Over the past few years the cataloguing community has seen radical changes in cataloguing standards, changes which appear to have been largely ignored by legal information professionals. This is a mistake according to Helen Doyle; the new cataloguing model can have enormous implications for the legal community, particularly in the spheres of information and knowledge management, and the profession is missing a huge opportunity by ignoring it. A new cataloguing standard (RDA) has been developed based on an alternative theoretical approach, known as “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR). FRBR seeks to change the way we approach the bibliographic universe: from stand-alone, individual repositories of information to networks of linked data built on a structured hierarchy. Commercial law firms are constantly trying to make connections between their traditional resources, online repositories, internal know-how, etc, but struggle to achieve complete synchronicity. FRBR provides a solution to this knowledge management problem: all resources (including people, events and subjects) become searchable, and because everything is linked, users can access information by navigating to it, establishing their own pathway through the data. Moreover, the major legal databases are already utilising linked data in this way – it is time for law firms to catch up.

This article, written by Lesley Dingle, is based upon an in-depth interview with Dame Rosalyn Higgins in March 2014. It highlights particular elements that characterise her contribution to legal scholarship and international adjudication, and should be read in the context of the biography presented in the Eminent Scholars Archive: http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent_scholars/dame_rosalyn_higgins.php. Dame Rosalyn Higgins was born in Kensington in 1937. She grew up in London during the Blitz and her matter-of-fact account of these times epitomised her later career: application to the task in hand, and a lack of a sense of expectation. After the War, she passed successively through grammar school, Girton College, Yale and the Royal Institute of International affairs, steadily immersing herself over fifteen years in the work of the United Nations during its formative period. It was on the UN's role as the global peace-keeper and international law-maker that she became the acknowledged authority. There followed a long period of formal academia (1978–95: Kent and LSE), during which she rose to high office. This experience further honed her scholarly and administrative instincts, and she was honoured in 1995 with a DBE. Later that year Dame Rosalyn was appointed to the Bench of the International Court of Justice – the first woman to rise to this position, and in 2006 was elected its President. She retired in 2009.

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.

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.

In this article, Nick Jarrett-Kerr examines the long delayed implementation of the ABS structure which is likely to be finally implemented in October 2011. He reviews the plans of some early movers towards ABS and considers the possible benefits to law firms, to external investors and to clients.

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.

Tony Simmonds describes the initiatives taken at the College of Law to assist students to perform effective practical legal research including a Legal Method foundation course; a vocational course for the Legal Practice Course and additional in house learning activities devised by the information professionals.

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.

In this article, Jackie Fishleigh reflects on her first taste of e-learning whilst undertaking the revamped Legal Foundations Course. She explains how the course now works and compares it to the original version she took 20 years ago. She also looks at the views on e-learning expressed by Professor Richard Susskind and educationalist, Alan Clarke. The advantages and disadvantages are explored, together with the characteristics of a successful e-learner. The article aims to be informative and entertaining.

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.

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.

This paper, written by Sue du Feu and James Lambert, outlines the challenges faced by the Jersey Legal Information Board (JLIB) in providing free access to legal information. The power of modern internet search engines has implications for a small island jurisdiction wishing to make its case law available on-line (see: www.jerseylaw.je). Having established protocols and policies to ensure a balance between open justice and privacy, several years later, JLIB is faced with concerns from individuals who feel that continuing public access to their earlier misdemeanours is an unfair burden. The paper will explain how the JLIB addressed the challenge of publishing court judgments online while safeguarding the interests of the individual.

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.

Increasing access to digital works and the proliferation of digital genres has changed the way in which we conceive of information, and particularly legal information, including how it is represented within legal citation practice. This article, written by Melissa Castan and Kate Galloway, contributes to the discourse around legal citation in two ways. It first provides a theoretical justification for citation practice as an element of legal information management crucial to effective scholarship, including knowledge creation and dissemination. Secondly, and based on this theoretical foundation, it identifies the challenges facing existing legal citation practice in the face of new media, new representations of legal scholarship, and new objectives for citation practice. Finally, in this article we distil foundation principles for citation to integrate these diverse elements. To illustrate the application of these principles, the article closes with suggested citation practices designed to enhance the existing framework in this digital landscape.

This article aims to identify and define some of the legal issues, the computer misuses and the information misbehaviour associated with IT security that are increasingly a matter for civil litigation, criminal cases and national policy where fighting serious organised crime and cybercrime are concerned. The author, Brunella Longo, investigates this subject, suggests criteria and offers practical guidance for researching the issues. The article also includes references to relevant legislation, normative technical standards and best practices that have emerged as a result of corporate IT developments.

In this article James Hamilton, Research Principal at the Society of Writers to HM Signet in Edinburgh, describes the history of the Signet Library as it approaches its 300th anniversary. He writes about some of the changes that have taken place over those three centuries and he also mentions some of the challenges for the library as the nature of the legal profession has altered, not least those presented recently by the Covid-19 pandemic.

By the Spring of this year, if all goes to plan, there will be changes to our current laws on copyright. EC Directive 2001/29/EC on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society is soon to be implemented into legislation in all Member States. This article describes the reasons behind the changes, what the changes are and how they affect the library and information sector.

Bennett Graff, senior acquisitions editor at Gale, reviews the origins and current composition of The Making of Modern Law, a series of individual collections of digitized primary sources devoted to legal history. This overview explores the rationale behind the development of these collections and the research needs that they meet.

This is a further contribution to the Squire Law Library Eminent Scholars Archive by Lesley Dingle. It is based on interviews with Stephen Schwebel about his distinguished career as an international jurist in the United States and at the International Court of Justice.

Daniel Harrison, professional support lawyer, and Lisa Bunker, senior information officer, at Clifford Chance LLP explain why competition law research is so heavily based on European Union (EU) law and briefly describe the organisational framework and where to find key documents.