Lexis trainer here Wed 6 April

Trish Andre will be here next Wednesday, offering free 50-minute training sessions on LexisNexis NZ and lexis.com.
It's a good chance to see what the Lexis databases can do for you, and what a Lexis expert can do with the databases.
Available times: 11am and 12 noon.
Place: Law Library seminar room (6th floor).
Sign up at the Law Library Desk.

EndNote clinic

We're offering an EndNote clinic aimed at helping you get started with EndNote.
Pretty much everything you need to know is on the EndNote for NZLSG mindmap so have a look at that first. But the mindmap is a bit confusing, so if you want help with customising EndNote for the New Zealand Law Style Guide, come to the EndNote clinic: Law Library seminar room (6th floor) Friday 1st April, 11 o'clock.
If you have EndNote on your laptop, bring it with you.

The art of EndNote

We're running a couple of sessions for anyone interested in using EndNote and the New Zealand Law Style Guide. Not exactly training so much as the art of the possible, to help you decide whether EndNote is worth it. My guess is that for anyone doing research at LLB Hons level or above, it is worth it.
Interested? Come along to the Law Library seminar room (6th floor, but access is through the main library entrance on the 8th floor) -

• Thursday 10 March at 9 o'clock; or
  

• Thursday 24 March at 10 o'clock (repeat session)
  

If neither of those times work for you, let me know and I can arrange something to suit.

Legal System tours

Next week we'll be seeing a lot of Legal System students in the Library, as they all get a mini-tour as part of their first tutorial.
It can be a bit chaotic, especially if there is more than one tutorial group here at a time. So just to be clear, here is what we'd like you to know:

• You're all welcome!
• We have sound recordings of the Legal System lectures - though there seems to be a slight hiccough with those at the moment - hope to have it sorted soon.
• We have staplers and printers and photocopiers, all near the Desk.
• The stuff behind the Desk is the Reserve collection - stuff that can be borrowed for a couple of hours at a time. You can find out what is on Reserve for Legal System (or any other course) via the Course Reserve tab of the library catalogue .
• You can find out more about the library via the Law Subject Guide.
• The best way to learn how to use the Law Library is to ask - at the Desk. That applies to all law students.

Summon old, summon new

Introducing Summon, the new widget that sits at the top of the Library's homepage. It's a database aggregator, meaning that it searches across a host of databases - the library catalogue, and lots of full-text databases. Which means that it doesn't really matter if you are looking for a book or an article - it should find either.
Definitely worth a look, though it often happens that the major legal publishers aren't included in these one-size-fits-all sorts of deals.
I tried putting it through its paces with our standard search: material on Lange v Atkinson. Simply typing: lange and atkinson got a huge result, full of authors called Atkinson and weird medical tests, often cited in German articles, that somehow included Lange. Second attempt was "lange v atkinson" - so, searching for an exact phrase. Much better - 7 hits, all of which were relevant, roughly half of which were for books. Compare this to a LegalTrac search - also 7 hits, but none of them the same as the Summon ones. Compare this to Linx - 35 hits (that's for articles).
And then I tested it with one of the Laws 498 questions, looking for articles or casenotes on the 1964 Rookes v Barnard case. Again, I searched for it as an exact phrase. Didn't really expect to find much but there were 113. At least the first few seemed relevant. A lot of them seemed to come from HeinOnline.
So, it's a new toy. Worth playing with, but don't throw away the old ones yet, especially if you are looking for New Zealand material, or primary material.