Many people have spent the last three months working from home. While most librarians had experience providing services to clients who were working remotely, it was a different situation when it came to being the ones who were working remotely. When you’re used to working in a physical library, moving to providing services entirely online presents a challenge, since a number of resources are still not available online.

I am sure that there are many people who can make helpful additions to this list, but this is what worked for us during the shift to providing all library services digitally:…

CanLII wants to know:

Have you ever imagined seeing a publication with *YOUR NAME* on *YOUR AREA OF EXPERTISE* on the cover?

If so, they’d like to know all about it – and could help make that dream a reality.

CanLII recently launched a house publishing program that “aims to create content that strategically meets the needs of the researchers who use CanLII.”

Specifically, CanLII seeks (1) legal texts on core areas of law, (2) shorter pieces that answer particular questions, and (3) practice manuals for particular areas of law.

If your idea falls outside those three types, the CanLII …

Two lawyers at my firm asked which formulation I preferred:

“Notice” has the meaning ascribed to it in Section 9.1.

“Notice” has the meaning ascribed in Section 9.1.

“Notice” has the meaning ascribed thereto in Section 9.1.

Being a dangerous radical, I opted for the second one. It’s the simplest.

Thereto is to be avoided at all costs, and to it in the first possibility really doesn’t add anything.

The more senior of the two lawyers made a good point, though.

Opposing counsel will probably want to add the to it, so leaving it out would only occasion more …

Who would have thought, back in January, that we’d be doing quite so much of this?

It feels like shopping in Bulgaria in the mid 1970s, lining up for the remaining 40-watt bulb on the shelf.

If you live in the United Kingdom or other parts of the Commonwealth, you would be doing it at the kerbside.

The form curb is usual in North America in describing the raised edge of a sidewalk, walkway or paved area.

Both versions are seen in early eighteenth-century examples (sometimes kirb).

Curb actually makes more sense, given that the word comes from …

Never write or say this.

It is just a mask. There is no other kind but that worn on the face (except figuratively).

Face mask is as silly as foot shoe or head hat.

As these twenty different senses of mask that are listed in the Oxford English Dictionary will attest:

• face-covering
• image of a face worn by an actor
• representation of a human or animal head
• grotesque representation of a face worn at carnivals etc.
• facial expression concealing emotion, giving false impression
• human face resembling a mask
• protective covering for the face
• surgical dressing for the face

With everyone working from home, I have been looking for better tools to collaborate with my team. I recently found one that is super cool – Miro.

Miro enables users to map out a workflow, brainstorm new ideas or develop a business strategy on a shared online whiteboard. To create a board, you can start with a blank canvas or use a template, such as ones for flowcharts, mind maps, or kanban frameworks.

Once in the whiteboard, it is easy to edit by clicking and dragging boxes, arrows or other shapes, or creating your own sketches with a drawing …

The Law Society of Saskatchewan has just launched a new series of video tutorials for remote research resources – perfect for a time when more people than ever are working away from their office or usual workspace.

The series has four videos with more on the way. The first batch covers:

• Canadian Encyclopedic Digest (CED)
• Irwin Law: Essentials of Canadian Law – Online!
• Finding Irwin Law Books on Des Libris
• O’Brien’s Internet: Online Encyclopedia of Forms

The videos are aimed at Law Society members in that province, but will be of interest to legal professionals across the country who have …

One of the challenges of the last few months has been accessing materials that my library does not own. With the majority of libraries being closed, we have not been able to borrow these materials from the usual suspects. 

When looking for government publications, one useful source is the Government of Canada Publications website which includes a catalogue of over 502,000 publications and which provides online access to more than 381,000 government publications.

The website offers an advanced search feature which allows you to limit your search by such criteria as department, language, and publication date. The collection includes PDFs …

Erin Cowling’s wonderful interview series, Women Leading in Law, is back up and running after a bit of a break.

In response to the difficult times we’re in, Cowling notes, “I don’t know about you but I need some good news right about now. And I believe there’s nothing better than reading positive stories about women kicking butt in law“.

In her series (at 45 interviews and counting!), Cowling asks women lawyers working in a wide variety of roles and practice areas a standard set of six questions:

• Tell me a little about your practice or business.
• Why

Coverage, essentially.

You’ll need a little ancient Greek here.

The –demic suffix comes from demos, which means ‘the people’, ‘the community’. Demos is the root of democracy (‘rule by the people’).

The epi- bit comes from the Greek for ‘upon’, ‘at’, ‘close to’. Think of the epicentre of an earthquake.

Pan-, on the other hand, means ‘universal’. Pandemonium is total confusion or chaos; pantheism is the belief that the divine is present everywhere in the universe.

An epidemic is a disease that touches a fairly localised group; a pandemic reaches far beyond the local.

One would therefore say …