By Jennifer Walker

The CCLA Library would like your feedback, and we’re not above giving away Starbucks gift cards to get it!

We’ve put together a very short survey for you to answer – just five questions about our library services. If you’d like a chance at winning one of two gift cards for Starbucks, just leave your name and contact information at the bottom of the survey. If you’d rather remain anonymous, we’d still love your feedback – you can just leave the contact information area empty. Unfortunately, you can’t win a gift card, but we might just have a chocolate treat for you as thanks if you stop by the library. The survey will be open until November 19, 2010. We’ll be letting the two lucky respondents know they’ve won on the following Monday!

With this survey, we’d like to hear more from Ottawa-area legal professionals about what they like about the library, which of our products and services they use, and any improvements we can make. With the results, we hope to better tailor our library service and collection for today’s legal community, and make the CCLA Library your first stop for legal research.

We thank you very much for taking the time to fill out this survey, and good luck!

To take the survey, please click here.

By Jennifer Walker

While the rest of the CCLA staff members are busy with preparations for both our Criminal Law and Civil Litigation Conferences at the Montebello, we librarians are gearing up for a conference of our own. Katie and I will be in Toronto this coming Thursday and Friday for an annual conference for Ontario courthouse librarians. This session is a chance for us to meet with the other librarians in our system (the same librarians that so graciously lend us books when you need them!), as well as a wonderful dinner at Osgoode Hall. This year, Katie and I will be delivering a presentation on the new CCLA website, which includes this blog, our Twitter account, and our Conference Papers Database. Amanda will be here while we’re out of the library (she has an amazing professional development workshop next month, don’t worry!), so you can check with her for reference assistance.

Speaking of the CCLA website, we couldn’t be more thrilled about two new developments. The first is the aforementioned Conference Papers Database. After some considerable behind the scenes work, we’ve now made it possible to search the database without logging into the website. If you’d like access to the PDF files contained, you’ll still need to be a CCLA member and log-in, but for a quick browse to see just how many great papers we have filed away, you can do that easily and quickly. Find it under the “Library” tab of the website, or click here.

The second project we’re excited about is this very blog. We gave hosting the blog on the CCLA website the ol’ college try, but in the end, Katie and I were just not thrilled with the results. And so, hopefully within the next week or two, we’ll be moving everything over to our brand new blog! We’ve seen the design prototype from our website designers, and it looks fantastic. The new blog will be built on a WordPress platform (which is much, much easier to use for blogging than this website, and will make doing all manner of “blog things” easier). Stayed tuned for this change – we think you’ll love it.