This article follows an initiative to create a Knowledge Database in SharePoint from inception to roll out. Written by Allie Lustigman and Amy Hanley, the Knowledge and Information Team at Charles Taylor, this article explores how certain customisations to SharePoint 2010's out of-the-box capabilities can be successfully applied to a knowledge repository on a limited timescale and budget.

In a paper given at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, Samantha Steer covered key findings from the 2007 Sweet & Maxwell Survey Information Managers in the 21stCentury. The survey was prompted by changes in the legal market, including those that will follow from the Legal Services Act, and the wider availability of new technology, altering the delivery of legal information. The findings cover past changes to the information management role, and perceptions as to how the role will continue to change over the coming years.

For over 100 years colleges of higher and further education have played important roles in the education of library and information professionals. However, the last decade has seen some significant changes in both the structure of teaching departments and the types of courses they deliver. This paper, delivered by Martin De Saulles at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, outlines some of the pressures currently facing the library and information profession and describes how teaching departments have responded in terms of course developments.

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.

Gail Boelens discusses how library and research training is delivered in a large Australian law firm. She also considers some of the challenges involved, including dealing with multiple jurisdictions, databases using different operating platforms and having adequate resources to develop and deliver training.

In a paper presented at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, Janine Miller described the development of CanLII by Canadian law societies from its earliest incarnation to the huge free legal resource that it now comprises.

In this, the second of two articles, Nadine Fathers looks at what information is available through the various legal online subscription databases in relation to pending appeal cases. Her first article was published in the Spring 2012 issue of LIM.1

In this second of a series of two articles, Daniel Bates considers some of the most popular online platforms which are available to host and promote audio and video content for purposes including knowledge-sharing, teaching, research dissemination, and profile-building.

Conor McCabe outlines the role of the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, the way that the library provides support and the impact of budget cuts on the service.

This article by Loyita Worley examines the potential effects of outsourcingknowledge management processes in law firms and discusses the impact it may haveon the firm, its information resources and the clients involved.

Peter Lake is the Managing Director of Sweet & Maxwell, a Thomson company. As part of our feature on law librarianship and legal information in the 21st Century, we arranged to interview him to ascertain his views both on the future of legal publishing and on how Sweet & Maxwell are faring in the early part of the century.

The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies holds copies of case papers of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). Steven Whittle describes the recent open access initiative at the IALS, working with BAILII to provide online access to historic case papers of appeals from over 35 countries from the period 1935 to 1985. These are cases of the highest importance in the legal development of each of the countries and to the development of common law shared by many countries worldwide.

During its 70th Anniversary celebrations the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London launched IALS Digital - a new name for established and evolving online services at IALS, bringing together resources, opportunities for new legal information initiatives, research projects and partnerships, and delivering support for digital legal scholarship. This paper written by Steven Whittle, IALS Digitial Manager, developed from presentations at the launch in November 2017, reports on the event and describes what the Institute plans to achieve through IALS Digital, explaining what it is, how it has developed and how it fits well with the IALS national role in the promotion and facilitation of legal research.

Lawyers are threatened as never before by the commoditisation of services and the automation of legal advice. Information professionals have been facing such threats for years. In this keynote article, Tim Buckley Owen asks whether it is time to make common cause?

The aim of this article, written by Martin Vorberg, is to portray the approach to information logistics at a private law school in Hamburg, Germany which is a largely self-sufficient, coordinated library system, with occasional use of local libraries and supra-regional delivery services. The article describes the management of a main library and more than twenty branch libraries in the context of some challenging times and in relation to hybrid collections and the uses of electronic media.

In the 1970s London law firms realised just how useful law librarians could be and there was a huge growth in their number during the 1980s. The first co-operative venture began in the mid-70s when we produced a Union List of Holdings and from that grew the City Law Librarians Group. By 1986 there were at least 60 firms in London employing over 150 professional law librarians. Provincial law firms were generally smaller but by the same date firms in Leeds, Birmingham, Manchester, Norwich and Bristol were employing law librarians.

Susannah Rayner provides an introduction to the archive collections held at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Library which relate to legal studies, based on a presentation given at the National Socio-legal Training Day on the subject of legal biography, held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies 15th May 2013.

John Eaton from the University of Manitoba at Winnipeg, describes an important Canadian knowledge initiative within the academic library community relating to acquisition of digital resources.

This article by Paulette Storey describes the sources of information produced by the central Information Department of Citizens Advice. They are available to advisers, many of them volunteers, working in the various local bureaux across the country and dealing face-to-face and on the phone, with a huge variety of enquiries. Paulette explains how the databases are structured, their content and how the information within them is written and obtained.

In this article, Julie Jones looks at the past, present, and possible future of information organisation, and considers how legal research might be conducted in years to come as the internet and computer science advance. Information classification systems have historically had finite life spans and there is no reason to believe that the current crop is any different. With increasingly more information being born digital, new ways of thinking about organisation and searching methodologies are developing to handle the deluge.