Law Librarianship in the 21st Century … . Continued
We are including a further series of articles on this theme. Jonathan Sims from the British Library has produced a comprehensive survey of how the British Library is negotiating the new developments in technology and user requirements and it makes very impressive reading. He has recently been appointed as the new content specialist for law and socio-legal studies at the BL so we will hope to hear more about developments in this area in the future. Following on nicely from this article is Ruth Bird's contribution from the Bodleian Law Library, which is also a copyright deposit library, and it is instructive to consider the effect of having to keep all copies of all legal materials on the library's infrastructure, both bricks and mortar and personnel.
Al Podboy from Cleveland, Ohio, provides an American perspective on how he thinks law librarians will face the challenges of this century. He takes as his theme a Bob Dylan song and the laws of Ranganathan – an interesting and thought-provoking mixture. We round up this theme with an interview with Peter Lake, the Managing Director of Sweet & Maxwell, who provides us with the publisher's angle on the developments he envisages in his industry in the next century.
Outsourcing
This is a topic of great interest within the information community but it has proved, probably not surprisingly, to be extremely difficult to find authors brave enough to commit themselves to paper on the subject. Fortunately for us, two of the speakers at a recent conference, who are both well-known law librarians, agreed to write up their papers for us. Loyita Worley provides a heavily theoretical view of the potential impacts of outsourcing legal KM and Sarah Fahy, from Allen & Overy, provides a practical overview of which areas of the legal information and knowledge management processes she considers are candidates for outsourcing. Jack Diggle has written an overview of the current activities in this “space” for us.
Edinburgh Study Conference 2007
Several of the presenters at what appears to have been an extremely successful and practical Study Conference in Edinburgh, have written up their presentations for us. Victoria Jannetta provides excellent reasons for implementing performance measurement systems within your information service. Sally Creissen has written a comprehensive guide to the processes needed to select and implement a library management system and Jacky Berry takes us through her experiences of project managing a new library at the British Medical Association.
Because these articles are so practical, we have not included a separate Checklist article in this issue.
Current Topics
I am grateful to Mark Stanley and Tamara Eisenschitz for writing about another topic which is of keen interest to our audience, and one which we have rarely covered in the past – the role of professional support lawyers as information providers. The work forms part of Mark's MA at City University and it would be great if the research could be taken further – perhaps a PhD sometime?
Also in this section, Peter Clinch and Ruth Bird report on their review of foreign law holdings in the UK as part of the ongoing FLAG project. They pose a series of questions at the end of their article and would value as much feedback as possible.
From Our Own Correspondent
We move from the balmy climes of the Caribbean to the colder air of Germany for this column. Ivo Vogel from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin writes about the latest developments in legal information as discussed at a recent conference in Germany. I am grateful to Katherine Read from IALS who corresponds entirely in German with Ivo and also helps with the translating of his articles.
