In this article Michael Maher, Librarian of the Law Society of England and Wales, examines the history of the extensive library on Chancery Lane, the range of services it provides to help support its members (including their agents i.e. law librarians) and the future plans for the library.

This paper written by Samuel Wiggins and Marie Cannon is drawn from their presentation at the 2013 BIALL Annual Conference. The article presents the findings of a survey conducted to explore the perceptions of New Professionals in the library and information sector, and the various challenges and issues they face on entering their first professional roles within law librarianship. The relevance of the professional library and information qualification within the legal sector is considered, as are potential barriers to working with legal information. The required skill sets and training needs for New Professionals and experienced professionals are also compared.

In this article Peter Kargbo describes the impact of the first national lockdown, due to Covid-19, on students using the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton. He describes some of the ways that library services responded and looks at some aspects concerning collection development. He begins his article by taking a brief look at life in the library for students prior to the arrival of the pandemic before describing the period that followed up to the end of the academic year in summer 2020.

Marianne Barber offers some practical observations from a trial introduction of eTextbooks at the College of Law. Ebook versions of the textbooks produced by the College (and published commercially by College of Law Publishing) were made available for the first time in 2010 to its Legal Practice Course students. This paper was originally presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2011 and included an overview of the variety of licensing models/platforms available, an analysis of the then level of response from teaching staff and students and likely touch-points for mass adoption in the legal field.

This article by Andrea Longson, the Senior Librarian, outlines the history of both the Advocates Library and the Faculty of Advocates. It describes the collections and services offered by the library.

Elizabeth Marley describes the addition of subject and other indexing metadata at the UK Parliament, contributing to the internal databases and to services to the public on the Parliamentary website, and the operation of the thesauri and controlled vocabularies used in enriching Parliamentary content.

This paper, by Ginevra Peruginelli, examines the general issue of mapping concepts of different legal orders, with a focus on legal terminology and semantics of the law. Interoperability between legal thesauri is a possible operative solution in so far as it meets two important functions: cross-collection retrieval and cross-language retrieval. At a practical level a feasibility study, carried out by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the National Research Council of Italy is described. The study aims at aligning a number of thesauri used in e-government services within the EU, while testing new methods of automatic mapping.

This article, written by Claire Bonello, presents the French collaborative project to digitise, spread and preserve heritage law collections. As a result, Gallica, the French national digital and encyclopedic library, gives freely access to a “law information universe”. This digital law library from heritage collections on Gallica is set to become a central point of access to legal contents for researchers as well as for jurists.

This article has been written by Janice Sayer, a freelance information manager, who has extensive and unrivalled experience of working on the content of the Westlaw UK legislation database.

Fiona Fogden discusses how negotiation skills can be applied within the information service. She uses a case-study, which involves evaluating the renewal of a news subscription service and the importance of considering which people may be involved in that negotiation, to illustrate her advice.

The emergence of the National Assembly for Wales as a devolved legislature producing first Measures and now Acts, together with the establishment of a Welsh Government with a range of powers to make secondary legislation, has added a new layer of complication to the already over-complicated legislative landscape of the United Kingdom. This article, written by Daniel Greenberg, examines briefly some of the resulting complications.

In this paper Lesley Dingle provides a detailed account of the historical development of the public international law collections at the Squire Law Library in Cambridge. She explains the close involvement of the academic lawyers and the librarians, past and present, in developing an important collection which reflects the significance of the subject at Cambridge's Faculty of Law. Finally, she brings things up-to-date by detailing the extent of the electronic provision which benefits the modern scholar in this discipline.

This article by Isabelle Brenneur-Garel, President of Juriconnexion and its working group, ‘Journée’1, focuses on the Juriconnexion association's annual conference, held on 21 January 2021 by videoconference. The choice of topic was motivated by the recent pandemic: changes to legal information and work in times of crisis. How have professionals navigated this ongoing crisis? What coping strategies have they developed? What does the future hold? More than twenty speakers from academia, legal publishing, legal associations and networks, and the legal and legal-related professions shared their experiences with members of the working group.

Infiltrate and Conquer … looks at how librarians might take inspiration from outside of their profession to gain greater visibility and influence within their own workplaces. The piece is a mixture of experiences: from the author, Emily Allbon, from others who have left the profession but who use those skills in other careers, and also from some librarians outside of law. The focus here is on why, and indeed how, to forge partnerships and encourage collaboration with others inside and outside of your profession. The author's Lawbore website and associated technologies will be discussed throughout the article.

Legal Information Management has reached 50 years since it was launched, under a different name, by the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). In this article the current editor of the journal, David Wills, reviews the history of the journal from its launch in spring 1970 when it took the name The Law Librarian, and describes how it has evolved, often reflecting the changing nature of the legal information profession in those intervening years. He follows the journey as this periodical developed from small beginnings, explains how it was enhanced by successive editors, why it became necessary to change its title in 2001 and describes the move to the current publisher, Cambridge University Press in 2004. He reflects on the current status of the journal, as an electronic product while also retaining its profile in print and, finally, he draws attention to some possible challenges for the future.

In medieval England ‘forest’ did not have the same meaning as it does today but defined large areas of land governed by severe forest laws which Magna Carta had failed to temper. Instead, these were addressed two years later in the Charter of the Forest 1217 which, although a companion charter to the 1217 Magna Carta reissue, remains relatively unknown. This article by Alison Million explores the Charter of the Forest; its history, impact and legacy and considers why and to what extent its memory has been lost in time. It explains how the Charter of the Forest, and the pen of an unwitting scribe, contributed towards the name Magna Carta; a name which has just seen its octocentenial anniversary.

Formalised reflective learning systems are one of the most effective and yet underutilised methods of learning. This article, written by Hélène Russell, aims to give you the tools to use after action reviews (AAR) for your information management (IM) and knowledge management (KM) projects so you can learn from your experiences for greater success in the future and also to lead AAR meetings for other professionals within your organisation, to help increase their experiential learning.

The Olympic Games are the world's most recognised international sporting event alongside the FIFA World Cup. Started in ancient Greece, the Olympic Games were revived in modern times in 1896 and occur every four years. This article, by Esther Cho, discusses how to research the structure and legal aspects of the Olympic Movement. It also encompasses the general array of international sports law resources connected to the Olympic Movement.

The Kent Law School at the University of Kent celebrated its 40th Anniversary in 2008 and Diane Raper, the current law librarian, reviews the changes that have taken place over the years in relation to user comment and feedback, and external drivers which have ensured the provision of a first-class library and information service for staff and students. She also considers the major changes in the modus operandi of the service over the last 40 years.

The notion that we are living through times of great change in the communication of information and the transmission of texts is a truism which will bring a weary look to most professionals with any kind of involvement in the area. The digital age, the information age, the electronic age — we've all heard these terms so many times and have sat through innumerable discussions, and seen even more documents, trying to sort out what it all means. There are almost as many views on the likely pace of change and the shape of the landscape 10 or 20 years from now as there are librarians to hold forth on the subject. Perhaps this helps to explain why the library community as a whole seems to be in such a rudderless state regarding the creation of digital content; no shortage of action, but no overall sense of direction. I am talking here about digitisation of our documentary heritage, that vast mass of books, archives and other media which fill our library shelves today.