Bruce hangs with CanLII crew at Canada’s legal 411 crib

Since he’s in town for the dg.o conference in Montreal this week, LII director Tom Bruce is taking the opportunity to visit old friends at CanLII. CanLII was the first “namesake” organization to adopt the LII name in the mid-90’s, and has grown into the definitive open-access national law resource for Canada. It’s relied on by all Canadian lawyers — who, incidentally, support the service through fees collected directly by their Bar Association.Bruce will be giving a small seminar for the CanLII staff. He plans to talk about the relationship between repositories that are relatively rich in subject-specific metadata — like the LII and CanLII — and search engines of general application, like Google. The trick is to figure out how to provide a seamless and enriched search process for people who first access our web sites via the large public search engines, but could then enjoy faster and more accurate searching using localized, specialized search. It is unlikely, however, that a sharp and curious crew like the CanLII folks will stick to the topic — an exploration that will be fun, educational, and productive for all involved.