PM's of Australia

I came across this new website Australian Prime Ministers via Senator Kate Lundy's blog this week. I think it is great. Apart from learning who the first Australian PM was - the obligatory quiz question, I know hardly anything about our political history.

I had a laugh at the section titled The prime ministerial wife. Sort of puts them in place with the Prime Ministerial car and the Prime Ministerial brief! From Ada, Florence and Vera to Annita, Janette and Therese, how the times change.

Here is Elsie Curtin doing her bit at The Lodge!

Another media library going

How sad is this story found via LISNews from the New York Observer? The ABC (US) is closing it's library and getting rid of all of it's journals and print collection, oh and library staff. Don't worry they are "developing, with an outside research consultant, a state of the art research system tailored to our particular needs". As one comment says - Wikipedia saved as a favourite maybe? The president of ABC News calls the planned replacement for the library a more cyber-focused "Digital Research Facility".

Interesting to follow this one and see how the journalists cope with the new service and whether any of the library staff do 'stay on'. I am presuming journalists would have fairly good research skills and a handle on new technologies, but then again you think lawyers would also.....

Am loving the new Firm Spy blog (especially the accompanying pics)!! I think the law and accounting firms are using the threat of recession to get rid of staff they couldn't be bothered retraining or performance managing out. A few less support staff and associates isn't going to mean the difference between the survival or death of these large firms. Maybe the resulting stress on increasingly demotivated employees and bad press will make a difference though?

Finding journals online

My last legal research refresher session was titled 'how to find journals and journal articles online'. This is not an easy task these days and in the end I wound up summarising by encouraging attendees to try a few searches and if they don't locate the journal within 5 mins, to contact the library. The issues that we face during this transition from print to online journal access is that we subscribe to journals via multiple publisher platforms and the library catalogue, as well as offering links to articles via abstracting services such as Informit and Proquest. Access to titles changes regularly as publishers offer more content online and we add titles to our various subscriptions. Patrons want one service which offers search facilities across all journals we have access to, an A-Z list of titles, sortable by subject and full text searchable. I know there are some publishers offering this but the changeable nature of journals and content ownership means that even these are unlikely to offer the perfect solution.

One of the biggest problems with training patrons in the use of subscription databases, library catalogues and other systems is that they don't use them often enough to practice and remember what they learn. We try to focus more on ad-hoc skilling by helping a client search for something as they need it (the just in time v just in case debate again). Doing it this way may mean that clients miss out on updating their research skills and learning about new functionality and search tips via training.

It is a Catch 22 situation. Due to advances in technology and the uptake of social media in libraries, we can now offer automated, targeted alerts, using RSS feeds and mashups. By integrating these tools and federated, googleesque searching my organisation has developed an online library presence to deliver many of the traditional library services. However those same advances and technologies, used by the library and by externals such as publishers mean that without the right skills and with increasing time constraints, clients are still reliant on librarians to run searches, conduct research and to filter information and provide alerting services.

I think we are still a long way from becoming redundant.

On a lighter note - more pretty library/book art from here via Librarian in Black

Case Research

I have been doing sessions on researching case law in Australia for our legal team this week.

These are the topics I am covering:

Finding cases by citation
Finding cases relating to a specific section of legislation
Finding cases by phrase, party or search terms
Case citators vs full text
Unreported, reported and authorised cases
International caselaw

I am demonstrating different searches using internal, subscription based and public access legal databases such as LexisNexisAU (CaseBase), LegalOnline (Firstpoint), Westlaw, TimeBase (Legislation with Case Link), AustLII and LawLink for Court sites.

This sesion has been popular and I have received good feedback which is nice. I don't think clients realise how great it is to get positive feedback (or any at all in fact, positive or otherwise)!! I have been using NetMeeting software and teleconference facilities to offer these classes to those in our offices around Australia, it is working well.

Jureeka

I came across this at the RIPS Law Librarian blog and I love the concept. Eureka for Jureeka?

It's a new Firefox add-on that "transforms legal citations in web pages into hyperlinks that point to online source material."

How many times have I come to the end of an assignment or paper and dreaded the task of creating footnotes for everything I have referenced within the paper? It would be great for online publishers and authors, depending on the ability of the system to find the best source to link to. If you could select sources such as legislation on ComLaw, onlne commentary from LexisNexis, book references to Google Books or cases on Austlii it may actually work? If not and it is completely random, searching acoss the www for anything with that citation, it could be a dangerous tool.

This is actually how I imagined wikis to work, before I used one. I thought that every word in a wiki article that corresponded with an article title would automatically become a hyperlink. I didn't realise that you had to identify works as hyperlinks.

I'll give it a go when I get a chance at home using firefox.....

Catching up

I finally found time to do a bit of catch up on my current awareness reading via RSS Feeds today. This is what I found:

CCH has released a White Paper called Professionals and web 2.0. It provides the results of a survey of Asia Pacific professionals including legal and accounting and their use of web 2.0 technologies.

A list of 250 Top Australian Blogs. I am looking forward to visiting some of them at home over the next few weeks....

The RBA has reduced the interest rate to 3.25% - yeah and the government has announced a further stimulus package and most of us get $950 - yeah again!!

Legal Research blog

I came across this new blog written about legal research in Australian (yeah)! This is how the author (Lauren) describes it

Legal Research Rescue (LRR) is a place for legal research tips and tricks for junior (and not-so-junior) lawyers, law graduates and law students

I subscribed straight away and recommend it for librarians to use as a resource when conducting legal research training or doing research themselves. She has also created a delicious account for legal research sites and articles.

Research is changing.....

I am currently studying for a Certificate in Criminal Intelligence and this semester am doing a subject called Strategic Intelligence Practice. I was reading my study materials last night and was amazed at the all too familiar issues raised by the authors in regards to intelligence analysts. They are facing a challenge to retain their place in organisations due to access to the internet and open source intelligence materials. Educators are impressing on analysts the importance of adding value to their products by including recommendations in their assessments. There are several reasons why they have been reluctant to do this in the past and due to the increase in freely available material, policy makers and managers have started doing their own research and bypassing intelligence analysts.

They face the same dilemma as librarians, is it our job to answer client questions or provide access to sources only. Analysts know that forecasting is difficult to guarantee and so may prefer to provide facts and conclusions and stop short at supplying recommendations. We are often faced with a similar problem with clients asking a research query (often one they don't fully understand) and hoping we'll provide an answer rather than advise them on sources to consult.

It seems that intelligence analysts are striving to gain recognition as a profession, such as librarians (yes, we got a mention), lawyers and doctors have. Much of what they do is very similar to our research function. They liaise with clients within an organisation, gather information, data and intelligence (all of the usual problems with definitions apply) and organise that material into a strategic intelligence assessment or some other type of product or report. The tools, raw data and methods they work with may differ from ours but the imperitive to market themselves, increase their skills and gain recognition are very similar to ours.

Thing #35 Mini or micro blogging

Have joined Twitter and posted an update. I am not sure that I will use it as it seems the type of thing only the y gen would use. I don't think any of my friends know about it or would be interested. I guess it could be useful to 'talk' at work as a national group, especially if we had a national reference desk.

wiki's for research

I am planning on co-writing an article on the wiki we have created at work and how we are using it to deliver research to clients. Maybe this will be published and I'll be able to tick that off my New Years Resolution list for 2007?

I have also tried to use Pageflakes to share info, RSS feeds, bookmarks etc with other staff in my team, but it takes too long to open and change.

Wiki's - Things 16 and 17

Trying hard to catch up now as I am nearing the end of 23 Things!

I have been involved in the wiki that the LIS team developed at work so have been able to add content and play around a bit with that. I would have found it difficult to know where and how to start though if I hadn't been shown! I think there is great potential in wiki's for research tasks and in ongoing and closer collaboration with clients. It is a great way of sharing info while remaining flexible and current.

I recently discovered PBWiki and started a page on arty/crafty stuff. I haven't spent much more time on it, mainly because I haven't 'created' recently. It isn't as sophisticated as the wiki software we use at work, but is still fun to play with, and free :-) Like everything else Library 2.0-related, they seem to update it regularly and add new features.

I liked some the examples of library wiki's provided by Learning 2.0 and can see the benefits for public libraries especially. We have challenges such as confidentiality and the need to train/educate clients on how and why to use a wiki within our organisation. I can see some form of collaborative software being used more in our work in the future.