University of Otago, Law Library Blog

Welcome finalists!

2012-02-28T10:44:00.004+13:00

Welcome back.We hope that by the end of the year, you will have mastered enough basic research skills to feel confident about entering the law profession (if that's what you want to do). We also want to develop the idea that law librarians are your allies, both now and in the future.So, if you're not feeling confident about independent legal research, sign up for a repeat database tutorial. If

Welcome third-years!

2012-02-28T09:41:00.007+13:00

Welcome back!If you're starting the research side of the Laws 498 programme this year, you'll be in the library for some library-based exercises and tutorials.There are sign-up forms at the Law Library desk forthe LexisNexis tutorial - 50 minutes, in the Law Library seminar room on the 6th floorthe NZ database tutorial - 100 minutes, also in the Law Library seminar roomthe Exercise 2 workshop (do

Welcome second-years!

2012-02-28T09:22:00.003+13:00

And congratulations for getting into Law School.We hope you'll get into the Law Library as well. You don't need to do much independent research this year but we still have a range of useful things, includingClose Reserve material - search the Catalogue's Reserve menu by course code to see what's on Reserve for your courses this yearlaw textbooks - great for getting an overview, and you can take

LexisNexis NZ's TLC

2012-02-21T13:48:00.002+13:00

LexisNexis NZ has just unveiled a new site full of useful teaching and learning resources for the LexisNexis NZ site. It's called TLC (for Training, Learning, Consultancy) and it includes a series of iKnowledge Bursts (90-second how-to videos) and a series of more in-depth iKnowledge tutorials. Topics include legislation, commentary, downloading, forms and precedents. The how-to stuff on

Hansard

2012-02-13T10:52:00.002+13:00

Hansard is now online within 2.5 hours. Find out more at the New Zealand Parliament site.

postgraduate workshops

2012-02-10T14:25:00.003+13:00

The Library is running a series of workshops for postgrads. You can sign up for one or for all. And they will be repeated in semester 2.Find out more and register here.

changing how we change things

2012-02-09T11:22:00.003+13:00

As of now, the Parliamentary Counsel Office is adopting new terminology for describing amendments, along with a general trend from passive descriptions ("is amended by adding") to active commands ("insert"). Worth a look.

Evernote's PDFs

2012-01-31T14:19:00.002+13:00

I'm a big fan of Evernote as a research tool to use alongside EndNote. They are both databases. Evernote is good for keeping track of the messy stuff you start with, whereas EndNote is good for the accurate detail you need at the finish.Evernote has just improved its PDF functionality: Search results will be highlighted inside of PDFs, you can easily drag PDFs out of Evernote, and you can even

lexis is back

2012-01-11T09:32:00.000+13:00

Links from the Library's pages seem to be working again.

New-look LegalTrac

2012-01-09T13:31:00.000+13:00

The more web-like LegalTrac is here. So what have we got? Open it now and have look. But first, a reminder about what LegalTrac does. It indexes journals related to law, since 1980ish. Although it has some full text, it is chiefly bibliographic, based on a beautifully crafted set of subject headings. So you use it to work out what you want, and get the article somewhere else, usually via the

A lexis web-like experience

2012-01-09T11:03:00.003+13:00

We're having problems accessing the lexis.com site - that's big Lexis, not the NZ site. There is a Plan B, which involves going directly to lexis.com and signing in with a special username and password. We can give you that special username and password, but we can't publish it to the blog, so you'll have to ask. Sorry!

A more web-like experience

2012-01-05T10:56:00.000+13:00

LegalTrac is changing tomorrow, to deliver you a more web-like experience. And when I say LegalTrac, I mean the whole Gale/InfoTrac family, which includes Academic OneFile and Expanded Academic. This is mainly a look-and-feel thing - look out for hot topics, popular article links, intuitive 'search assist' features. But it will affect people who have set up personal accounts with Gale: