Transcript Slide 1

Interdisciplinarity, current
awareness and trend-watching
CML 3319: Advanced Legal Research
7 April 2011
Julie Lavigne, Law Librarian
Brian Dickson Law Library
Interdisciplinarity
Kathleen M. Sullivan in the Foreword to the Michigan Law
Review, 2001-2002, vol. 100.
Law and…
 uOttawa:
– Law and Technology
– Law and Social Justice
 McGill:
– McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law , cosponsored with the Faculties of Medicine and
Religious Studies
 Yale Law School:
– Cultural Cognition Project
 etc.
How should I conduct
interdisciplinary research?
 Determine the major themes and keywords
that relate to your research
 Identify the relevant types of information you
are looking for
– For example, who are the experts in this field? Do you want journal
articles only? etc.
 Identify the major databases, journals,
monographs (books), websites, etc., that are
relevant
 Don’t forget to search in multidisciplinary
databases!
uOttawa Subject Guides (A-Z)
 www.biblio.uottawa.ca
uOttawa Subject Guides
LibGuides: uOttawa
Multidisciplinary databases
 Academic Search Complete:
– Multidisciplinary database designed specifically for
academic institutions, it includes full text of journals,
magazines, and newspapers. It is the world’s largest
scholarly, multidisciplinary full text database.
 Academic OneFile:
– This Multidisciplinary database includes abstracts and full
text. Academic content is smaller than that of Academic
Search Premier.
Multidisciplinary databases
 Expanded Academic ASAP:
– Provides journal literature from over 2,200 full-text titles
in a wide variety of subject areas including: social sciences,
humanities, science and technology, medicine, national
news periodicals, general interest magazines, and
newswires.
 JSTOR:
– Multidisciplinary database giving archival access to
scholarly journals within the following areas: arts,
sciences, humanities and social sciences. Note that Jstor
does not provide access to current issues.
Business and management
 See also the Management subject guides
– accounting, business law, business plans, company
information, finance, human resources, industry
information, international business, management, and
marketing and advertising
 Business Source Complete
– This scholarly business database provides the leading collection of
bibliographic and full text content (more than 2,800 journals), with
indexing and abstracts (more than 3,700 journals) for the most important
business journals, and various types of reports. Subjects include
management, economics, banking & finance, accounting, international
business, labour relations, computer systems, marketing, area studies,
taxation, industry & manufacturing, production & operations
management, communications & media, human resources, public
administration, and health care management.
Business and management
 CBCA Complete
– Includes journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters
and newswires, with comprehensive subject coverage,
including Current Events, Business, Education, Science and
Medicine, Arts, Social Sciences, and Law, all with a
Canadian focus. Full text is available for selected titles.
 Canadian Business Resource (CBR)
– Profiles on over 50 Canadian Companies, information on
2,500 of Canada's largest firms and all 3,500 TSX and TSX
Venture listed firms, and more than 40,000 contact names.
Criminology
 See also the Criminology subject guide
 Criminal Justice Abstracts
– Comprehensive coverage of the major journals, books, and
reports from government and non-governmental agencies.
International coverage. Subjects include crime trends,
prevention projects, corrections, juvenile delinquency, police,
courts, offenders, victims, and sentencing.
 Violence and Abuse Abstracts @ Scholars Portal
– Index to journal literature on interpersonal violence, including
psychological, physical and sexual abuse against women and
children, hate crimes against groups such as gay and lesbians
and ethnic minorities, elder abuse and neglect, work place
violence, gang violence and other violence impinging upon
domestic relations.
 See also the Government Information
subject guide and the International
Development subject guide
 Peace Research Abstracts @ Scholars
Portal
– index to information on all aspects of peace and
conflicts studies research.
Public and international affairs
 See also the Public and International Affairs
subject guide
 Canadian Public Policy Collection:
– Collection of monograph publications from Canadian public policy
institutes, government agencies, advocacy groups, think-tanks, university
research centers and other public interest groups.
 PAIS International @ Scholars Portal:
– A bibliographic index with abstracts. Includes journal articles, books, etc.
Subjects include political, social, and public policy issues.
 Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO):
– Full-text database of theory and research on international affairs that
includes working papers from university research institutes, occasional
papers series from NGOs, foundation-funded research projects,
proceedings from conferences, books, journals and policy briefs.
News and current affairs databases
 See also the Newspaper Articles and Current Events
subject guide
 Canadian Newsstand Major Dailies
– Canadian newspapers in English.
 Factiva
– Over 6,000 Canadian and foreign newspapers, magazines and reports; most full
text. Includes business news, market research reports, analyst reports and Web
sites.
 Canadian Periodical Index (CPI.Q)
– Provides access to Canadian and American periodical literature. Full text articles
for more than 160 titles and full text for selected sections of The Globe and Mail.
Emphasis on mainstream and academic titles available in Canadian libraries. Over
400 periodicals are indexed in CPI.Q with more than 80 journals in business.
News and current affairs
 A number of other databases also
include archived newspapers :
– Globe and Mail: Canada's Heritage (1844 - 2003)
– Historical New York Times
– Paper of Record
• Free registration required
– Times Digital Archive
Government information
 See also the Government Information subject
guide
 Canadian Census Analyser: Provides access to
commonly requested census data, 1971-2001
 Canadian Research Index: Index of provincial
and federal documents
Located on the 3rd floor of the Morisset library
The Invisible or Deep Web
For more information, see Jane Devine &
Francine Egger-Sider, Going Beyond Google: The
Invisible Web in Learning and Teaching (NealSchuman Publishers, New York: 2009) and “An
Illustration of the World Wide Web ‘Content
Layers’” in Paul Gil, “What is the ‘Invisible
Web’?”, online: About.com
<http://netforbeginners.about.com/library/diagr
ams/n4layers.htm>.
Some tips and techniques for
improving your Google searches
 “exact phrase”
 define:  find a definition of a term
 site:  search a specific site or domain
(e.g., site:.gc.ca will search only
Government of Canada sites)
 .format  search for particular document
types (e.g., “legal ethics” .pdf will retrieve
largely only PDF documents)
 try an Advanced Search in Google!
Also try...
 Google Scholar
– To search for publicly-available scholarly articles
 Google Books
– To search the full text of many publicly-available
books
 Google Translate
– To get general translations of websites in other
languages
Recommended reading!
Tara Calishain & Rael Dornfest, Google
Hacks: Tips & Tools for Smarter Searching
(Sebastopol, Calif. : O'Reilly, 2005).
Available at
Morriset Library
MRT General /
ZA 4251 .G66
C34 2005
Grey literature
 good source of information for science,
technology, and social sciences
 not conventionally or commercially
published, but produced and distributed
by government agencies, academia,
business, and industry in either print or
electronic formats
– policy briefs, technical reports, conference
papers and proceedings, government reports,
theses and dissertations, and working papers
 often more current because produced
quickly, without peer review
Grey Literature
 Search databases that index or include full-text
sources of grey literature.
– e.g. Columbia International Affairs Online (CIAO),
Public Affairs Information Service (PAIS), Dissertation
Abstracts
 Search major Internet directories or gateways.
 Search websites of corporations or institutions that
are likely to produce grey literature.
 Search using general or specialty search engines
such as Google and AltaVista or Scirus or SOSIG.
 Search for PDF files.
 Search dissertations or theses as well as conference
papers and proceedings.

For more information, see: http://toby.library.ubc.ca/subjects/subjpage2.cfm?id=879.
Your research is now up to date. But are
YOU???
 Current awareness:
– Makes it easier to locate relevant and new
information sources
– Helps you continually be aware of developments
in your field(s) of interest
– Should be preceded by training on various tools
for remaining effective researchers
– Relies on either “Pull” or “Push” technologies
Current awareness
“Pull” represents the
classic way of using the
Web: the user goes
regularly and directly to
various Internet sites to
“pull” information and
recent news about
particular subjects.
“Push”, on the other
hand, occurs when the
information is “pushed”
toward the user; that is
to say, information is
delivered to the user
according to criteria that
he or she has set up in
the past.
RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) feeds
 RSS feeds allow you to automatically organize or index the
contents of a website, or part of a site, and to deliver it in a
digested format on another site.
 It allows websites to automatically post the last news
articles, or other pieces of content, that have appeared on a
site.
 This is called the syndication of content. Think of a TV show
that goes into syndication – its same content is now
available on alternate channels. This is the same idea,
except you have more control over which shows you want
to see (like Tivo?).
Some RSS icons
Look for these on your
favourite websites, to
see if you can set up an
RSS feed to the site.
Check out the
examples at the Globe
& Mail and CanLII.
RSS feeds and RSS aggregators
 You can easily access all your requested
RSS feeds using an aggregator or
reader.
 This means you just have to go to one
location to quickly check if there have
been any updates to your favourite
websites.
RSS readers: Google Reader
Table of Contents services
 Traditionally, libraries would send the
table of contents for newly-received
journals to all professors who had
requested this service. Today, many
journals offer this service online, either
through their websites or through a
database service. The Table of Contents
gets sent to your email electronically.
Table of Contents services: Legal Scholarship
Network
Table of Contents service:
NetVibes
 NetVibes is actually an RSS service that
the law library is in the process of setting
up to use like a TOC service
 Official launch planned for September
2011
 http://www.netvibes.com/droitlaw
Research alerts
 set up a search query that you can then ask
the system to re-run for you on a regular
basis
 most frequently-used research alerts by
lawyers are those offered by
LexisNexis/Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada,
but can set up alerts in many different
resources, including web search engines
 sometimes alerts are actually RSS feeds
Research alerts in Google
Research alerts in LexisNexis/
Quicklaw
Research alerts in LexisNexis/
Quicklaw
Using blogs
 Web log = blog
 Blawg (http://www.blawg.com)
– A directory of legal blogs, podcasts, and news
feeds
– Includes lawyers writing about their area of
expertise, law librarians offering research tips and
tricks, law professors expressing their opinions and
analysis, and technologists discussing the latest
trends and ideas in legal technology.
Some recommended

Slaw.ca
–

News and opinions about changes in the legal profession.
University of Alberta Faculty Blog
–

News stories about developments in marketing, litigation, practice management and business
law.
Law21
–

With contributions from academics and law students, the site discusses recent Supreme Court
of Canada cases and developments at other countries’ top courts.
FP Legal Post
–

Cooperative blog by legal academics, lawyers and law librarians discussing recent and
interesting developments in law and legal technology.
The Court
–

2
blawgs
Academic discussions of current legal issues in Canada and other countries, and in
international law.
Library Boy
– Legal research news and developments from a Supreme Court of Canada librarian.
___
2
“Recommended Canadian Law Blogs” (January 2, 2009), online: Bora Laskin Law Library Reference Services Weblog
<http://bllreference.wordpress.com/tag/recommended-blogs/>.
Twitter
Twitter
 Some ways to use it in law3:
 for breaking international legal news, and often
the first place for links to recent court cases, new
legislation, and international documents
 blog Twitterfeeds will immediately alert you to
new posts (similar to RSS)
 news of legal developments worldwide and
upcoming conferences, new books, new law
library acquisitions, news from local or foreign
sources and in foreign languages
 network with colleagues, share ideas, and
crowd source
___
3
Lyonette Louis-Jacques, “Twitter for Foreign, Comparative, and International Law (FCIL) Work” (November 4, 2010), online: Slaw.ca
<http://www.slaw.ca/2010/11/04/twitter-for-foreign-comparative-and-international-law-fcil-work/>.
Social bookmarking
 Social bookmarking is a way you can
take all your bits and pieces of
documented knowledge and share it
with others. It is a way of sharing your
bibliographies on various topics, or your
favourite websites, etc., with others who
share your interests.
CiteULike:
http://www.citeulike.org/
 manage and discover
scholarly references to
articles on particular
topics (i.e.
bibliographies)
 useful for suggesting
keywords, finding
literature relevant to your
topic, or particular
authors who contribute to
a field
CiteULike: “Everyone’s library”
Delicious:
http://www.delicious.com/
 one of the original
social bookmarking
sites
 huge lists of
bookmarks on various
topics, easily
shareable and easily
searchable
 search and browse
easily using “tags”
Delicious
LibraryThing:
http://www.librarything.com/
 share your libraries with
other users and find other
books on particular topics
LibraryThing