Category: Scotland

Scottish Law Librarians Group Book Festival event

From BBC News website: “Members of staff at the National Library of Scotland point to an extract taken from one of the first books printed in Scotland, which forms part of the 500 years of the Scottish Printed Word exhibition. Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.”

If you’re a member of the Scottish Law Librarians Group (SLLG), you’ll have already been sent your invite to this years event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
The SLLG likes to try and ensure that members get the maximum benefit from the group, and as last years Book Festival visit proved so popular, it’s been decided that this should become an annual jaunt.

So, this year, we’ve selected the following as (hopefully) being of interest to as many members as possible, and at a good time to allow everyone the chance to attend:

“Bill Bell, David Finkelstein & Alistair McCleery: Books and Society
Tue 19/08/2008
12:00 PM – 1:00 PM
As Scotland celebrates 500 years of printing, editors David Finkelstein, Bill Bell and Alistair McCleery reveal the remarkable contribution to publishing and literary culture made by Scotland over the last 120 years – a period covering momentous change in writing, publishing technology, bookselling, readership and, of course, book festivals.”

Tickets for this event for SLLG members will be paid for by the group, so it’s free, free, free!
The image above (I think) relates to this event too, as this talk supports the exhibition referred to.

You can download the Festival Brochure from the website.

SWOP meeting: "From Parliament Square to Holyrood – historical official publications online"

Belatedly writing up the SWOP meeting, which I posted info about here. Links to available presentations here.

This turned out to be a really useful and interesting event, even though it may have been aimed more at academics and researchers than anything else (it was only me and someone from a Council who weren’t academic staff).

  • “Parliament’s past online : a review of sources” Paul Seaward Director – History of Parliament Trust.

This part was full of interesting historical information, and background on UK Parliamentary materials development e.g House of Lords and House of Commons records were stored in different buildings, so a fire in 1834 that destroyed HofC records prior to that date had no effect on HofL records. Parliament Rolls and Statute Rolls are separate. Parliament Rolls of Medieval England (subscription service) and BOPCRIS (an HE and FE academics access only site). So, there’s sources, but you have to be an academic to view them, from the looks of it!

  • “From archive to internet: producing an online edition of the records of the pre 1707 Scottish Parliament” Gillian MacIntosh St Andrews University

A review of the background to the development of the Records of the Parliament of Scotland online. Highlighting the lovely option for parallel translations from old Scots, that can be viewed alongside their modern English translations. Noting that there’s now a citeable reference style for the old Acts (eg [1604/4/22], denoting year, month and number of the Acts), and original sources are given, unlike the previous printed edition, which is now known to be inaccurate and suffered from the editors personal bias!

  • “Prototyping Hansard” Robert Brook, UK Parliament

An un-official, ad-hoc project, working with the raw Hansard data and reusing it in various ways. It’s a very basic, non-prettified version of a website, but it allows users to search on tagged items to find all sorts of information on them, eg, by member name like Tam Dalyell. They specifically don’t work with the most current data, stopping at 2004.

I have to confess to tuning out slightly for the following presentations:

  • “Online Historical Population reports” Matthew Woollard – Project Director, Online Historical Reports Project.
  • “Digitisation of Parliamentary Texts at BOPCRIS” Dr Julian Ball, Project Manager, BOPCRIS
  • “ProQuest Parliamentary Papers” Rob Newman, Senior Editor, Proquest CSA

These were very definitely aimed at the academic sector, and researchers of population / history, and therefore not of particular use to me.

But overall, definitely an afternoon well spent – I have a far better understanding of where the historical parliamentary materials came from, why there’s gaps, why the printed collected Scottish Acts are unreliable, and now know about a funky online tool to play with Hansard! 😀

Why Web 2.0? The opportunities and challenges for the legal sector

I’ve foolishly been allowed to organise a training event for the Scottish Law Librarians Group, and if you’re a member of the SLLG, it’s free for you to attend, yay!

Why Web 2.0? The opportunities and challenges for the legal sector

You are cordially invited to a seminar which looks beyond the hype at the challenges and opportunities Web 2.0 provides for information professionals in the legal sector. James Mullan will explore some of the technologies that are currently available and provide practical examples of how these can be used within an Information Services unit. There will then follow a chance for those who wish to investigate these tools to experiment with them on the computers provided, and have informal discussions with James about any of the topics covered in his presentation.

James Mullan works as an Information Professional at a large city law firm and is an active blogger, owning the Running Librarian Blog. He is a well known Web 2.0 evangelist and administrates BIALL’s blog and Facebook profile. He has also spoken at numerous events including Knowledge Management for the Legal Profession and Online Information and has written widely on the subject of harnessing collective intelligence by means of Web 2.0 technologies…

The first half of the seminar is expected to take between 45 minutes to an hour, with computers and refreshments available for the following hour of the second half of the event.

Date and time: 3.30pm, Friday 20th June
Venue: Edinburgh Training Centre, St. Mary’s Street,
Edinburgh (location maps and directions available
from: http://www.edintrain.com/location.asp )
Cost: Free to SLLG members

Thanks to James for agreeing to make the trip up to the Frozen North!