Searching for journal articles

John Papadopoulos, a new contributor to Slaw.ca recently wrote a great reminder about the ability to find Canadian Law Journals on Commercial Databases. In speaking about the unique collections that each of the commercial publishers offer and the dearth of crossover, John reminds us:

if you are doing journal research and want to know what has been written on a specific topic use an index - full-text searching is (still) not enough.

In addition to journal indexes, I want to remind you of the Custom Google search that Ted Tjaden created. By visiting this search site, you can search Canadian law firm websites, blogs & journals.

Remember to look everywhere - or delegate to the library staff to search for you.

Digital Archives

I am comforted this morning by an email cross posted to a number of email list services. The message that digital content specific to my industry is being preserved is something that is too important not to share.

December 1, 2010, Bloomington, IN – Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) and Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) are pleased to announce that they have partnered to create the Law Review Preservation Program: the first comprehensive long-term archiving solution for law reviews published online.

With funding and support from LIPA, law reviews published on bepress’s Digital Commons platform can be automatically archived in CLOCKSS, an international dark archive for long-term preservation. Law reviews will join thousands of journals in CLOCKSS, from publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, and Nature, as well as all Berkeley Electronic Press journals. The first law schools to join the program are American University, archiving American University International Law Review, The Modern American, and Sustainable Development Law and Policy, and Boston College, archiving Boston College Law Review.

Margaret Maes, Executive Director of LIPA, said “We are pleased to support the preservation of electronic law review content in a dark archive through this partnership with bepress and CLOCKSS. This is another step in our efforts to find long-term solutions to the problem of digital preservation of legal information, and we hope that Digital Commons subscribers will take advantage of the program by making their law reviews available through the Digital Commons.”

Content in CLOCKSS is preserved with award-winning LOCKSS technology. In the event that a law review is no longer available from any university or publisher, it will be triggered from CLOCKSS under an open-access Creative Commons license, guaranteeing that law review articles will remain in the public domain forever. The CLOCKSS archive is distributed across twelve geographically and geopolitically diverse archive nodes, located at major libraries across North America, Europe, and Asia, and is governed by the community of participating libraries and publishers.

Berkeley Electronic
Press CEO and President Jean-Gabriel Bankier said, “We feel strongly that law reviews deserve the same state-of-the-art preservation as all digital publications, and are very pleased to partner with LIPA and CLOCKSS on a program that brings preservation within the reach of all law reviews.”

About LIPA

The Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) is a non-profit consortium of academic, federal, state and public law libraries working on projects to preserve print and electronic legal information. It provides the opportunity for libraries to work collaboratively on preservation projects at lower cost and to take advantage of the partnerships created by the organization.

http://www.aallnet.org/committee/lipa

About Berkeley Electronic Press

Founded by professors in 1999, Berkeley Electronic Press (bepress) publishes peer-reviewed electronic journals and develops software for the next generation of scholarly publishing. The bepress journals collection, ResearchNow, redefines what scholarly journals can do today, with fast and high quality peer review at sustainable prices. The bepress open-access institutional repository platform, Digital Commons, is the world's leading hosted IR, featuring an innovative suite of publishing and software services that empowers scholarly communities to showcase and share their works for maximum impact.

http://www.bepress.com/

About CLOCKSS

CLOCKSS (Controlled LOCKSS) is a not for profit joint venture between the world’s leading scholarly publishers and research libraries whose mission is to build a sustainable, geographically distributed dark archive with which to ensure the long-term survival of Web-based scholarly publications for the benefit of the greater global research community.

http://www.clockss.org/

My sincere personal thanks to all those in academic and public institutions (and others) around the world who work toward preservation of knowledge.

Law reviews in print

An interesting article from Inside Higher Ed on the decline of print subscriptions to law reviews crossed my inbox today.
The article points to a paper posted at SSRN. The paper discusses the declining print subscriptions and interested methodology used to collect this statistic in the US. It also says:

On the other hand, while our tables do show declines in law‐review circulation, they do not account for any rise in web‐based consumption that might roughly correspond to, and at least partly explain, those declines. Westlaw, Lexis, HeinOnline, Findlaw, etc. — and more recently even the law reviews themselves — have made it easy to read journals without a subscription. Perhaps the net consumption of law reviews is actually on the rise, along with their influence and status. Who knows?

Here at Field, we still subscribe to some Canadian law reviews in print. We also have access to law reviews through WestlaweCarswell's "Law Reports and Journals" search template. Journals and law reviews are available from LexisNexis. All members of the Alberta Bar have access to HeinOnline by walking in to their closest Courthouse library, and the Internet has tons of commentary - not necessarily peer-reviewed, but still a valid source of commentary.

Unlike some of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed article I think that looking at new law review articles for emerging trends and historical law review articles for a picture of how the law evolved is a useful research method for practitioners. What do you think?

This topic is also covered at Slaw.ca