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Changes in Access to Electronic Resources

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The McGill Library is making important changes in the access to electronic resources.

On Wednesday, June 4, 2014, the electronic resources (e-books, e-journals, databases, open access resources) will be removed from the Classic Catalogue.

  • The Classic Catalogue will continue to contain all the items in our local collections, including print books and journals, DVDs, microform, etc.
  • E-resources will be removed from the following sub-catalogues: full, audio-visual and journal titles
  • The McGill Theses sub-catalogue will not be affected by this change, and will still contain both print and electronic materials.
  • eExams will not be affected by this change, and will continue to be available as they were before.
  • Course Reserves will still display e-resources on reserve for McGill courses.
  • You can continue to access all our e-resources through WorldCat.

On Monday, June 9, 2014 the eResearch Gateway will be taken off-line.

  • The eResearch Gateway was an alternate way of searching for articles, databases, and other electronic resources. This functionality is now provided for the most part by WorldCat and the Library’s subject guides.
  • The Law Subject guide includes all the legal databases to which the McGill Library is currently subscribing.
  • If you have used saved articles using the My Research feature, you’ll need to export those article references before June 9. You can find more information about how to export the articles here.

In June, our link old resolver (“Find It”) will be migrated to OCLC’s WorldCat Link Resolver service.

  • For the most part, the change in link resolver will happen automatically and will not require any intervention on your part.
  • If you use Google Scholar to search for articles, you will need to configure it to use the new WorldCat Link Resolver to access articles that are available through the Library. You can find the information about configuring the Google Scholar here.

If you have any questions regarding upcoming changes, please do not hesitate to contact any of the liaison librarians for Law.

Article: Peter W. Hogg, Canadian Constitutional Law.

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If you read only one book while at the Law school, which I hope is not the case :), it must have been the “Constitutional Law of Canada” by Peter W. Hogg.  His recent article published in the International journal of legal information, tells the story behind the creation of this most-cited book in decisions of the Supreme Court of Canada.

NEW Database: Investor-State LawGuide Database

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As of this month, the Nahum Gelber Law Library is subscribed to the Investor-State LawGuide Database. ISLG’s technology links you to the specific passages in arbitral decisions and awards where a tribunal discusses a particular legal instrument or prior arbitral decision. The database includes such features as Subject Navigator, Article Citator, Jurisprudence Citator, Terms & Phrases and Full-text search. All materials relevant to publicly available ICSID, NAFTA and ad hoc tribunal decisions are available in ISLG’s comprehensive document directory. These materials can be filtered in a variety of ways to enable you to obtain the research results you need.

To access the database, go: Law subject guide / Foreign legislation and cases / Arbitration.

Air & Space Research: Marketline Advantage database

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Marketline Advantage database provides access to case studies, company news, and company reports that contain market size, value, segmentation, shares, leading companies, forecast for each industry, including Aerospace and Defence. For the Aerospace and Defence industry, users can search and browse documents subdivided by subject categories, such as Aerospace Products and Parts Manufacturing, Space Programmes, Vehicle and Aircraft Electronics, etc.

To access the database, go: Law subject guide / Foreign legislation and cases / Air & Space.

NEW Database: Global Health and Human Rights Database

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Last fall, Lawyers Collective and the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University in Washington DC have launched the Global Health and Human Rights Database. The Database is a fully searchable free online database of more than 1000 judgments, constitutions and international instruments on the intersection between health and human rights. The Database is the first attempt to comprehensively make available health and human rights law from both common and civil law jurisdictions, and features case law and other legal documents from more than 80 countries and in 25 languages. It also provides 500 plain-language summaries and 200 original translations of case law previously unavailable in English.

To access the database, go: Law subject guide / Foreign legislation and cases / Human rights.

Exhibit in Honour of Professor Rod Macdonald

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As of this week, we have a new book exhibition in the Law Library. This display is themed to the symposium The Unbounded Level of the Mind: Rod Macdonald’s Legal Imagination that takes place at the Faculty of Law on 7-8 February 2014. The exhibit features a selection of the texts by Rod Macdonald, written during his career. To mirror the symposium, the exhibit showcases most of the texts that will be discussed over its course and is organized around six symposium’s themes: Kaleidoscopic Federalism, Producing Fairness, Pluralizing the Subject, The Priority of Distributive Justice, Contextualizing Governance, and Pursuing Virtue.

All the texts featured at the exhibit are available in the electronic format at the symposium’s webpage:  http://www.mcgill.ca/macdonald-symposium/texts

NEW Database: Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals

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Nahum Gelber Law Library is now subscribed on the Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals database. It provides you with the full text of the most important decisions, including concurring, separate and dissenting opinions. Distinguished experts in the field of international criminal law have commented the most important decisions of the ICTY, ICTR, The Special Court for Sierra Leone, The International Criminal Tribunal for Timor-Leste and the ICC. Annotated Leading Cases of International Criminal Tribunals is useful for students, scholars, legal practitioners, judges, prosecutors and defence counsel who are interested in the various legal aspects of the law of the ICTY, ICTR and other forms of international criminal adjudication.

To access the database, go: Law subject guide / Foreign legislation and cases / Human rights.

New Look for the Law Subject Guide

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During the holiday break, we migrated our subject guide to a new tabbed layout. We hope that this design that uses tabs instead of subheadings to divide the subsections will be more conducive to the resource discovery. It allows to avoid vertical scrolling and provides more visibility for the resources that were previously “buried” at the bottoms of the pages.

Parliament’s Historical Debates Available Online

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The Library of Parliament, in collaboration with Canadiana.org, is launching its Historical Debates of the Parliament of Canada digital portal.  The portal provides free public access to digital versions of the historical debates of the Parliament of Canada in both official languages.  It includes all published debates of both the Senate and the House of Commons from Parliament 1, Session 1 until coverage provided on the Parliament of Canada page.

Survival Guide to the Cite Guide :)

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Last two or three weeks (as usual on this time of year), there was number of students looking for help on how to cite the sources for their first memo. For their benefit, I decided to reiterate my last year’s not-totally-unsolicited advice on the matter.

  1. Ask a librarian for a help. We will not do or check your footnotes, but we will walk you through the maze of the Red Book (no offence meant) to make sure that the next time you will be comfortable to use it by yourself.  Do not be shy to come several times if you need more help, and please, please do not come 5 minutes before your paper is due – in this case, we can only commiserate with you.
  2. When your TL gives you a piece of paper, a pdf, or a photocopy of something, ask what this is, and from where it is coming from (book, website, encyclopaedia, etc.). You will save some precious minutes (or hours) later when you are pressed for time and have to finish your work by a deadline. It is quite unpleasant to discover suddenly that the TL’s piece of paper is a book chapter, and you have no slightest idea about the book title and/ or author.
  3. Do not wait until the last minute to make your footnotes. If you ‘cite while you write’, you will have your paper AND your footnotes ready, except for the final proofing, when you finish writing the last paragraph. If you leave all your footnotes to be done after you finish the paper, you will end up frantically trying to figure out where this or that quotation is coming from, or what all the supra(s) and idem(s) mean. Everybody works differently, but try at least once…
  4. Add some common sense and reasoning to the Red Book. Do not expect it to contain a correct form of footnote for every possible source. Red Book will not necessarily have an answer to your particular question. When you have something to cite, think about what rule fits the best the type of source that you have in hand.
    Read carefully the section to apply the rule, do not scan and skim the text.
  5. In short, to cite a source, proceed as follows:
  • READ General Rules section (optional after you know it by heart)
  • determine what it is that you have to cite
  • find the chapter corresponding to the type of your source (Jurisprudence for cases, Secondary Sources for books and journal articles, etc.)
  • find the section corresponding to the particular source that you have
  • READ this section
  • apply the rule to cite the source making analogies if necessary
  • repeat as needed:)