"I've got this weird citation and don't know where to look: 'The Prince George, 3 Hagg. 376'"

One of my favorite moments on the reference desk is when someone asks for help finding a case from the English Reports. An amazing feat of legal publishing, the English Reports reproduce over 100,000 early English cases from the years 1220 to 1873, many of which continue to be cited in Canadian cases.

We're lucky in the Vancouver courthouse library, as we have three options for clients: the print English Reports, HeinOnline, and CommonLII (the Commonwealth Legal Information Institute). In the last two years, both HeinOnline and CommonLII have added the full reprint of the English Reports to their mix of databases. Now that those sources have had some time to establish themselves (and for us to use them), I thought a comparison might be helpful.

To test out the two sources, I ran three types of searches on each:

• Where I have the name of the case only: "I'm looking for Saunders v. Vautier"
• Where I have the citation only: "I have a citation I don't recognize: 8 Co. Rep. 132a"
• Where I have a keyword or two but not much else: "I know there’s an old English case that had a great quote about the defence of fair comment in a defamation case, something about the comments being in a fair spirit"

Coverage

Both HeinOnline and CommonLII feature all 176 volumes of the English Reports. The full text of all 124,000 plus cases can be searched on both sources. No difference there.

Search Experience

Both HeinOnline and CommonLII handled the case name search brilliantly. Each has a fairly easy way to specifically search by case name (HeinOnline's is a little better, but both sources can do this). The Saunders case was the first result for each.

For the citation search, both sources struggled. I thought HeinOnline would have an edge, as they have a dropdown option that allows a citation search. In fact, they have two dropdown options: one for an English Reports citation, and another for a "nominative citation" (the original report citation, such as our example "8 Co. Rep. 132a"). But neither citation option turned up our result in the first 25 results. Nor did a keyword search. A phrase search turned up 0 results. CommonLII didn't fare much better. Finally, I thought the "a" in the page number might be messing things up. Sure enough, pulling out the "a" from the citation, CommonLII returned the case, Turnor's Case, as the first result. The same strategy on HeinOnline returned the case as the 12th result. So far, still more or less a draw.

It was with the keyword search where I thought HeinOnline might really dominate. I decided on a proximity search:

• fair /10 spirit and "fair comment"

This approach worked well on both sources. In fact, I was totally impressed with CommonLII, where the quote I was looking for was in the first result, Hedley v. Barlow (1865), 176 ER 541. A nice win for proximity searching. On HeinOnline, the case was sixth in the result list. One feature on HeinOnline that really shines with this kind of search is that in their results list, you can view the matching text pages, showing the search terms highlighted.

Features

Speaking of features, HeinOnline does have an edge there. HeinOnline delivers really solid relevancy results. Their PDFs of the original reports are crisp, very readable on screen, and print out great.

That said, CommonLII totally held its own in this quick comparison. Searches are fast, it supports both simple searching and more complex types of searches, and you can slice and dice search results in many ways. CommonLII is a great option for finding cases from the English Reports, particularly given that it's free and accessible anywhere.

In a Vancouver Law Librarian Blog post highlighting Gowlings' 2010 Trendwatch Report, which uses video to present 5 of the 6 legal trend items, Steve Matthews comments "I can't help but think this is going to be a big year for video."

I can't help but agree!  For example, just last week Slaw featured several posts that discuss online delivery of multimedia content to the legal community including:

• Non-Print Guides to Legal Research

• The LCO and e-Learning

• E-Learning Changing the Face of Law

• A comment by Daniel Poulin pointing out that the Supreme Court case Canada (Prime Minister) v. Khadr, 2010 SCC 3 includes a link to video content in paragraph 7.

Courthouse Libraries BC has recently introduced two new videos of potential interest to the legal community.  These are "How To" videos that demonstrate how to use the new Clicklaw HelpMap and how (and why) to set up an account on the Courthouse Libraries BC website.  

Here's our video demonstrating the top 5 things you can do on the Clicklaw HelpMap (on , embedded below):

And here's our video demo on how to create an account on our website in 90 seconds or less plus the 3 main benefits of creating a website account (on , embedded below - also available in larger format on our website):

We're increasingly convinced that video can be a very effective format for online instruction and have more video content in the works for 2010.  If you have any feedback on our new videos, please let us know.

The Law Society of BC has provided us with an audio file of Self-Governance as a Necessary Condition of Constitutionally Mandated Lawyer Independence in British Columbia, a speech by Gordon Turriff, QC.

Mr Turriff gave this speech on September 17, 2009 at the Conference of Regulatory Officers, Perth, Australia, during his year as President of the Law Society.   

To listen to the speech, download the MP3 
(Right click the link - Save Link or Target As...).  12.6 MB (1 hr 10 min)

The text of the speech is also available on the Law Society website (PDF, 28 pages).