CanLII Introduces Tables of Contents for Legislation Databases

As of September 24, CanLII's statute and regulation databases for BC, Ontario and Quebec now include automatically-generated Tables of Contents. CanLII promises that the same soon will follow for other jurisdictions. The blog sets out some details:

Statutes and regulations from British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec have been republished with automatically generated tables of contents and HTML anchors to parts' headings, sections and subsections.

The tables of content that were already available at the federal level were also improved for better readability.

You will navigate more easily within legislative texts from these four databases. You will also be able to establish hyperlinks to specific parts, sections and subsections. For instance, a link to subsection 54(3.1) of the federal Broadcasting Act, S.C. 1991, c. 11 can be established with the following URL:

http://www.canlii.org/en/ca/laws/stat/sc-1991-c-11/latest/sc-1991-c-11.html#sec54subsec3.1

This feature will be implemented to other legislative databases in the coming months.

The announcement is on the CanLII blog.

Thanks to Courthouse Libraries BC for the heads up.

New CanLII Blog

An interesting development I just posted over on Slaw ... CanLII news items seem to now be driven via their new blog!

And for those so inclined, there's an RSS feed also available.

New CANLII Beta Upgrades to RSS

First let me say, I'm really impressed with the new CANLII Beta. Not sure on the interface yet, but they've taken a big step forward by adding a huge list of RSS feeds.

My only additional request would be to implement search feeds prior to launch. I want to be able to monitor new cases or legislation that match keyword phrases - check out Google News as a practical example. Users shouldn't have to read every decision if they don't want to. We need RSS technology that will save people time, and search feeds would be one way CANLII could further improve this world class product.

That's my feedback. Send yours to beta@canlii.org