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.

The following article began life as a ten-minute presentation titled ‘Building student engagement brick by brick; using Lego® Serious Play® to explore subject engagement in HE’, presented at BIALL's 2020 virtual conference on 12 June 2020. Since 2016 I have been incorporating Lego® Serious Play® (LSP) within my practice as an academic librarian at Middlesex University. This article will explore how I have embedded LSP into workshops with students and staff, the tactics employed to gain acceptance for using LSP within academic settings and offering some tentative predictions on whether playful approaches will be successful in the current Higher Education (HE) landscape, dominated as we currently are by virtual learning and screen technologies.

This paper draws on the work of the Evidence and Insight Team, a dedicated research function presently at the Mayor's Office for Policing And Crime, previously based within the Metropolitan Police Service for over a decade. The aim of the paper is to make readers aware of the obliquely hidden data goldmine that exists within UK policing. Such data captures the decisions police make routinely, the kinds of situations police encounter and with whom. This rich data seam goes beyond crime – and should be used more outside of policing. The authors, Paul Dawson and Elizabeth A. Stanko, argue that interested academics need a better roadmap of the data in order to stimulate basic knowledge and usage. Three case studies are presented that illustrate the scope and challenges of working with such data.

This article by Dean Mason looks at the retrieval effectiveness of the online legal research tools Lexis Professional and Westlaw UK and is the result of research carried out for his Masters Degree in Information Science.

This article is based on a presentation given by John Bell at the annual conference of The Society of Legal Scholars (SLS)1 held in Bristol in September 2012. His talk reflects the immediate challenges facing law schools, academic lawyers and the legal publishing industry in the light of the recent Finch Report2 and the subsequent response by the Government3 whereby it has adopted an open access policy to publicly funded research.

Helen Young, the information Librarian (Law & Official Publications) at the University of Leicester, reports on the results of one extra element in the BIALL/SPTL Survey, designed to acquire further information about academic law librarians.

This paper outlines the first part of a wider, two-part study on the information behaviour of law students. The authors are Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Lyn Robinson. The background and motivation for the study have been described in a previous publication1 which reports the results of interviews with three academic law librarians. Our initial work found that although mobile technologies offered benefits to law students seeking information for their academic studies, there was concern from law librarians that the use of electronic resources via both non-mobile and mobile interfaces resulted in a loss of skills required for information retrieval due to the increasing capabilities of electronic resources’ search interfaces. To gain more insight into how law students were using mobile information resources, and to further understand the advantages and disadvantages of such resources, we extended our study to a wider cohort. This second phase, of our first part study, was conducted over two years (2013–2015). During this time, we carried out interviews with thirteen law librarians and fielded both quantitative and qualitative questionnaires to 36 law students. We also conducted a greater review of literature and examined several existing information-seeking models. We used the results of the research from this phase of study, together with the knowledge from the literature to propose a novel information-seeking behaviour (ISB) model for law students. These findings are reported within this paper. The second part of this research will look at expanding our research cohort to cover a wider audience throughout the UK and use a focus group to validate our proposed model. This will be reported in a following paper.

The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily impacted Australian universities and their libraries but has been felt most strongly by students and staff who are already marginalised. This article, written by Kay Tucker and Becky Batagol, draws upon both published literature and the authors’ own experiences as a librarian and academic employed at Monash University, Australia's largest university. Important lessons from the pandemic for universities and university libraries at times of crisis and disaster include: actively recognising and responding to structural inequalities amongst students and staff; organising services so that all can participate to their fullest ability; providing students with opportunities for social connection, enhanced digital capabilities, safe and inclusive spaces and accessible materials; as well as flexible employment practices.

Susanna Winter from Baker & McKenzie considers the key issues which will affect law firm information services in the 21st Century. These include the use of technology, including the rise of so-called social networking and Web 2.0 tools; the impact of the Google-generation; the structure of information units; and the changing place of librarians within the law firm structure as a whole.

This research, conducted by Erin Gow, aims to explore the information literacy and legal research training needs of users of the Middle Temple library.* In order to do this it focuses on the patterns of use of library resources by users, reasons for these patterns, previous training users have received, and general evidence of user training needs in law libraries. The research as a whole was generated in result of the recognition that many Middle Temple library users require further legal research skills training in order to confidently find and employ the extensive resources available through the library. Before such training could be developed, however, research needed to be conducted into the specific capabilities and needs of the unique user base at the library. As a result of the research the current habits of library users have been explored, their general training levels and needs identified, and recommendations made about how to structure training so as to address these needs and best serve users. It was discovered that Middle Temple library users generally visit the library frequently, and are already confident using certain materials such as textbooks. Despite confidence in using certain common materials, users struggle to take advantage of the full range of resources available, making training necessary. The difficulties many users currently face in the library stem from a general lack of information literacy and library skills training.

Smartphones have quickly become a key part of our daily lives. Over 70 percent of people in the UK own such a device and law students are no exception to this far-reaching trend1. The use of these devices has posed some significant questions on the extent of their impact on information seeking behaviour and in relation to information delivery of resources. Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Ayşe Göker, who have recently begun a research project together, seek to not only examine the information seeking behaviours (ISBs) of law students using their Smartphones for academic information retrieval, but also to investigate perspectives from subject law librarians from Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) throughout the UK. There is an impression that students tend to find Smartphones more appealing for their information seeking needs compared to the professional resources and services, such as virtual libraries, which their HEI have already invested in. The result leads to a deep concern from subject librarians that students may be at risk from weakening research skills as well as relying too much on poor information sources not specifically designed to meet their information needs within the academic context5. The authors also suggest that information service providers to be more pro-active in providing information to students through more user-friendly interfaces as well as capitalise on the growing use of the Smartphone as a means to deliver their product4,5,6,15.

This paper provides a brief introduction to caLIM, the Current Awareness for Legal Information Managers (http://193.62.18.223/dbtw-wpd/textbase/cadquery.htm) web database developed at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London and made freely available on the IALS Web site.

In this article Susan Alcock examines the issues relating to outsourcing of legal information services. She reflects the many concerns felt within the industry and offers many points-of-view that have been collected from those working in the field as in-house law librarians and legal information professionals.

In this article Peter Charlish addresses the controversial issue of the use of performance enhancing drugs in sport. He looks at the legal basis for regulation via the World Anti-Doping Code and the nature of a sports participant's relationship with their governing body and the anti-doping organisations. He explains in the context of proportionality, the measures designed to combat doping in sport; the importance to the Code of the central principle of strict liability. Also, he highlights the use of non-analytical positives as a further method of detection of doping violations, whilst taking consideration of the impact of these measures on the human rights of participants.

It is a very great honour to be invited to give this lecture in memory of Willi Steiner. I was not privileged to know him personally but I have long been aware of the enormous contribution that he made to the development of the Squire Library in Cambridge and the library of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, of which I have been a grateful user for many years. I am also very aware of Willi's contribution to legal scholarship in general and in particular to comparative law. His work on the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals is just one example. I hope and believe that the topic on which I am going to speak tonight would have interested him.

Malcolm Kendall offers guidance on how to establish whether a work is in fact an orphan work and examines efforts being made here and overseas in devising systems to make the search easier.

Lesley Dingle describes the ESA, a digital archive based on interviews with prominent personalities associated with the Law Faculty of Cambridge University. It constitutes a unique repository of audio, textual and photographic materials, providing insights into the careers of scholars, jurists and practitioners. Motivations for the establishment of the archive in 2006 were: recording reminiscences of scholars back to WWII and its immediate aftermath; documenting developments in administration and teaching in the Faculty and colleges; archiving voices of scholars taking about their early lives, careers and published works; compiling a cross-indexed reference of personalities mentioned in interviews; and generating an awareness amongst students and younger staff of the rich heritage of the Faculty. The methodology and strategy of conducting interviews and compiling entries is briefly described. Finally, in the broader context of legal biography, it is argued that such oral histories are an essential component because they capture aspects of personality that written accounts cannot and thereby reveal traits that conventional biographies may miss. This claim is illustrated by selected examples from the archive, that currently contains twenty interviewees.

Alison Pope, Keith Puttick and Geoff Walton have been involved in the information literacy aspects of a project to help students improve their research skills and they report on this and the wider current debates on information literacy with an emphasis throughout on legal research skills.

Angela Carritt of the Bodleian Law Library gave a paper at the 38th Annual BIALL Study Conference in Sheffield in June 2007. She discusses Oxford University's Legal Research Skills Programme (LRSP), looking at its content, methodology and effectiveness. She also looks at the programme as an example of a stand-alone skills course and asks whether such courses can be effective. Additionally, she discusses students' use of online resources and suggests that they have developed computer based study strategies which make the use of print resources inconvenient. The paper draws on research by Sandra Meredith into students' expectations and experiences of the LRSP and how they use their learning after the classes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the scholarly peer-reviewed publications relating to social media objectives and challenges of law libraries. The methodology is that of a systematic literature review. The studies included in this literature review shows that the social media objectives of law libraries are: promoting and marketing resources and services, supporting legal research teaching and tutorials and providing reference services. Secondly, law libraries face some challenges with their social media usage regarding the quality and scope of content, technological difficulties and online privacy.