This article from Gillian Sands looks at the cat and class skills taught on information studies courses and the use these skills are to new legal information professionals. The article is based on the opinions of nine new legal information professionals from both academic and law firm libraries.

The legal information landscape has always been one of instability and change. The rate of these changes seems to be speeding up as societal and technological changes interact and impact our lives. In the face of this volatility, we should remain constant by being the human factor between information and our clients. We are the interface between new technology and the changing information usage behaviours of our clients. We must understand both aspects to ensure the best outcomes. Our client centric attitude positions us perfectly to be leaders when exploring, and perhaps even creating, new solutions. We are best placed to bring them back to our institutions and provide the human touch to ensure they are implemented in a way that will succeed and add value. It is important to embrace this constant state of flux and find our value in being supportive change agents, while also ensuring that we can ensure, and advocate for, the importance of safeguarding legal information for generations to come.

This article covers, and expands on, a presentation of the same name given at the BIALL Conference held in Brighton in 2010. The Health and Safety Executive Management Standards approach for tackling the cause of work-related stress was launched in November 2004. Since the launch, the HSE has worked with many thousands of organisations within the United Kingdom to implement the Management Standards approach. This work has provided the HSE with the opportunity to learn how best to manage the causes of work-related stress in the workplace.

The purpose of this article by Peter Clinch and Ruth Bird is to outline the latest findings from the recent review of foreign law holdings in the United Kingdom, and, in Part 4, to raise key questions relating to the future of these potentially endangered resources. The authors invite the legal research community to consider the many issues of concern raised by the results of this latest FLAG survey.

In this article Susan Doe reports from the perspective of the law firm sector on the progress towards the introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation that became automatically ‘live’ on 25 May 2018. She provides an introduction to the Regulation, highlights some practicalities for law firms when considering compliance with GDPR and offers a ‘to do’ list with reference to the record of data processing, training needs, security, and contracts and documentation. She also provides advice on what should be considered especially in respect of client demands.

Law has been a little slow off the mark in the UK when it comes to the world of mobile applications (apps). In an environment where students spend more time using mobile applications than they do browsing the internet, the authors were keen to take their Learnmore website to the next stage by developing an app for law students. The Learnmore website (part of the Lawbore suite of resources from City University) has received much attention for its quirky visuals, multimedia learning tools and winning marriage of librarian and student generated content. With an ultimate aim of easing the transition between A-levels and degree and making the ‘building blocks’ of legal skills more interesting. Emily and Sanmeet secured substantial funding from JISC after a call for universities to create mobile apps from existing content, teaming up with a colleague in City University's Human Computer Interaction and Design department. The app was to be designed to help students learn essential legal skills in an innovative way, employing more interaction than was possible via the web. The emphasis on video content meant an early decision to fix on iPad rather than iPhone as the tool for mobile learning. The JISC funding paid for the services of a developer to help bring their ideas to life. This paper looks at the transformation from standard wiki to mobile application; focusing on the process of developing the concept for the app and the major milestones, as well as providing an insight into the expected challenges along the way. These included: working in a multidisciplinary team, communication of ideas, recognising the differences required in design for an app as opposed to a website and managing conflicting visions. The team motto was that creating an app cannot be simply a re-skinning process; but a re-working of content to to ensure a truly effective learning resource.

Within the legal library world “outsourcing” has become a hot topic, and not necessarily a welcome one. In the last 12 months there have been several law firms making the move to outsource their Information Services, so why is this happening and what are the options? Kate Stanfield, Vice President, Knowledge and Research at Integreon examines the issues. Her article is based on a presentation given at the BIALL Conference in June 2011.

In a previous article for LIM, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj wrote about online legal information services and their uses at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.1 This new article looks at Institutional Repositories (IRs) which in the academic world, help to re-define the production, dissemination and the use of the intellectual output from an institution. A project to develop an IR offers numerous opportunities to become engaged with information and scholarly material beyond the nature of traditional library services. In this paper, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj and Shikha Kaushik jointly discuss some of the issues, experiences and theories around the institutional repository that has been developed at St Stephen's College.

Guy Holborn, Librarian of Gray's Inn, gives some very practical help on how to catalogue the law collection whilst ensuring compliance with cataloguing standards

This article by Dr Peter Clinch gives details of where to find not just law reports but also other documents relating to cases. It covers a wide range of courts, from the High Court through to Coroners Courts and Administrative tribunals

The proliferation of digital legal resources over recent years has profoundly changed the way in which lawyers carry out legal research. Law librarians have had to adapt rapidly to these new ‘disruptive technologies’ and have had to develop new ways to train their users in how to carry out the most effective legal search. As a consequence, training has become an increasingly important role of a law librarian. The literature shows that these issues have been much discussed, but often confined to either the academic sector, or to the role of the law librarian in a law firm. Over the past few years, the concept of information literacy has increasingly been seen as a way of developing more effective legal research training programmes. This study, conducted by Steve Mishkin*, examines the views of law librarians working in both the academic and non-academic sectors, regarding how to deliver legal research training most effectively. The study concludes by recommending greater cooperation between academic and non-academic law librarians and suggests that both need to make the case for the benefits of legal research training, in order to win support from their management for better resourced programmes. It also suggests that the quality of legal research training will be improved if law librarians themselves are provided with training, on how to deliver it most effectively.

This article by Jennie Grimshaw presents an overview of the transition of UK government publishing from print to electronic between the mid-1990s and 2016. It goes on to describe the tools being developed by the British Library in collaboration with the other five legal deposit libraries, to collect, preserve, organise and provide access to born digital government publications. This paradigm shift in official publishing gives the libraries a window of opportunity to improve their management of these materials and ensure that they can be found through their catalogues more easily than their print predecessors.

The global recession has wrought havoc on the budgets of libraries worldwide, forcing administrators to reassess priorities and change direction midcourse. Privately funded academic libraries which typically rely heavily on large endowments have not been exempt and in fact have probably been hit the hardest. The challenges encountered by this long drawn financial crisis have ultimately provided opportunities to reassess priorities and conduct business more efficiently. This paper was presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2010 by Femi Cadmus and Blair Kaufmann.

This article by Alvin M. Podboy of Baker Hostetler in Cleveland, Ohio, examines the future of 21st Century law librarianship from an American perspective. It reviews developing legal information trends as they affect our profession. The article melds our historical and philosophic law library foundation to our continuing professional evolution.

This article by Paul Magrath considers the role of law reporting not only as a service in support of the administration of justice and legal education, but also in the wider context of open justice, transparency and public legal information. It traces the history of law reporting and considers the pros and cons of the more comprehensive publication of judgments of the senior courts made possible by digitisation and the internet, in comparison with the more selective approach adopted in the past. The article is loosely based on a presentation given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians held in Bournemouth in June 2019.

Professor Mashood Baderin of the School of Oriental and African Studies explains the basic concepts of Islamic law. He discusses its sources, including the distinction between Sharīcah and Fiqh and its methods and principles. He concludes with a discussion of the various Schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

Developing legal research skills is something that takes time and practice and can be enhanced with proper training. Marcie M. Baranich explores the various resources that HeinOnline offers to help law librarians and legal researchers develop their research skills in HeinOnline, from training guides and video tutorials to live webinars and support, together with the platforms and social media applications used to disseminate training resources, including the Wiki, Blog, YouTube channel, Facebook page, and Twitter feed.

This article reviews the kinds of resources available to support the training of legal researchers and to guide them in their research, so that law librarians can avoid “re-inventing the wheel”. Karen Crouch places her emphasis on practical legal research. She also highlights some work in progress and possible future directions for legal learning resources and reviews some of the online tools that enable legal researchers to work more efficiently. The emphasis is on low cost resources, and those which enable additional value to be extracted from existing legal database subscriptions.

Tony Simmonds explains the six types of Open Access licences which are available to academic users to preserve rights in their publications.

In the article Jackie Fishleigh, a regular contributor to LIM, looks at the vital and seemingly never-ending task of how to provide relevant and effective training in legal research to lawyers. The author shares her experiences in putting the new BIALL Legal Research 5 Stage Model through its paces with real audiences of live humans!