In a world where articles and tweets are discussing how artificial intelligence technology will replace humans, including lawyers and their support functions in firms, it can be hard to understand what the future holds. This article, written by Alex Smith, is based on his presentation at the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians conference in Dublin 2016 and looks at demystifying the emerging technology boom and identifies the expertise needed to make these tools work and be deployed in law firms. The article then looks at the skills and expertise of the knowledge and information teams, based in law firms, and suggests how they are ideally placed to lead these challenges as a result of their domain expertise and their existing, well defined skills that are essential to this new generation of technology. The article looks at the new technical environment, the emerging areas of products and legal problems, the skills needed for the new roles that this revolution is creating and how this could fit into a reimagined knowledge team.

This article, by Rosemary Hunter, is based on a presentation given at the national training day on ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: Sources and Methods in Socio-Legal Research’ in May 2014, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the British Library. She begins by describing the uses of judgments as sources within feminist research on judging, and then outlines three different methods of analysis employed within this research: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and the newest method, that of rewriting judgments.

The following report outlines the activities and funding of academic law libraries in the UK and Ireland in the academic year I 99912000.The figures have been taken from the results of a postal questionnaire undertaken by Information Services staff at Cardiff University on behalf of the Society of Public Teachers of Law (SPTL).

The Foreign Law Guide (FLAG) Project, which aims to build a Web inventory to the holdings of foreign legal materials in university and college libraries throughout the United Kingdom, is one of about 12 collection management projects, funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP). It is believed to be the only project which included within its research proposal the requirement to carry out a survey of user needs to assist in the design of the end-product of the project: the Web inventory.The purpose of the survey, as stated in the bid document, would be to:

establish the present and future requirements for foreign, comparative and international legal materials

discover what information researchers need on foreign law, how they obtain it and what they expect libraries to provide

provide essential information for decision-making on collection development and influence the production of the law Web map.

The Project Management Committee considered it important to attempt to obtain the views of as wide a range of users of foreign legal materials as possible. Attempts were made to include (a) non-lawyers working in related disciplines, (b) research support staff and PhD. students as well as academics, and (c) law librarians and information officers.

This article by Ann-Christin Karlén Gramming, Elisabeth Ejemyr and Elin Thunell is based on a presentation delivered at the BIALL Annual Conference in 2019. It focuses on promoting library services through an e-learning system called ‘Nano-learning’. It is an innovative way of promoting the library and its services in a new and engaging manner. It combats information overdose (usually followed by a rapid forgetting curve) by relying on spaced repetition. The system also comes with useful analytics and reporting tools, making it easy to measure and showcase ROI (return on investment) to partners.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been compiled by Peter Clinch, Information Specialist – Law, Cardiff University.

This paper is adapted from a presentation given by Sara Roberts at the 2015 BIALL Annual Conference. On September 4th 2010 Christchurch suffered the first of a series of catastrophic earthquakes which continued over the next two years and damaged much of the city. During this time the University of Canterbury suffered greatly, both through physical damage to the campus and from a loss of students willing to come and study in Christchurch. Subsequently, the dedicated Law Library on campus was closed and it was necessary to reassess the service in the light of severely reduced resources. More than four years on from that first earthquake, the law collection is situated in the central library on campus, and the number of professional law librarians supporting the service has reduced from four to two. Yet despite the changes the service has not diminished and, indeed, is stronger in some areas.

Maria Mawson explores the extent to which universities still teach undergraduates how to use print legal research sources. It also examines the level to which these sources are still provided, in the light of increasing costs, shrinking budgets and the convenience of online access.

In this digital age, users require immediate access to information. To foster the process of research, the legal fraternity demands efficient online legal information systems. Raj Kumar Bhardwaj provides a view from India and reports on a case study that has been conducted on the use of various legal information databases in the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi, India. In his paper, he also reviews and discusses the various aspects relating to legal information retrieval systems, with particular reference to the various essential legal databases that cover Indian law.

The intersection of freedom of information, privacy legislation and library services may be interpreted as the relation between two bodies (law and library) and how they influence one another directly and indirectly. This means library services can be shaped enormously by both federal and provincial freedom of information and privacy laws. We notice that there are cases in various Canadian courts involving disagreements concerning the rule of law in the fields of freedom of information and privacy with libraries. The combined effects of legislation and stronger library policies may make it more challenging for users to understand how to use shared library resources and services properly. For many libraries, this means operational policies and professional ethics codes have to be revised to strictly respect the users and employees’ confidentiality rights. The research method used for this paper included a search of relevant Canadian court cases as case studies.

Stella Dextre Clarke provided an article for our Winter 2003 issue on the government's drive towards interoperability, and the role of a controlled vocabulary in easing access to information. Here is an update, casting light on the relevance of the government's standards, from the viewpoint of our profession.

This article, written by Natasha Choolhun, follows the progress of submitting a proposal to BIALL Council on the topic of devising a ‘Legal Information Literacy Toolkit’ following discussion at the 2011 BIALL conference.

This paper written by Ginevra Peruginelli is devoted to a discussion of the issues concerning the provision of free access to law in our global society and investigates the effects and benefits of freely available information to the legal profession, citizens and governments. The knowledge of rights, responsibilities and policies allows people and institutions to know what is expected of them and which protections they enjoy. In particular, the paper focuses on the main actors, namely the Legal Information Institutes, involved in the free access to law all around the world. These institutions publish legal information from more than one source for free, and mutually collaborate both politically and technically through membership.

This article by James Mullan is based on his paper delivered to the BIALL Conference 2009. It examines the role that social media and Web 2.0 technologies can play in the life of the legal information specialist.

It was only three years ago that I was told that publishing valuable digital content on the Internet would not take off for 10 years. Today it is happening all around us with MP3 music files being swapped by our children and market research reports openly passed between business colleagues. The problem is that the intellectual property owners lose control of distribution through publishing content on the Internet – in its raw essence, an unregulated global arena – and then, more often than not, do not get paid for use of a large percentage of their content, This is perhaps the greatest reason why publishers have been unwilling to place valuable content online. Historically low-value content has taken up the vast majority of what we have been able to access online with companies hoping to recoup costs through advertising revenue. The reason is simple; conventional Internet technologies do not have any facilities for enforcing copyright, but the problem is that advertising revenues are dwindling so publishers need to find other ways of generating revenue. We can now look back with a sense of irony at straplines from major technology companies saying “Information at your finger tips”, “Information where and how you need it” as this is exactly what they are now trying to prevent so that they can keep an element of control.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been written by David Gee, Deputy Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

This article by Karen Waldron describes the experiences of LexisNexis in implementing Agile as a framework in product development and across the organisation. It discusses the principles of Agile, the aims of LexisNexis of greater collaboration, quicker delivery of value to customers and continuous improvement, the main activities introduced, and the benefits experienced at LexisNexis as a result. It also discusses the applicability of Agile as a framework outside of software development, as the goals are common to most organisations, and sets out the view that incorporating simple agile activities into current working practices can have incremental and short term benefit for most teams.

In this short article Rónán Kennedy explores fundamental issues surrounding the use of algorithms in the context of the rule of law in our society. He states, ‘The issues that are buried in these systems should be a matter of serious concern for law and lawyers as we try to protect fundamental values in the 21st century, and we try to properly represent our clients’ interests against systems errors that we cannot easily identify’.*

Stella Dextre Clarke, our Guest Editor, provides an update on the latest developments nationally and internationally on producing standards for the creation of controlled vocabularies. After many years of inaction the advent of the worldwide web has stimulated the need for wholesale revision of existing standards and the introduction of new ones.

In this article, Mark James and Guy Osborn discuss how the relationships between the various members of the Olympic Movement are governed by the Olympic Charter and the legal framework within which an edition of the Olympic Games is organised. The legal status of the Charter and its interpretation by the Court of Arbitration for Sport are examined to identify who is subject to its terms and how challenges to its requirements can be made. Finally, by using the UK legislation that has been enacted to regulate advertising and trading at London 2012, the far-reaching and sometimes unexpected reach of Olympic Law is explored.