Following an introduction to the Hungarian legal system, highlighting some of the main events of the history of the Hungarian state and Hungarian law and reviewing the system of Hungarian legislation, this article provides sources of legal information in Hungary, including the most important acts, reference books, legal periodicals and sources of legal information in printed and electronic form and on the internet. It has been contributed by Tamás Böszörményi, Eszter Horváth, Tibor Kövér and Krisztina Orphanides.

“Seen one library, seen the lot. Drive on!”

Reputedly, this command was uttered by the President of an emerging African nation to his chauffeur, when his official visit to the campus of the state university was running behind schedule. After visiting over fifty university and three national libraries in the last 18 months as part of the data collection phase of the FLAG project, I am able to report that, in the UK at least, the generalisation is not valid.

First, here is a quick recap for those not familiar with the Library and the Document Supply Service. The Institute Library is a postgraduate academic research library, known for its collections of foreign and international law, particularly Commonwealth law. The main funding for the Institute and its library comes from HEFC. However, in our experience, the collections need to be available to practitioners. Lawyers may not always be willing or able to visit the library in person so a commercial document supply service was devised in the early 1990s, to meet a legal need and to help serve the administration of justice. A significant side-effect of the document supply service has become its ability to generate income to supplement the annual grant from HEFC. The workings of the scheme are set out fully in Gee (1999) but, in outline, practitioners must Join the Library as subscribers and are then able to access our priced document supply service. Full details are available at http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/iservice/iservice.htm.

This article is an extended version of my previous article “Information Literacy in a corporate environment” which was published on the FreePint website last year. http//:www.freepint.com/issues/060303.htm. The opinions in this article are solely those of the author. Feedback or discussion is welcomed.

In this article Dunstan Speight, President of BIALL 2018–2019, provides a short overview of current challenges and opportunities facing the profession. In addition to trends affecting all types of law libraries, the article discusses some of the main issues facing the three main types of information service: academic, law firm and chambers, and professional bodies. The article concludes with a discussion of how core skills and experience are still relevant in the fast-changing world of legal information.

This brief note describes the procedures followed and the results obtained through updating the FLAG (Foreign Law Guide) database (http://ials.sas.ac.uk/flag.htm), which took place over summer 2004. The results indicate generally a decline in the acquisition of new primary legal material in traditional paper format, within the foreign, international and comparative law collections of UK universities, national libraries and other major law libraries. From a small number of observations and comments noted by contributors to the survey, there appear to be three reasons for this. First, the availability of an increasing number of materials on the internet (a few titles are now no longer published in paper format). Second, difficulties in regularly acquiring material from some countries where publishing and distribution of publications are intermittent or severely delayed and, third, the cancellation of subscriptions due to budget cuts and a reappraisal of the value to the individual institution of maintaining particular collections.

In this article Wirt Soetenhorst explores a paradigm shift that is already taking place in the legal education market and that will accelerate over the next five years. This development will have consequences for all the parties that are active in the field of academic legal education: authors, institutions, libraries, students and publishers. The article analyses the current traditional business model (the sale of physical textbooks) and outlines several potential scenarios for the future of legal publishing in which publishers move into teaching and academic institutions.

This practical checklist by Nicola Franklin, Head of Recruitment at Sue Hill Recruitment, gives useful tips on how to market your skills in preparation for internal promotion or a new job.

In this article, David Gee, Deputy Librarian & Academic Services Manager at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) in the University of London, writes about the launch of IALS Digital. As a way of placing the launch into context, he outlines the growth of the IALS Library over the past 70 years and describes the development of a wide range of digital initiatives over the past 30 years.

Carol Tullo, Director of the Office of Public Sector Information, explains what comprises public sector information and how her office is planning to promote the re-use of such information, to the benefit of the citizens of this country via sophisticated web technologies.

In this article Chris Wallis examines some of the recent and impending developments in technology for managing legal information – in all its various guises. He looks in some detail at the facilities offered by Microsoft Sharepoint and tries to identify its USPs.

The concepts of agile working, the emergence of the entreployee and generational issues: are these concepts game changers or just gimmicks? Jackie Fishleigh examines new ways of office working in the commercial and information environments. Her thoughts are informed and inspired in part by her attendance at the London Law Expo, Europe's largest senior legal management conference and exhibition, which took place on 13th October 2015.

When faced with a U.S. legal research question, what options does the non-U.S. based researcher have, short of purchasing a subscription to one of the fee-based databases or visiting a major research library? This article will briefly discuss a number of no-cost and low-cost resources in the context of the process required to perform U.S. legal research and will also provide explanations of the different types of primary sources that a legal researcher might encounter.

Professor Bill Cornish was a legal scholar of vision, who was well ahead of his time in two widely disparate areas, and in both he became a recognised leader and authority: legal history and intellectual property law. In the former he applied what was then the novel approach of stressing the contemporary social conditions to which the extant law had to apply - something that modern commentators could well ponder, but which he was honest enough to acknowledge was also criticised by some of his peers at the time. As for intellectual property law, his place as the ‘father of intellectual property teaching and scholarship in the UK’ was acclaimed by his admission as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984, and his place as the inaugural occupant of the Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, at Cambridge (1995–2004). Both these activities had their origins in Bill's long stay (1970–1990) as professor of law at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by their emphasis on societal tertiary education, and his friendship with the renowned Anglo-German scholar Otto Kahn-Freund, respectively. In reality, though, Bill's upbringing in the unique milieu of immediate post-War South Australia, which he describes as a backwater of tranquility, and his urge to see Europe were the roots of his expansive vision of the law. Lesley Dingle interviewed Bill for the Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) in 2015, nine years after his retirement, and these observations of this remarkable scholar are based on those conversations, and her readings of his works.

Jonathan Sims looks at the way the British Library has been redefining its role in light of the changing environment of society's information revolution. An overview of challenges from the information society and the institutional complex is followed by descriptions of how the Library is responding through content strategy and programmes for digitisation, digital preservation and web archiving. A brief look is also taken at the new social science strategy and a new content specialist role for law and socio-legal studies.

The definition of mashing in the context of content is different depending on where you look. In this example from Fiona Fogden of Baker Tilly, mashing refers to the blending of content from a variety of sources into a single location. It is a process librarians have been undertaking for years in bulletins and abstracts, but new technology brings with it new terminology as well as new opportunities.

Allie Lustigman from Linklaters updates the information collated from a survey of the internal use made by law firms of social software tools and provides an insight into how blogs, RSS feeds and wikis are also being implemented for external use for clients.

This article by Lizzie Seal is adapted from a presentation given at the Sources and Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice socio-legal research workshop that was held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in November 2015. It explores the selection of qualitative sources for a project that aimed to uncover public responses to capital punishment in the mid twentieth-century. The article discusses which sources were selected and considers their strengths and weaknesses. It concludes that the particular sources chosen as data can, in themselves, help to shape researchers’ thinking about their findings.

The Library is of value as a physical and social space, as a place that can facilitate learning; independently and in distinct ways to its role as repository of, and point of access to, information. The problems that defenders of this “learning place” aspect of the Library face are bound up with a very powerful, and indeed prevalent, metaphor. This metaphor is of teaching and learning as the transfer of information from one place or head, to another place or head. Therefore, Graham Ferris and Angela Donaldson put forward a far more realistic account of learning, and combine it with an example of learning being enacted in practice. We need to articulate the value of the Library as a place of learning because it is under threat from pressures on resources that are being deployed on a “common sense” but fallacious assumption that Libraries are about the storage and manipulation of information only.

This article, written by Adam Woellhaf, describes the legal research training offered by Middle Temple Library to Inns of Court members. It examines the challenges of designing and delivering legal research training to practitioners, as well as offering guidance and advice to others in their own legal research training efforts. It also looks at the potential for using mobile technology in legal research instruction.