Getting Feedback

Between blogging at Slaw.ca, posting legal research tips at Slawtips.ca, and taking courses towards Lean Six Sigma certification, this poor blog has not had much attention in 2014.  Christmas is the traditional time for guilt trips. Rather than focusing on the negative feelings from leaving this site without nourishment, I decided to give a compliment to the Attorney At Work site.

An excellent Daily Dispatch post by Mary Lokensgard on December 18, 2014 titled How to Ask for Feedback is one example of why I think highly of Attorney at Work.  I also appreciate their focus on one really good idea every day.

I agree with Mary that feedback is a dialog.  It is an innovation tool.

To put feedback into a legal research perspective - wouldn't you like to KNOW if what you provided was too little, too much, or just right? Isn't it better for your requester to know when you had too little time, too much time, or the predicted amount of time to complete the task?

I see feedback as a key driver for expectation management.

Thanks Attorney at Work for the excellent intel in 2014.

Alberta Queen's Printer Stakeholder Survey

Josette McEachern and I were among a group who participated in a stakeholder session this week about the Alberta Queen's Printer products and services.  To assist with results based budgeting, the QP is looking for feedback about how they deliver services, official products and legislative material.

I was given leave to share an online survey to further assist them in their important work.

In addition to the questions that we asked in the session, we also encourage you participate in our online questionnaire ─ a set of mostly different questions other than what we already asked you ─ so that we may be further informed about your experience with and expectations of Alberta Queen’s Printer.  The survey will take 5 – 15 minutes in length (depends on the length of your answers).  The survey will be open until Friday June 27^th at 4:30 pm.

 

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/AQP-Customer-Survey

 

Of course, you are always welcome to contact us by email qp@gov.ab.ca or phone 780-427-4952 (AB Toll Free 310-0000) with your questions, suggestions or comments.

I encourage all Albertans and anyone who uses Alberta Legislation to participate.

The end of Canada Gazette in print

Well, that is it. Statutory Instrument 2014-19 registered March 12, 2014 titled Canada Gazette Publication Order, 2014 has been published. Three short lines that spell the end of a very long era.

1. The Canada Gazette is to continue to be published electronically in Portable Document Format (PDF).

The Order comes into force on April 1, 2014.

A couple of points from the Explanatory Note attached to the order:

Proposal

The Canada Gazette Publication Order, 2014 provides for the continuation of the publication in electronic Portable Document Format (PDF) of Part I, Part II and Part III of the Canada Gazette, pursuant to subsection 10(2) of the Statutory Instruments Act. It also clarifies that the Canada Gazette will continue to be published electronically in PDF.

Objective

The objective of this Order is to eliminate the requirement for a printed version of the Canada Gazette. This initiative was included in the Jobs, Growth and Long-term Prosperity Act, chapter 19 of the Statutes of Canada, 2012, to support the Government’s greening initiatives as part of its Sustainable Development Strategy.

Visit the Canada Gazette on its permanent home at http://www.gazette.gc.ca/gazette/home-accueil-eng.php

The whole of the Gazette is online at a variety of places.

The Field Library has a near complete print collection for reference in the Edmonton office from 1978 to 2010. We print the indexes for quick reference.

A lament about moving targets - New Release RSS feed

Digital information is fantastic.  It makes research tasks more flexible when you have options for the format or forum that information is available from .  One thing that hinders me, and others I am sure, is the potential for born digital information to move, merge, be edited, or disappear.

There have been laments and warnings about link rot (Link Rot in Court Decisions – Still a Problem, Fifth Annual Link Rot Report of the Chesapeake Digital Preservation Group, Citation by Shortened URL) and concerns about access to solely digital legislative and government information (Canadian Association of Law Libraries: Could Federal Budget Affect Access to Legislative Information?,  Hide and Seek – a New Paradigm for Finding Official Documents?, Government of Canada Moves to E-Printing) circulated and shared.  One major issue that hasn't been specifically addressed is the pain involved with service access point changes.

I totally understand why websites and web services have to change and evolve.  Still, it gets me a little riled up when important access points are subject to moving around and disruption with no warning, notice, or reason.  Yes, I am complaining about the Alberta Government News Releases.

Government new releases are an important source of legal information.  They are generated when there are new Orders in Council, they contain information about government consultations and legislative change and the background of why decisions are made and implemented.

In mid-August, my team was worried that our RSS readers were not working properly. Alberta Government news releases were not appearing.  Because this information is critical to current awareness services that my team provides, we investigated further and found that the news pages for the alberta.ca website had changed significantly.  There was no link shown to RSS feeds.

There is still no RSS feeds list easily identifiable from the site, but responsive public servants shared this news:

Our RSS feeds have been updated.  Please see the links below.

Listing of all updated feeds:  http://alberta.ca/Newsrssfeeds.cfm

Or here is the feed to see all news announcements: http://alberta.ca/newsroom/newsroom.cfm

Date sorting and the Alberta Courts Judgment database - UPDATE

I wrote about problems with the Alberta Courts Judgment Database in a July 25 post. The webmaster was responsive to the problem and had contact with myself and others at the firm letting use know that they were working on the problems. Today, I got some welcome news from Strater Patrick letting me know that the judgment database date sorting is working as it has in the past..

Thank you to all the long suffering technical folk who have to deal with problems like this.

Date sorting at the Alberta Courts Judgment database

Someone at the Alberta Courts is going to be very unhappy.  I was asked to write a letter to share how disappointed (stronger phrasing will likely be used) that the Alberta Courts Judgment Database is no longer applying their "recent First default to the Quick Search results. 

For those of you not in the know, the Quick Search function provides the previous 30 days of judgments and it often used by lawyers to review new case law.  Remember the days when you walked into the Alberta Law Libraries and looked at the recent cases pile on the side reference desk (in Edmonton). The Quick Search function is the virtual equivalent of this process - an important tool for lawyers.

Not only is the Quick Search function not applying the default sort order, this seems to be broken for all searching. The search template shows a Sort by option of Recent First by default, but the results are not matching that criteria.

Fast forward to this morning when I was asked "What were they thinking?"

A very good question I hope to find an answer to. Even better, a return to the previous - successful - functionality.

Government of Canada moves to electronic printing

A news release on July 5, 2013 shared that the Government of Canada Moves to E-Printing.

This move is billed as part of the government commitment to reducing costs and modernizing operations. The Procedures for Publishing give us an idea of how Government Documents will appear.

I sincerely hope that all government documents will be forever available through the Government of Canada Publications website. I hope that the government supports the crucial activities of the Depository Services Program.

I predict that this move will lead to more jobs for librarians in the private sector who will find interesting challenges locating Government of Canada Publications.

March/April LawNow Magazine

The March/April 2013 LawNow Magazine is now available. There is a particularly interesting article about Online Dispute Resolution.

The Latest at WorldLII

Thanks to a tip from Library Boy, I learned about some new offerings at WorldLII. Check out his post:

WorldLII Launches International Law Library

from Library Boy by Michel-Adrien

WorldLII (World Legal Information Institute) yesterday launched the International Law Library , a free online collection of decisions of International Courts and Tribunals, treaties and international agreements, and international law journals and law reform materials.

Acting on information - a Westlaw Canada bulletin

It is important to act on information.

With the conscripted assistance of Dave Stam, a civil litigator with Justice Canada, I did a very short session for the students at the Head Start program on memo writing and research output. A huge thank you to Dave who agreed on the spot, with no preparation and having never met me, to share with the students about what he expects to see in a research memo from the practitioners perspective.

Dave acted on the brief bit of information that students from his department were in the room, an opportunity was presented to share his expertise, and carrying out the proposed activity would not take much of his time.

I am glad I had a good example of acting on information when I got back to the office to see a customer alert from Carswell about Westlaw Canada. Carswell, very appropriately and in a timely manner, informed users about a glitch in one piece of functionality on their platform. It was already repaired, but they felt customers should be aware as it could have an effect on items that had been retained. Following Dave's good example, I acted on the information.

This notice went in our daily email bulletin to all members of the firm:

Westlaw Canada Notice: We received a notice that for a brief period, between the afternoon of Wednesday June 9 and the morning of Saturday June 12, there was a malfunction in the print, download, fax and email functions of Westlaw Canada. This resulted in omissions of quoted text in an undetermined number of case law documents.
This issue has been repaired and everyone who downloaded cases to worldox has been alerted. This malfunction affected printed cases as well which the library staff are unable to identify from our usage reports. Please double check the date stamp on any printed cases that you use that may have been retrieved during this time period. The Library staff are happy to re-gather these materials (at no cost) to the firm if needed.

I also did a quick check of our document management system and identified items that had been downloaded from Westlaw Canada and emailed a link to them with the message above to each person affected. It was pretty simple to do a creation date specific search of our client files with additional full text for

"end of document" & (westlaw or carswell or reuters)

to see if cases for the affected time period had been saved.

Several had and in each case users were glad to know of the problem. In one instance much of the material gathered was outside our subscription and the research support team at Carswell sent us fresh copies of everything we requested in a very short turn around time.

I really appreciated the customer alert. My confidence in a technology is always more inspired when problems are reported to customers. We all know things break and are fixed and I would rather know what and when so that I can act if necessary. I hope that other firms took action when they saw this notice from Carswell.