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.

Ivo Vogel brings us news of the latest areas of interest in German legal information, with a report from a recent conference entitled Legal Information in Change, held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, including information literacy, the Virtual Law Library, copyright and catalogue enrichment.

The British Medical Association Library (BMA) has been through some significant changes over the past two years. As part of an organisation-wide refurbishment, Jacky Berry, now its permanent Librarian, has project managed one of these changes, the relocation of the BMA library within the existing building. Her article covers many aspects of a library move, including the design phase and working with architects and internal estates teams; the budgeting phase including negotiating finance; planning for the move and motivating staff through the change period.

On flight NW43 from Gatwick I am the excitable passenger in seat 22B glancing nervously at the permafrost several thousand feet below as we head rapidly over Greenland (?) for the USA. I am travelling (with much thanks to BIALL and AALL) towards the 94th AALL Meeting and Conference (my first) being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I am due to speak in session H3 about the Social Science Information Gateway and the work led by IALS to develop the law section of the Internet Gateway (http://www.sosig.ac.uk/law).

Victor Monakhov and Anita Soboleva analyse the current development of legal standards in the area of access to information and protection of personal data in the Russian Federation. At the end of 2005 Russia ratified the Convention for the Protection of Individuals with regard to Automatic Processing of Personal Data. At the same time several new laws, intended to harmonize national privacy legislation with this Convention and to define the legal status of different databases, which are being created by the state for the purposes of registration of population and identification of persons, passed the first reading in the State Duma. The article reflects the ongoing debates on the scope of the right to know and the right to keep secret in the Russian context.

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.

The MDP environment in which I work is the professional services firm of Andersen. I am the manager of the combined research service for Andersen's UK Tax practice and the Andersen Legal law firms in the UK. Andersen Legal in the UK is the firm of Garretts in England and Dundas & Wilson in Scotland. Andersen Legal practices share knowledge, resources and technology to offer a broad range of legal services to clients around the world.

In the 1760s a newly qualified apprentice to the King's Geographer hit upon the idea of cutting up maps for children to assemble as a geographical teaching aid. Dissected maps remain popular to this day in their evolved form as jigsaw puzzles. This article, written by Alison Million during the Covid-19 lockdown when jigsaws have exploded in popularity, looks at their history and at research projects which have established their cognitive benefits or have used them as an inexpensive non-digital tool. By considering papers written on librarians’ thinking styles and on personality it seeks to establish with the help of a short survey whether parallels might exist between the cognitive skillsets of the jigsaw puzzler and those of the librarian.

New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa, in the windy city of Wellington in the Southern Hemisphere spring of early September was the venue for 2002's conference “Visible Justice - evolving access to the law”. This was my first overseas conference as a BIALL delegate and one I approached with trepidation, not really knowing what to expect, but my overall impression was without doubt a positive one. I was able to obtain a network of valuable contacts and gain an important insight into legal librarianship in the Country.

In January 2011, Harvey Ingram and Borneos merged their businesses creating a full service law firm with over 400 staff and approximately 200 fee-earners. The new organisation is based in five sites over the Midlands and the Home Counties. In this article the Information Officer, Helen Marshall, and the Head of Knowledge Management, Jon Beaumont, examine the practical elements of such a merger from the point of view of the Knowledge and Information Team.

New emergent technologies, like cloud computing, blockchain, the ‘internet of things’, and artificial intelligence (AI), have received significant attention from research and industry. Public and private organisations benefit from these technologies, but the privacy of individuals is threatened. This research paper, by Varda Mone and CLV Sivakumar, analyses the existing data protection laws with respect to new emerging technologies like AI, big data, and algorithms. The purpose is first, to discuss and analyse the impact and emergence of modern concepts like big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), Cloud computing, and the ‘internet of things’, etc mainly in light of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) provisions. The article examines the challenges of GDPR compliance posed by the features of these technologies, both individually and collectively. Due to the unique features of these technologies, we are able to identify areas of compliance that needed attention. With regard to the compliance issues identified, we discuss possible solutions as well as raise new questions for further investigation. It is not an exhaustive assessment of these fields but an attempt is made to shed light on a few of them from a data protection perspective.

This article, by Sarah Bracey and Tony Simmonds, explores professional and cultural challenges confronting two BIALL members involved in a project to enhance law library services in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It considers approaches to developing effectual supportive partnerships in a developing country context where the legal information ecosystem and provision of resource differ to an extent that all but inverts the familiar working world. The article traces the boundaries of what change is feasible in such a context, cautioning against over-ambition and advocating areas for future focus around staffing, co-ordination of donation programmes and digitisation of primary materials.

In the current climate of rapid technological change, upheavals in the legal profession and global recession, Nick Holmes asks “What does the future hold for law publishing?”

In this article, the authors, Catherine Bowl, John Furlong and Caroline Mosley look at the direction the Association's Annual Conference has taken over the past 50 years since the first Conference in Liverpool in 1970. The emphasis is on the mid-1990s to the present day, during which period the authors served as Chairs of BIALL's Conference Committee1.

In this short article, David Ibbetson, the Regius Professor of Civil Law at the University of Cambridge, writes about the value of the law librarian in the academic context. His wide-ranging interests cover English and European legal history and, in particular, the historical relationship between English Common Law and the legal systems and legal thought of the rest of Europe. His experiences of using law libraries and receiving assistance from academic-based law librarians has led him to acknowledge the true value of the profession.

In this article, where Liz Murray, Information Resources Manager at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) in London, interviews Claudia Holland, Head of the Library of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, the strategic direction of the new Head Librarian is explored. The strengths of this major international, comparative private law library are considered and the balance between providing electronic access to law resources while still maintaining an excellent legal print collection is examined. The importance of networks and collaboration is also highlighted.

Linda Holbeche discusses how knowledge and service industry organisations should change in recessionary periods and she explains the cycle of change.

Diane Gwynne-Smith writes about the project, which she managed, to create the most comprehensive and freely available online database of materials on social care. It can be found at: www.scie-socialcareonline.org.uk