Historical legal research is now even easier thanks to an updated legislation comparison tool from CanLII.
Users can now select two versions of an act from Federal and Provincial legislation to see what text has been changed between them. Simply click on “Versions”, choose two versions, and hit “Compare”.
Scroll through the text side by side to quickly note any differences. Text will be highlighted in red and green to show what has been removed and added.
The font and formatting of each act has also been standardized to make it easier to compare. CanLII also automatically hides any large sections of unchanged text, so scrolling and loading times are now quicker.
Try it out yourself, or learn more about this handy tool on the CanLII Blog.
Heinonline has made a couple of improvements to make searching and logging in easier.
The search box has been amalgamated into a single bar instead of split up into different categories. This will allow you to conduct a broader search in one step rather than multiple queries.
Don’t worry, the option to run a specific search is still there, it has just been integrated into the search bar with a drop down menu.
To learn more about how to use this feature, plus advanced search functions, visit this Heinonline Blog post.
For those of you that use the myHein feature, it is even easier now to log in by linking your Google account. If you are unfamiliar with myHein , it is a personal account you can use to create bookmarks, save queries, and customize your Heinonline experience. If you’re interested, see the user guide to get started.
Guest post byMelanie R. Bueckert, Legal Research Counsel – Manitoba Court of Appeal
I am very thankful for all of the excellent resources that the Great Library provides through our Law Society Member Portal. My gratitude has increased greatly during the pandemic, while I have been unable to access the law school’s library. While I often use HeinOnline to locate articles that I have already determined are relevant to my research, I hesitate to run searches of their databases, as the volume of results can be overwhelming. However, in at least two cases in the past few months, my research has been improved substantially by their “More Like This” feature. In case you haven’t used it yet, I will walk you through the very simple process.
Once you have located a relevant article in HeinOnline, look at the top of the document for the “More Like This” button. Click it. It will bring you to a list of results related to your article. If you find that they are not particularly helpful, you can tweak the “Interesting Words” weighting on the left-hand side of the screen or remove some of those words. You can also enter a new filtering term in the “Enter new term” box underneath the “Interesting Words”. You can also limit your results by date range.
According to HeinOnline:
More Like This uses a program which finds ‘interesting words’ in an article, as determined by an algorithm that analyzes the article’s text. …
More Like This compares all articles in HeinOnline and ranks them in order based on which articles’ interesting words are most similar to the first article. Results include the top 50 most relevant articles available in HeinOnline.
With the recent increase in working from home, or difficulties getting to the Great Library to use our print material, HeinOnline is a great resource for Canadian Federal and Provincial historical legislation.
Sometimes an article can be very tricky to track down. It might be from an obscure journal, or maybe from something old enough that no one carries it any more. That may require tracking down a print version hidden away in some library’s archives, but sometimes some creative searching online can provide surprising results.
Limit where you look
Sometimes too much is just as bad as not enough. If you find yourself searching for an article title on a web search engine you may get hundreds or thousands of results. Most of us will scan the first page, and maybe the second, but are quick to give up after that.
A lot of the time, articles will be published as a PDF, so limit your search to that file format by either using the advanced search function
Or use the limiter “filetype” in the search field.
Change where you are looking
Most articles are often published as part of a journal. That means you might limit your search to libraries or sites that have access to that publication. If you separate the article from the journal, you can look in unusual places that have already uploaded or published that article separate from its original publication.
When you browse the search results, try looking at academic websites. Again, you can use the advanced search, or use the limiter “site:” and limit to academic domains such as “.edu.” Sometimes universities publish their syllabi online and will link to any reading or documents for a course. Often they link to paywall sources, but it’s worth a look because when there is no online resource the organization may upload the document itself, or provide alternative sites.
Let someone do the looking for you
Those alternative sites may lead you to sites that may have already compiled or collected documents and journals you are looking for. If I haven’t found the specific article I am looking for, I may try to search by journal issue or volume. Article titles aren’t always indexed so once you’ve narrowed your search, you can widen it again when you’ve found a resource that is more specific to your interest.
There are a few popular sites like SSRN, but I am always stumbling upon other sites that provide other avenues of searching. These can often be open-access, but they may also have a soft paywall that requires signing up, or using a free trial.
Look out
The internet is an amazing resource but just like every other tool, it can be used to harm as well. A lot of sites use your google search to create a link that may look like exactly what you are looking for but may contain a virus or spam. Be careful what you are downloading. Watch for unusual file types such as .exe or suspicious looking sites.
As an information professional I am an advocate for open information, but I am always mindful of copyright restrictions. Fair use allows some leeway when sharing articles and texts, but it may not always be clear where that leeway ends.
Some sites such as Sci-Hub might be a bit of a grey area, and I tend to err on the side of caution, so use reputable sites as much as you can.
Bonus tip
One piece of advice I haven’t used much but is worth a shot is contacting the author directly. Some authors will provide their articles for free upon request. So if they are a contemporary author, try giving them a search on LinkedIn or at their organization.
Of course sometimes no matter how hard you look, you just can’t find what you are looking for. Sometimes you need a fresh pair of eyes. Even if you try thinking outside the box, everyone has their own way of looking at things. So ask someone else to give it a gander, they may be able to see things from a different perspective. They can be colleagues, or professional listservs, or even your friendly library.
Interested in what were the most viewed decisions of the past year? Take a look at the most searched for, and most accessed, cases on CanLII with their Top Ten Accessed Cases on CanLII from 2020.
More Manitoba content has been added to CanLII with the Manitoba Annual Statutes. Statutes from 1988 to present are now part of the CanLII database which means you can now use these with CanLII’s features such as creating alerts, finding citing cases, and saving documents to Lexbox, Lexum’s “Online legal research workspace”.
Manitoba content on CanLII now includes decisions from Manitoba Reports, Manitoba Reports (2nd) series and the Revised Manitoba Statutes from 1987.
The Manitoba Law Library would like to acknowledge with gratitude that we are situated on Treaty One Territory, the traditional lands of the Anishinaabe, Cree and Dakota peoples, and the homeland of the Métis Nation.
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