Big changes are underway at the CCLA Library with regard to our online catalogue. It was in 1990 that the CCLA replaced the old card catalogue with an online system, as announced in the newsletter below. Sorry to everyone who wants the actual old card catalogue for their home – it’s long gone!

From the August 1990 CCLA Bulletin

From our understanding, this was the first courthouse library catalogue in the province. Go us! In time, however, the Law Society’s Great Library catalogue (Advocat) came into being, and more recently, their Infolocate search engine, which looks through library holdings for every courthouse library in Ontario (including the CCLA) *and* the online CPD materials prepared by the Law Society.

Due to required software and hardware upgrades at the CCLA, it was time to decide what to do with our now redundant catalogue. We have made the call to sunset our dear old catalogue in favour of the admittedly far superior Great Library catalogue. We’ve updated the links on our website and in-library computers.

Some much better features of the Great Library catalogue software that CCLA Library users will enjoy:

  • Fuzzy searching: You don’t have to spell everything exactly right to get results. This was a huge drawback of our old in-house catalogue
  • Tables of contents: Lots of the entries for texts books or looseleafs will have a table of contents in the item record. You can look at what’s in a resource without leaving your computer.
  • Law Society of Ontario CPD materials: When searching the catalogue, you’ll also pull up hits for individual PDFs of relevant conference papers from LSO CPD.

Please Note: Selecting the CCLA Library

When you access Infolocate, the default is to search all of the Ontario courthouse libraries.

If you wish to limit this to just Ottawa, select Carleton County in the drop down  menu:

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