A new acronym, NATIS, has officially entered our professional langugage. It stands for National Information System and signals nothing less than an all-out attempt to cope, on a national, regional and global level, with the staggering problems of information gathering and control on “Spaceship Earth”.

The present reporter has been associated with the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (IFLP) from its inception in 1959, first as Assistant Editor and, for the last five years, als General Editor; his remarks will be confined to matters of which he has had direct experience in his work for the IFLP.

The basic need for unification and clarification of technical terminology is probably to be met with in all branches of learning. The lawyers might form an exception to this since legal science by its very nature is, to a very large extent, a conceptual science. It is worth while, nevertheless, to examine the question whether a uniform legal thesaurus for the legal systems in the area in which German is spoken is necessary; that is to say, a thesaurus which could, among other things, contribute to a unification of legal terminology. The following report should not be understood as a contribution to the basic problems of a thesaurus as a documentation language of a special kind. Those considerations and questions will, however, be briefly examined which could arise in connection with the compilation and development of a special legal thesaurus.

The rapid development of reprographic technology, and the explosion of requests for copies of library materials have turned the reproduction by libraries of works protected by copyright into a major problem both from a practical and from the legal point of view. The libraries as the traditional distributors of these works are somehow caught in the middle of the two groups with their conflicting interests which are colliding under their roof: the proprietory interests of authors and publishers in the printed word, and the users’ need for information and free access to it. Both groups expect the library to uphold their interests and to serve their needs.

Since my last report in this Journal (vol. 1, no. 1, March, 1973, pp. 9-15) quite a few things have happened in the law library field in Australia. I shall deal with the more tangible items first.

Library surveys, irrespective of their range of inquiry and specificity of information sought, can turn into incredibly taxing and even hazardous undertakings as those who have had the temerity to participate in them can vouch from personal experience. The primary objectives of such surveys consist of collecting relevant information from several similar library sources and the subsequent presentation of such information in a comprehensive and accurate manner. Unfortunately, a considerable degree of divergence exists between ideal surveys and the real world in which they are expected to be conducted.

An outline is given of the various types of law libraries in Australia, a survey of law publications, a review of law library technology, and a brief survey of overseas legal developments which may influence trends in relation to collections, technical innovations and information retrieval in Australia.

Before considering the possible state of law and law library technology in the 1980's, I want to mention briefly some of the trends to be seen in Australia today in legal literature and the organization of legal institutions.

After some first impulses had been received from learned writers, preparatory work for the use of electronic data processing (EDP) in overcoming the difficulties in obtaining information in the legal system was taken up in the Federal Ministry of Justice as early as in 1967.