LegalAve - Alberta family law information

Marsha Guthrie, Manager, Implementation and Partnerships with the Alberta Legal Information Society and Julie Rainey of Alberta Law Libraries for sending the following my way:

New free website for Albertans dealing with family law issues: LegalAve

LegalAve is a free website that brings together existing public legal information under a single virtual "roof" to help people in Alberta dealing with family law issues such as separation and divorce, child support, custody, guardianship, parenting time, partner/spousal support, property division, family violence, and more. The plain language website describes the law in Alberta, the process to follow (such as court forms and court hearings), and common questions about family law issues. LegalAve also has general information about navigating the legal system, including out-of-court resolution options, working with a lawyer, community legal resources, and legal aid. The "Guided Pathway" feature allows users to answer a series of questions about their legal issue and be directed only to the information that applies to them.

Visit legalave.ca as a starting point for family law resources in Alberta.

The website was created by the Alberta Legal Information Society (ALIS), and links to resources from organizations such as the Centre for Public Legal Education Alberta, Alberta Courts, Legal Aid Alberta, Native Counselling Services of Alberta, Calgary Legal Guidance, Student Legal Services of Edmonton, and many more. All resources are reviewed and approved for accuracy and currency by the ALIS staff lawyer.

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.

Wolfram Alpha

Don't just be a googler. The wonderful 3 Geeks and a Law Blog has a great post today about 10 things you can do with the Wolfram-Alpha search engine.

I have written about Wolfram Alpha and time sheets, others at Slaw.ca have written about using the site for generating passwords, and one Slawyer was bold enough to ask if it might make Google obsolete.

Wolfram Alpha is a Computational Knowledge Engine. Check it out.

Improvements to SSRN

SSRN - the Social Sciences Research Network is a host site for in publication and published academic content - including some really great legal articles. I am happy to share this note that came from SSRN today:

SSRN's CITEREADER™ REFERENCE AND CITATION PROJECT

We have been working on extracting references from all SSRN papers for 5 years as part of the CiteReader™ project that SSRN has undertaken with our development firm, ITX Corp. We have created a system to extract references and footnotes from PDF files on SSRN and to have that extracted data proofread by human beings. While this project is not yet complete, we are now announcing the release of over 6.7 million references extracted from the reference sections of over 182,000 papers on the SSRN site as well as over 4.2 million citations that we have linked to SSRN papers.

– The references from each SSRN paper (where we have been able to extract them) can be found on the REFERENCES tab on the public abstract page for each paper.
– The citations we have matched to each SSRN paper are available on the CITATIONS tab on the public abstract page for the paper.
– These reference links provide an excellent way for any reader to go back in the literature in any area, and the citation links provide an excellent way to go forward in the literature.

Data on the Current State of SSRN's CiteReader™ Project

– Papers with Resolved References: 182,645 out of the 270,109 full text papers on SSRN
– Total References Resolved: 6,689,847
– SSRN Papers with Resolved Citations: 180,339
– Total Citation Links between the Cited and the Citing Paper: 4,277,354
– Papers with Resolved Footnotes: 60,721 (we are giving footnote extraction priority to papers with no reference section)
– Total Extracted Footnotes: 6,899,585

NOTE: References in those papers on SSRN that do not have a Reference section have not been fully extracted as yet. We are working on this. These papers (primarily law papers) have their references in footnotes. This means that citations from law papers are currently dramatically undercounted in SSRN citation statistics.

SSRN is now extracting footnotes from all papers while giving processing priority to those papers with no reference section. We have extracted over 6.9 million footnotes from over 60,000 papers with no Reference sections thus far. These footnotes and the references we extract from them will also be appearing in tabs on SSRN's abstract pages. SSRN is now perfecting the algorithms for extracting references from these footnotes. The undercounting of citations from and to law papers will be resolved over the next year as our algorithms are perfected and references from papers with no reference section are extracted from footnotes and linked to the papers being cited.

Sincerely,

Michael C. Jensen
Chairman
Social Science Research Network

CanLII subject query RSS feeds and other search improvements

Back in January I wrote a Tip at the (then) newly launched Slaw Tips blog titled Monitoring a case law subject with CanLII. There were a lot of great comments on the tip. I also heard that CanLII was working on a built in solution to subject Query RSS feeds.

I am extremely pleased to pass on the news that CanLII has made some improvements to their search tools this week and Subject Query RSS feeds is one of them.

Way to go CanLII. Hat tip to Steve Matthews and Susannah Tredwell for tweeting this.

Along with faster results rendering CanLII has also added the ability to more specifically target your hit results based on the query.

Thank you to CanLII for the innovations and for the fabulous example of what a well organized and reasonably funded free access to the law movement can do in 10 short years.

Cool Google Gadgets

Today, the Google search page image has a playable Pac Man. To Quote the tweet that came across my feed:

mike_elgan Playable PacMan on http://www.google.com is easily the coolest thing Google has ever done.

Some of the other cool - for work productivity - things that have come out of Google lately:

iGoogle - adding gadget boxes to personalize a Google start page, including tweet streams and my Google Reader RSS feeds:



Searching for US case law with jurisdiction filtering at Google Scholar (advanced search)

The modified Google Accounts page which lets you jump off to things like Buzz and Wave:

And the latest thing that I just noticed (probably old news, but new to me)...Web history

From the page:

All the web sites you visit, at your fingertips.

• View your web activity. You know that great web site you saw online and now can't find? With Web History, you can.
• Search the full text of pages you've visited. Web History allows you to search across the web pages, images, videos and news stories you've viewed.
• Get personalized search results and more. Web History helps deliver search results based on what you've searched for and which sites you've seen.

Web History relies on Google Toolbar to associate the web pages you visit with your Google Account. See the Web History and Toolbar Privacy Policies. Learn more."

Web history could be used by individuals to track research projects, to search across web pages you have visited, and to track your research sources.

Most of these tools require a Google Account, which also lets you deal with privacy settings.