Librarians have an important role to play in providing guidance and assistance to their organisation on copyright compliance. This task is becoming ever more challenging as licence conditions and copyright law are refined and library users want to re-use information in a wider variety of ways. In the following article Dunstan Speight and Jennifer Darroch of Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP discuss a recent pilot project to produce more readily accessible copyright guidance. Although the examples below relate to newspaper copyright issues and are in the context of a City law firm, it is hoped that the ideas will be of more general application.

Today, the level of access to legal information in Canada equals or surpasses that of any country. Not only do several commercial publishers compete to sell their publications but, in recent years, legislatures, many courts and tribunals have built significant repositories on the web. However, the most spectacular advance has come through the creation of CanLII. In this paper, the Daniel Poulin looks at why and how the Free Access to Law (FAL) approach came about in Canada. He sketches the principles supporting free access, but he tries also to make the business case for establishing it.

Paper presented to the 35th BIALL Annual Study Conference in Edinburgh, June 2004 by Sharon Markless.

Alison Clayton and Cath Hancock have supplied us with two articles addressing aspects of the recruitment and selection process. This article from Alison Clayton, Training and Development Officer at Cameron McKenna, deals with the skills you need to be an effective interviewer.

This paper, presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2010 by Anneli Sarkanen, describes the process Field Fisher Waterhouse went through in utilising wikis in the firm for knowledge management and knowledge sharing. It describes the development of the project, the tactics used to encourage adoption, problems encountered and the project's planned future development.

“I am an indexer” as the answer to the usual occupation enquiry is pretty much guaranteed to stop a conversation stone dead. It is much easier to say ‘librarian’, which was on my passport for 20 years, or even ‘information scientist’, which I was trained to be. Sometimes I get quite defiant. I am an indexer, and yes a human actually does prepare those pages at the back of books, and no, it is not all done by computer.

One of the perks awarded to the BIALL Chair is the opportunity to attend the AALL Annual meeting in the summer. I had been once before, as a BIALL bursary recipient, to Washington DC in 1999 and knew that there would be a great deal to observe and learn apart from the main conference programme. The scale of the American conference is, of course, very different to ours: nearly 1800 delegates compared to the 400 we had in Liverpool in June; 74 scheduled conference sessions and several hundred business meetings, a conference centre over a mile long (!), and of course the whole “larger than life” experience of being in Orlando. I knew the heat would be a problem for me, so I opted to stay in the Peabody Hotel just across the road from the conference centre, with its twice-daily “Duck Walk” to the fountain in the hotel lobby.

In this article Pattie Punch reflects on IALL's 34th Annual Course on International Law and Legal Information which was held at Statsbibliothek, Berlin from 20th to 24th September, 2015. The course was entitled ‘Within and in Between: German Legal Tradition in Times of Internationalization and Beyond’ and the work and content of the presentations made her consider what she values about the education of law librarians in the 21st Century. The course raised many questions in relation to a resilient education for law librarians. Since this course, the Brexit referendum in the UK has taken place and the author offers her thoughts about this change of direction and what it might mean for the profession.

The Bodleian Law Library has only existed as an entity in its own right for less than 50 years. Yet part of the collection dates back to the days before the founding of the Bodleian Library in 1602. The rise and fall in fortunes of the teaching of law at Oxford is closely tied to the establishment of the law library. A lesser known aspect of the history includes the ties between Oxford and the United States, especially its oldest law school, William and Mary Law School. In this paper, Ruth Bird offers a brief history of the University of Oxford and then looks at the history of law teaching, before moving on to the evolution of the Law Library itself, and some links with our cousins across the pond.

This article by Helen Riley explains how changes in official publishing have affected the provision of official publications at Warwick University Library, and discusses the pros and cons of print versus online publications. It also explains how using and promoting good online databases may help to save staff time and shelf space at a time when library budgets are being curtailed.

Chris Holland analyses the provisions of the new Digital Economy Act 2010 and considers its potential effect on the work of information professionals.

Although one can read differing accounts of what is involved in information auditing, most commentators would probably accept that audits are, in some form or another, a type of investigation undertaken for the purpose of optimising information use within organisations. In practice this can range from the compilation of a straightforward inventory of published materials to an analysis of information use and flow across the whole of an organisation's operations. Despite differences in scope, most audits are likely to consist of a survey of the organisation combined with some form of gap analysis.

This article, by Jennefer Aston, outlines the origins of The Law Library, focusing on its librarians and the services that were provided for members in the first 180 years.

David Percik, Chair of the BIALL Legal Information Group traces the history of this award, which was presented for the first time to Wildy's at the BIALL Conference in June 2010.

Disability discrimination law is a fast evolving area of the law in England and Wales. This article sets out the basic concepts of what constitutes a “disability”, what constitutes “discrimination” and some of the factors that tribunals, employees and employers should consider in a disability discrimination dispute.

Andrew Coburn the 2009 Chairman of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group describes its activities, including continuing professional development, in the form of meetings and courses; work on standards and the opportunities it provides for networking.

First of all, apologies for the title. This article is based on a talk I was asked to give to the Welsh Law Librarians Group at their inaugural meeting. I was allocated the graveyard slot in the afternoon and it was intended to be something to make everyone wake up. There is nothing like suggesting librarians are no longer needed to do just that.The purpose of this piece is to look at developments in legal information provision — and information provision generally — over the past five to ten years.

This article, written by Renate Ní Uigín, provides an overview of the Irish law publishing market today. It discusses the nature of Irish law, potential purchasers and the principal publishers.

Roger Cook of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw has produced a guide to the most important and accessible sources of US law reports which is aimed at those of us who do not necessarily need constant access to such sources.

BIALL hosted a winter regional meeting at the Signet Library in Edinburgh in December.This event gave members who are not able to attend the annual study conference June an opportunity to get together and discuss current professional issues. Local librarians who are not BIALL members were also invited to attend, and there was a good turnout from the Scottish and North of England law librarians groups. The Signet Library, a private subscription library for members of the Society of Writers to the Signet in Scotland, provided a wonderful setting for the talks, discussion sessions and the Friday evening dinner: many us envied Audrey Walker and her team coming to work each day in such elegant surroundings.