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The Emergence of Professional Law Librarianship and the Professional Law Librarian: the History of BIALL in Context

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2019

Guy Holborn
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Abstract

Guy Holborn revisits the research he carried out in preparing the chapter on law libraries from 1850 to 2000 in the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. Much of the material he gathered was not included in the chapter as published for reasons of space. Drawing from both the previously published chapter and the unpublished material, he selects four themes relevant to BIALL in its 50th anniversary year: legal education and law libraries, the development of law firms and their information services, the content of law libraries and the information needs of the profession, and the emergence of the professional law librarian.

Keywords

legal educationlaw librarianshiplaw librarianslegal information managersBIALL
Type
BIALL’s 50th Anniversary: A Celebration
Information
Legal Information Management , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , June 2019 , pp. 80 - 87
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2019. Published by British and Irish Association of Law Librarians 

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References

Footnotes

1 Holborn, G., “Lawyers and their libraries” in Black, A. and Hoare, P. (eds.), The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland. Vol 3: 1850–2000 (Cambridge, 2006), 453–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reprint here some parts of the chapter. The footnotes follow the citation style of the book not the usual style of this journal.

2 Select Committee on Legal Education, Report and minutes of evidence, Parliamentary Papers (1846) vol. 10, 224 (H.C. 686).

3 Abel-Smith, B. and Stevens, R., Lawyers and the courts: a sociological study of the English legal system (London, 1967), 54Google Scholar.

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8 “The Library of the Middle Temple”, Law Magazine and Law Review 7 (1859), 82.

9 The Royal Commission on Legal Services (Chairman: Sir Henry Benson), Final report, Cmnd 7648 (London, 1979), para 32.13.

10 Abel-Smith and Stevens, Lawyers and the courts, 177, n. 4.

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19 With a further change of guise to the University of Law in 2012.

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21 Published as a pamphlet (London, 1883), and reprinted as an appendix to the variorum edition of Dicey's Law of the constitution, ed. J.W.F. Allison (Oxford, 2013).

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28 Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Union list of Commonwealth and South African law, 2nd edn (London, 1963); Union list of United States legal literature, 2nd edn (London, 1967); Union list of legal periodicals, 4th edn (London, 1978).

29 Some statistics are given in Steiner, The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 24, and appear in the Institute's annual reports.

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36 Abel-Smith and Stevens, Lawyers and the courts, 435.

37 Moys, E. M. (ed.), Manual of law librarianship: the use and organization of legal literature (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

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43 Now the RELX Group.

44 Now Thomson Reuters Corporation.

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49 The launch of Westlaw UK in 2000 was of course to change this. How the seeds were sown for this by the founding in 1986 of the Legal Journals Index by professional law librarian Christine Miskin, and the creation of her Legal thesaurus, deserves a separate article.

50 Society for Computers and Law, A national law library – the way ahead: a proposal for a computer-assisted retrieval system for the UK (Abingdon, 1979)Google Scholar.

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54 [News item] Law Journal 18 (1883), 44.

55 [“Obiter dicta” editorial], Law Journal 29 (1894), 625.

56 British and Irish Association of Law Librarians, BIALL salary survey 1999/2000 (London, 2000), 18.

57 Hewitt, A. R., “Law librarianship”, Library Association Record 50 (1948), 91–7Google Scholar.

58 Kauffman, S. B., “Law libraries” in Wiegard, W. A. and Davis, D. G. (eds.), Encyclopedia of library history (New York, 1994), 332–6Google Scholar.

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60 Way, D. J., The student's guide to law libraries (London, 1967)Google Scholar.

61 Cited at n. 37 above; with a 2nd edn in 1987.