Today’s Tip: Dig Deep

By deep, I mean the deep or invisible web.  According to Marcus Zillman, there are somewhere in the vicinity of 1 trillion plus pages of information out there on the world wide web that search engines might not see.

Marcus was kind enough to update his annual article at LLRX.com, Deep Web Research 2012.

This report and guide is designed to give you the resources you need to better understand the history of the deep web research, as well as various classified resources that allow you to search through the currently available web

Susan Van Dyke wrote at Slaw on How to Avoid Resource-Draining One-Off Marketing Activities. She inspired this post with one of her ideas:

• Review your current orphans and if you’re not getting any results after a good effort of at least a couple of years, see about dropping some of these, especially if you can’t make a reasonable business case to support it.

Susan was speaking about marketing events, but this advice could apply to many things – library services, database content, use of website features, technology solutions, margarine vs. butter.

For legal research, I believe it is important …

Today’s Tip”: Look far afield.

When looking for articles from a medical journal I was reminded about the excellent service offered by the National Library of Australia. Their coordinates are:

Document Supply Service
National Library of Australia
Canberra ACT 2600
Enquiry Hotline: 1800 235 627
http://www.nla.gov.au/document-supply-services/contact

A recent fee for service item was sent to me with unbelieveably excellent turn around time which saved a one hour trip to the off site storage facility of my local University library.  Their catalogue linked web request form and credit card payment process is well thought out and very efficient. Weighed against my …

Most search engines have the capacity for searching a phrase: internet engines, ebook search tools, services like Westlaw Canada, LexisNexis Quicklaw, Maritime Law Books National Reporter System, CCH Online, and legal information institutes etc.

Today’s Tip: use the phrase search.

It is much more efficient for a first database (and I use this term very broadly) look to use a narrow search and then expand to if you need to “catch everything”.

Test this out by looking at results for:

constructive trust

and then do it again for

“constructive trust”

Happy New Year.…

Thanks to Simon Chester among others, we know that the Supreme Court of Canada intends to release it’s judgment in the National Securities Regulator Reference on December 22 at 9:45 EST. You will most likely find it first here or maybe here.

Today’s Tip is to use your calendar to diarize important watches.

Why your electronic calendar rather than an RSS feed or other automated technology to send you what you are waiting for? I have a few reasons for using this method:

• Your calendar can be set to send you a beeping reminder
• You most likely open your

Sometimes new law requires very broad compliance.  It might be easy to dismiss an act like the one proclaimed in force on December 8, 2011 titled “An Act respecting the mandatory reporting of Internet child pornography by persons who provide an Internet service” as applying to Internet Service Providers only, but it might apply to you as well. 

Today’s Tip is about identifying who in your organization to inform about a newly proclaimed law.

The  says:

Order fixing December 8, 2011 as the day on which an ACT RESPECTING THE MANDATORY REPORTING OF INTERNET CHILD PORNOGRAPHY BY PERSONS WHO PROVIDE …

Following on last week’s theme, Today’s Tip is about judicial consideration of statutes.

CanLII: Navigate to the act that you are interested in and click the Noteup Tab.  This tool allows for a judicial consideration search for the whole act, or for a particular section.

CanLII very correctly offers this warning:

Results are highly sensitive to the manner in which citations to a specific section are formatted in the texts by their authors. Some of them are not currently recognized by CanLII.

This feature does not currently support subsections or other subdivisions of a section. Therefore you may search

Today’s Tip idea comes from Corey McDonald, Paralegal with Justice Canada in Edmonton.

Cory mentioned yesterday that it would be helpful to know the different steps for doing the same task in LexisNexis Quicklaw and Westlaw Canada and CanLII.  I chose to write about Noting Up. Here are the steps for each system for noting up a case to see if it has been judicially considered

CanLII – click on the “search decisions citing this decision” link.

LexisNexis Quicklaw – click on the citator symbol or the “noteup with QuickCITE” link at the top of the decision or go directly …

Plenty of innovation is happening around real-time search. Simon Fodden told us about Google adding real-time search in August 2010, Connie Crosby has blogged about the importance of real time news and information, and I have shared a tip about Social Mention.

Today’s Tip: Check out Topsy.

Topsy is marketed as a social intelligence tool.

Our fast-indexing technology ingests massive amounts of authored content from the world’s largest social networks and our live-ranking software applies influence algorithms to social data, identifying the most important content seconds after it has been posted to the social web. We produce

Sometimes we learn so many ways to find information that we forget one or two.

Today’s Tip is to look for the Useful Things.

Here you’ll find a collection of resources hosted on or developed by Slaw, all designed to make your legal work on the internet just that little bit easier. Some of the resources have a page on Slaw all their own, while others are described and made available on this page. The table of contents immediately below will direct you to the proper place.

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