‘soft’ ones has also brought challenges."

"In order to understand these, and the evidence behind them, IFLA commissioned a literature review in late 2016. This looked through the available academic and grey literature, from theoretical analyses to practical survey work on libraries’ experience of licensing, and its limits as a tool."

CanLII Adds Book on Domestic Violence to Collection of Secondary Sources

The Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII), the law society-supported open access Internet site for finding Canadian jurisprudence and legislation, has added a new e-book to its collection of secondary materials: Responding to Domestic Violence in Family Law, Civil Protection & Child Protection Cases by Dr. Linda C. Neilson.

CanLII's secondary sources include a few e-books but mostly the tens of thousands of case summaries and commentaries on the CanLII Connects platform.

CanLII Connects allows publishers, law firms and academics to share commentary on Canadian cases and legislation for anyone to read free of charge

Article on Harvard Law's Anti-Link Rot Tool

This is related to the April 18, 2016 Library Boy post Harvard Law Receives Major Grant to Continue Developing its Anti-Link Rot Tool.

The most recent issue of D-Lib Magazine includes the article Scaling Up Perma.cc: Ensuring the Integrity of the Digital Scholarly Record that describes work to continue developing the Harvard Library Innovation Lab's Perma.cc web archiving service. Perma.cc is a well-regarded too used to fight "link rot".

From the article abstract:

"IMLS [the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services] awarded the Harvard Library Innovation Lab a National Digital Platform grant to further develop the Lab's Perma.cc web archiving service. The funds will be used to provide technical enhancements to support an expanded user base, aid in outreach efforts to implement Perma.cc in the nation's academic libraries, and develop a commercial model for the service that will sustain the free service for the academic community. Perma.cc is a web archiving tool that puts the ability to archive a source in the hands of the author who is citing it. Once saved, Perma.cc assigns the source a new URL, which can be added to the original URL cited in the author's work, so that if the original link rots or is changed the Perma.cc URL will still lead to the original source. Perma.cc is being used widely in the legal community with great success; the IMLS grant will make the tool available to other areas of scholarship where link rot occurs and will provide a solution for those in the commercial arena who do not currently have one."

Earlier Library Boy posts about link rot include:

• Most Recent Issue of Law Library Journal (November 5, 2010): "Among the articles that attracted my attention: ... Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archives Examination of URL Stability: 'Ms. Rhodes explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites'."
• Fifth Annual Link Rot Report of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group (May 3, 2012): "The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group has just published its 5th annual study of link rot among the original URLs for online law- and policy-related materials it has been archiving since 2007 (...) In 2012, 218 out of 579 URLs in the sample no longer provide access to the content that was originally selected, captured, and archived by the Chesapeake Group. In other words, link rot has increased to 37.7 percent within five years."
• CBC Radio Interview about Link Rot in Court Decisions (October 28, 2013): "The most recent episode of the CBC Radio show Spark includes an interview with Harvard Law School researcher Kendra Albert who co-authored an article about link rot in US Supreme Court decisions (...) In the case of the URLs in US Supreme Court decisions, the authors found a link rot rate of 50%. The Spark researchers checked URLs in Supreme Court of Canada decisions and found many broken links to texts from the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Law Society of Alberta and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada, among others."
• Georgetown University Symposium Searches for Solutions for Link Rot (March 16, 2015): "Retired Supreme Court of the United States librarian Judith Gaskell published an article today on Slaw.ca called Link Rot: the Problem Is Getting Bigger, but Solutions Are Being Developed. The article describes a symposium in the fall of 2014 at Georgetown University that examined emerging solutions to the problem of link rot.." 
• Profile Article About Inventor of Anti-Link Rot Perma.cc Web Tool (September 27, 2015): "The ABA Journal last week published a profile of "Legal Rebel" Jonathan Zittrain, the director of the Harvard Law Library. The Law School invented the tool Perma.cc that helps organizations create an archive of permanent links for web citations. It acts as a tool to deal with the growing menace of link rot."
• US Supreme Court Tackles Link Rot Problem (October 11, 2015): "The New York Times reported last week that the Court has created a dedicated page on its website where it posts permanent copies of the materials to which it links in its decisions."
• Law Library of Congress Tackles Link Rot (April 14, 2016): "... the Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. adopted Perma.cc, a tool developed at Harvard to help law journals and courts deal with link rot."
• Supreme Court of Canada Tackles Link Rot With New Online Archive (January 26, 2017): "To combat link rot, the Supreme Court of Canada today launched an online archive of Internet Sources Cited in SCC Judgments (1998 – 2016)."

Survey on GALLOP Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal

GALLOP, the Government and Legislative Libraries Online Publications Portal, was launched in 2013 by the Association of Parliamentary Libraries in Canada.

It is a portal providing access to often hard-to-find federal and provincial government publications.

The Association is asking users to fill out a survey about their experience with the Portal.

2017 Law via the Internet Conference Call for Papers

The organizers of the 2017 Law via the Internet conference have posted a call for submissions.

The event takes place at the Rutgers Law School in Newark, New Jersey, October 19-21, 2017.

The conference brings together people from the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) from different countries and continents that together form the Free Access to Law Movement.

The submission deadline for abstracts is July 30, 2017. Organizers are looking for papers on the following topics:

• Development and Implementation of Standards for Preserving and Presenting Legal Information
• New Initiatives in Free Access to Law
• Technical initiatives and developments in Legal Informatics
• Tools for Facilitating Access to Justice
• The state of LII Initiatives
• Sustainability of Open Access to Law Initiatives

The goal of the LIIs is to maximize free access to public legal information such as legislation and case law from as many countries and international institutions as possible.  

CanLII, the Canadian Legal Information Institute, and  Lexum, which publishes the decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada online, are prominent members of the movement.

Winter 2017 Issue of Law Library Journal

The Winter 2017 issue of Law Library Journal is now available online. It is published by the American Association of Law Lbraries.

Featured articles include:

• The Law School Library or the Library at the Law School? How Lessons from Other Types of Libraries Can Inform the Evolution of the Academic Law Library in the Digital Age: "Academic law libraries must adapt to the new digital environment of reduced funds, smaller physical collections, and greater use of electronic resources. This article examines the historical development of academic law libraries and the current challenges they face, different approaches libraries take to change, and lessons about how to thrive from nonlaw libraries."
• Law Libraries and the Future of Public Access to Born-Digital Government Information: "As government publications have shifted from print to electronic, mechanisms for guaranteeing the public’s right to access government information have not kept pace. Because legal resources are among the publications most at risk of loss, law libraries should participate in efforts to ensure that born-digital government information remains freely available to all." 
• Increasing Article Findability Online: The Four Cs of Search Engine Optimization : "As researchers increasingly and exclusively conduct legal research online, authors must learn the essential skill of ensuring that their articles are both findable and among the top-ranked results in a search. This article highlights four search engine optimization best practices to apply to legal scholarship: creating effective titles, abstracts, and metadata; cross-discipline marketing to multiple disciplines; crossposting to multiple locations; and converting to searchable PDFs."

UC Berkeley School of Law Library Tackles Link Rot at US Supreme Court

This is a follow-up of the January 26, 2017 posy entitled Supreme Court of Canada Tackles Link Rot With New Online Archive.

The UC Berkeley School of Law Library has partnered with application developer Philip Ardery to host a service called U.S. Supreme Court Web Citations that will capture any web resource cited by the United States Supreme Court immediately after their opinions are issued.

This is intended to address the problem of "link rot", or hyperlinks that no longer work.

More on Supreme Court of Canada Link Rot

This is a follow-up of the January 26, 2017 posy entitled Supreme Court of Canada Tackles Link Rot With New Online Archive.

Today on Slaw.ca, Nate Russell provided some statistical analysis of dead-end Internet links in SCC decisions and how the Court has tackled the problem.

And the website Motherboard published an article yesterday on the topic under the title Canada's Supreme Court Is Preserving Every Website Mentioned In Its Rulings.

Supreme Court of Canada Tackles Link Rot With New Online Archive

To combat link rot, the Supreme Court of Canada today launched an online archive of Internet Sources Cited in SCC Judgments (1998 – 2016).

Link rot refers to broken URLs or to URLs that direct to the original site but whose corresponding document has been removed or relocated without any information about where to find it.

From the Terms of Use:

“The Office of the Registrar of the SCC, recognizing that web pages or websites that the Court cites in its judgments may subsequently vary in content or be discontinued, has located and archived the content of most online sources that had been cited by the Court between 1998 and 2016 in order to preserve access to them. These sources were captured with a content as close as possible to the original content (…)”
“Since 2017, online sources cited in the ‘Authors Cited’ section in SCC judgments have been captured and archived. When a judgment cites such a source, an ‘archived version’ link is provided.”

Earlier Library Boy posts about link rot include:

• Most Recent Issue of Law Library Journal (November 5, 2010): "Among the articles that attracted my attention: ... Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archives Examination of URL Stability: 'Ms. Rhodes explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites'."
• Fifth Annual Link Rot Report of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group (May 3, 2012): "The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group has just published its 5th annual study of link rot among the original URLs for online law- and policy-related materials it has been archiving since 2007 (...) In 2012, 218 out of 579 URLs in the sample no longer provide access to the content that was originally selected, captured, and archived by the Chesapeake Group. In other words, link rot has increased to 37.7 percent within five years."
• CBC Radio Interview about Link Rot in Court Decisions (October 28, 2013): "The most recent episode of the CBC Radio show Spark includes an interview with Harvard Law School researcher Kendra Albert who co-authored an article about link rot in US Supreme Court decisions (...) In the case of the URLs in US Supreme Court decisions, the authors found a link rot rate of 50%. The Spark researchers checked URLs in Supreme Court of Canada decisions and found many broken links to texts from the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Law Society of Alberta and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada, among others."
• Georgetown University Symposium Searches for Solutions for Link Rot (March 16, 2015): "Retired Supreme Court of the United States librarian Judith Gaskell published an article today on Slaw.ca called Link Rot: the Problem Is Getting Bigger, but Solutions Are Being Developed. The article describes a symposium in the fall of 2014 at Georgetown University that examined emerging solutions to the problem of link rot.." 
• Profile Article About Inventor of Anti-Link Rot Perma.cc Web Tool (September 27, 2015): "The ABA Journal last week published a profile of "Legal Rebel" Jonathan Zittrain, the director of the Harvard Law Library. The Law School invented the tool Perma.cc that helps organizations create an archive of permanent links for web citations. It acts as a tool to deal with the growing menace of link rot."
• US Supreme Court Tackles Link Rot Problem (October 11, 2015): "The New York Times reported last week that the Court has created a dedicated page on its website where it posts permanent copies of the materials to which it links in its decisions."
• Law Library of Congress Tackles Link Rot (April 14, 2016): "The US government website DigitalGov has published an article called Law Library of Congress Implements Solution for Link and Reference Rot.  It explains how the Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. adopted Perma.cc, a tool developed at Harvard to help law journals and courts deal with link rot." 
• Harvard Law Receives Major Grant to Continue Developing its Anti-Link Rot Tool (April 18, 2016)

Primary Research Group Report on Benchmarks for Academic Library Use of Bibliometrics & Altmetrics

New York-based Primary Research Group has published a report on International Benchmarks for Academic Library Use of Bibliometrics & Altmetrics, 2016-17:

"This study presents data from 20 predominantly research universities in the USA, continental Europe, the UK, Canada and Australia/New Zealand.  Among the survey participants are: Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge University, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya the University at Albany, the University of Melbourne, Florida State University, the University of Alberta and Victoria University of Wellington."

"The report gives detailed data on the use of various bibliometric and altmetric tools such as Google Scholar, Web of Science, Scimago, Plum Analytics, and many, many others.  The 114-page report presents detailed information on staffing, budgets, marketing, sources of demand,  technology and other factors in bibliometric and altmetric service development."

Print and PDF versions are available for $109(US). Site licenses are also available.

Earlier Library Boy posts about Primary Research Group include:

• Primary Research Group Report on Library Database Licensing Practices (January 15, 2011)
• Law Library Benchmarks 2012-13 (April 23, 2012)
• Law Library Benchmarks 2014  (April 10, 2014)
• Survey of Law Library Database Licensing Practices (February 14, 2016)
• Survey of US Law School Faculty: Evaluation of the Law Library (April 21, 2016) 
• Primary Research Group Report on Bundled Journals Package Contract Negotiations Benchmarks (June 19, 2016)

Updated Research Guides From GlobaLex

One of the sources I consult for research guides on international law topics is GlobaLex, the electronic collection created by the Hauser Global Law School Program at the New York University School of Law.

It recently updated a number of its excellent research guides:

• A Guide to Fee-Based U. S. Legal Research Databases: "This guide is designed primarily for non-U.S. legal researchers. It describes several providers of legal research databases, focusing on fee-based sources, both high-cost and low-cost (...) Among commercial providers, WestlawNext, Lexis Advance, and Bloomberg Law (including Bloomberg BNA and PACER) are the largest and most sophisticated in terms of search features in searching and other features), but often the most expensive. Fastcase, Casemaker, and VersusLaw are considered to be low-cost databases. Specifically, Casemaker and Fastcase are free to state bar members in many states. Additionally, Bloomberg BNA (included in Bloomberg Law), CCH IntelliConnect, HeinOnline, and Thomson Reuters Checkpoint provide expensive, sophisticated, and specialized products for practitioners in areas such as labor law, environmental law, securities, taxation, and immigration law. Although they have not been introduced in this article, other important fee-based databases are PACER (also included in Bloomberg Law), CourtLink (by Lexis), Courthouse News Service, Law360 (also included in Lexis), and CourtExpress (by Westlaw) for court docket and case information service, Lexis Securities Mosaic for securities, LexisNexis Accurint for public records, AILA Link for immigration law, vLex and Foreign Law Guide for foreign laws, WorldTradeLaw.net for international trade law, and Proquest Congressional for legislative history research, etc."
• International Trademark Law – The Madrid System: "Registration of trademarks in multiple jurisdictions around the world is governed by two independent treaties—the Madrid Agreement (the Agreement) and the Madrid Protocol (the Protocol). Despite its name, the Protocol is a separate treaty and not a “protocol” to the Agreement. Together, the Agreement and the Protocol are known as the Madrid System for the International Registration of Marks (the Madrid System). States party to the Agreement and/or the Protocol and organizations party to the Protocol are referred to collectively as Contracting Parties. Together, they constitute the Madrid Union, which is a Special Union under Article 19 of the Paris Convention. The Madrid System is a centrally administered system (by the International Bureau of the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO) for obtaining a bundle of trademark registrations in separate jurisdictions, creating in effect a basis for an "international registration" of marks. This guide is intended to highlight the resources and important issues encountered in using the Madrid System for the international registration of marks."

Harvard Law Receives Major Grant to Continue Developing its Anti-Link Rot Tool

This is a follow-up to the Library Boy post of April 14, 2016 entitled Law Library of Congress Tackles Link Rot.

Harvard University's law school has been granted $700,000US by the Institute of Museum and Library Services to continue developing Perma.cc:

"Link rot happens when a hyperlink on a web page or within a document points to a website or online resource that has changed or is no longer available. It is a serious problem affecting as much as 70 percent of all scholarly articles in law, medicine, science, and technology, impeding the ability to follow and evaluate the digital scholarly record. Building on solutions and approaches developed in the field of legal scholarship, this project will add to the Perma library coalition and seek to mitigate link rot in other fields."

Law Library of Congress Tackles Link Rot

The US government website DigitalGov has published an article called Law Library of Congress Implements Solution for Link and Reference Rot.

It explains how the Law Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. adopted Perma.cc, a tool developed at Harvard to help law journals and courts deal with link rot.

Link rot refers to broken URLs or to URLs that direct to the original site but whose corresponding document has been removed or relocated without any information about where to find it.

The Library had discovered many instances of link rot in its foreign, comparative and international law reports.

Using Perma.cc, authors can archive web documents and create a permalink to them:

"(...) Perma.cc was officially implemented by the Law Library on October 1, 2015. This means that hyperlinked footnote references in new Global Legal Research Center reports—such as the Center’s recent reports on foreign fighters, human trafficking or national parliaments—now contain links to archived versions of referenced Web pages, allowing readers permanent access to key legal materials, regardless of what happens to the original Web address."

Earlier Library Boy posts about link rot include:

• Most Recent Issue of Law Library Journal (November 5, 2010): "Among the articles that attracted my attention: ... Breaking Down Link Rot: The Chesapeake Project Legal Information Archives Examination of URL Stability: 'Ms. Rhodes explores URL stability, measured by the prevalence of link rot over a three-year period, among the original URLs for law- and policy-related materials published to the web and archived though the Chesapeake Project, a collaborative digital preservation initiative under way in the law library community. The results demonstrate a significant increase in link rot over time in materials originally published to seemingly stable organization, government, and state web sites'."
• Fifth Annual Link Rot Report of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group (May 3, 2012): "The Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group has just published its 5th annual study of link rot among the original URLs for online law- and policy-related materials it has been archiving since 2007 (...) In 2012, 218 out of 579 URLs in the sample no longer provide access to the content that was originally selected, captured, and archived by the Chesapeake Group. In other words, link rot has increased to 37.7 percent within five years."
• CBC Radio Interview about Link Rot in Court Decisions (October 28, 2013): "The most recent episode of the CBC Radio show Spark includes an interview with Harvard Law School researcher Kendra Albert who co-authored an article about link rot in US Supreme Court decisions (...) In the case of the URLs in US Supreme Court decisions, the authors found a link rot rate of 50%. The Spark researchers checked URLs in Supreme Court of Canada decisions and found many broken links to texts from the Canadian Association of Journalists, the Law Society of Alberta and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada, among others."
• Georgetown University Symposium Searches for Solutions for Link Rot (March 16, 2015): "Retired Supreme Court of the United States librarian Judith Gaskell published an article today on Slaw.ca called Link Rot: the Problem Is Getting Bigger, but Solutions Are Being Developed. The article describes a symposium in the fall of 2014 at Georgetown University that examined emerging solutions to the problem of link rot.." 
• Profile Article About Inventor of Anti-Link Rot Perma.cc Web Tool (September 27, 2015): "The ABA Journal last week published a profile of "Legal Rebel" Jonathan Zittrain, the director of the Harvard Law Library. The Law School invented the tool Perma.cc that helps organizations create an archive of permanent links for web citations. It acts as a tool to deal with the growing menace of link rot."
• US Supreme Court Tackles Link Rot Problem (October 11, 2015): "The New York Times reported last week that the Court has created a dedicated page on its website where it posts permanent copies of the materials to which it links in its decisions."