WELCOME
Welcome to volume 13, number 4 of Legal Information Management. As is customary at this time of year this issue of the journal features a number of papers that were delivered at the BIALL Annual Conference. The 44th such conference took place in Glasgow from 13th June to 15th June and the theme of the event was, ‘The Business of Law’. I was reminded that the first time that the BIALL conference visited Scotland was in 1973 when it was held in Edinburgh. In the Law Librarian (the previous name of this journal) prior to the event, an advertisement appeared entitled, “Scotland Awaits You”Footnote 1. It drew careful attention to the programme that was scheduled for the forthcoming event and reassured attendees, with a good dose of humour, that, “Haggis provided for all: advice given beforehand on which tartan not to wear”! More seriously, the title of that conference was, ‘Wide Horizons: an Excursion into Scots and [European] Community Law’Footnote 2. With the referendum on Scottish Independence scheduled for 2014 Scotland may be about to widen horizons still further and this year's BIALL conference may well be the last to be held north of the border in a United Kingdom. The editor notes that even the very name (and therefore the acronym) of our Association is not safe from change following such momentous events should they actually occur. According to a report of the 1973 conference, “the Haggis promised in the preliminary notice …did not materialise”.
SELECTION OF PAPERS FROM THE BIALL CONFERENCE 2013
The conference officially began with the keynote speech and 4th Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture which was delivered by Professor Hector MacQueen. That paper is not available for publication in this particular issue of LIM but the editor expects that it will be possible to include it in a future issue. Some of the other papers that were given do appear in this issue.
Carol Tullo, Director of Information Policy and Services at the National Archives, writes about the complexities of legislation being available on the web with particular reference to legislation.gov.uk. Samuel Wiggins and Marie Cannon jointly discuss the findings of a survey conducted to explore the perceptions of new professionals in the library and information sector, and the various challenges and issues they face on entering their first professional roles within law librarianship. Nicola Sales writes on legal research training and the technique of ‘flipping’ the classroom. Pete Smith and Peter Griffith of Sheffield Hallam University focus on the development of the LawSync project which aims at reflecting the desire to see better synchronisation between law as an academic discipline and the practice of law. Mark Haines, in his piece entitled, ‘Career Opportunities: the Ones That Never Knock, talks about the good and bad practices he has experienced associated with recruitment and job seeking. Finally in this section, Jackie Fishleigh, a regular contributor to this journal, reviews and analyses three of the sessions held at the conference that were concerned with ‘soft skills’.
CURRENT ISSUES
In the Current Issues section Ian Hunter writes on his research into free legal and official information on the web and asks the question, ‘is it time to stop Google-bashing?’ David Gee, from the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, has (for the second year running) the task of writing up the ever informative SLS/BIALL Academic Law Library Survey for 2011/2012.
OCCASIONAL SERIES
Under the title of Occasional Series, Lesley Dingle, founder of the Eminent Scholars Archive at the Squire Law Library interviews Emeritus Professor Len Sealy, renowned for his work in the commercial and company law fields. His book, Cases and Materials in Company Law, is one amongst many well known titles that are associated with him.
CURRENT AWARENESS AND BOOK REVIEWS
The Current Awareness section has been compiled, as always, by Katherine Read and Laura Griffiths at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. Gillian Watt and Hélène Russell helpfully and thoughtfully provide two book reviews to complete this issue of LIM.
As usual, the editor is enormously grateful to all of the contributors to this issue of the journal. In addition, he wishes to thank the proof-readers and Susan Perkins at CUP for their assistance, not just with this issue but for the whole of the 2013 volume.
