It has become increasingly common for a reader to follow a URL cited in a court opinion or a law review article, only to be met with an error message because the resource has been moved from its original online address. This form of reference rot, commonly referred to as ‘linkrot’, has arisen from the disconnect between the transience of online materials and the permanence of legal citation, and will only become more prevalent as scholarly materials move online. The present paper*, written by Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Lawrence Lessig, explores the pervasiveness of linkrot in academic and legal citations, finding that more than 70% of the URLs within the Harvard Law Review and other journals, and 50% of the URLs within United States Supreme Court opinions, do not link to the originally cited information. In light of these results, a solution is proposed for authors and editors of new scholarship that involves libraries undertaking the distributed, long-term preservation of link contents.

In this article Christian Wolf seeks to identify and understand the nature of the profession of law librarianship in Germany. The first question he seeks to address is whether there is a recognised profession at all. He explains some basic principles of German public and labour law and then, having laid this foundation, he describes the profession of law librarianship in Germany in detail.

This article, written by Ivo Vogel and Elisabeth Schrecklinger, deals with the efforts of German libraries to digitise historical legal sources and make them publicly available. Although the main focus is on two selected libraries, a general overview is included. Commercial products are not considered since their contents are likely to become increasingly less relevant due to German law libraries' own initiatives. More attention is paid to problems that have been identified during the implementation of digitisation projects such as the recording of full texts is highlighted. The retrieval of digitised legal materials and, eventually, the digitisation of historical legal gazettes or parliamentary literature is also discussed. This contribution focuses exclusively on the retrospective digitisation of historical legal materials.

In this article Margarethe Sannino shares some information on how legal research works in an international law firm with several offices. The focus is on German law and legal materials. A short introduction to German law is followed by an outline of German research resources in general and then, further on, there are two parts describing specific approaches to research from Margarethe's daily work; research on company/corporate law requests as well as research on legislative acts.

Faced with a fragmentation of publishers' portfolios in Germany, the librarian Martina Kuth was interviewed about the challenges to grant a user-oriented library collection in a large commercial law firm like CMS Hasche Sigle.

This article, written by Katherine Read, gives an introduction to printed and electronic German legal resources that are collected by the Library of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies and including those that are accessible through the web. Particular attention is given to English language sources where they are available to library users.

The aim of this article, written by Martin Vorberg, is to portray the approach to information logistics at a private law school in Hamburg, Germany which is a largely self-sufficient, coordinated library system, with occasional use of local libraries and supra-regional delivery services. The article describes the management of a main library and more than twenty branch libraries in the context of some challenging times and in relation to hybrid collections and the uses of electronic media.

Despite a lack of a national legislation that mandates open government information in the People's Republic of China, each major government branch has taken proactive efforts to make primary legal information issued within their power available to the public. A close examination of Chinese official legal information portals on the national level reveal issues such as a lack of uniformity and a lack of access to authenticated primary legal information. This article, by Xiaomeng Zhang1, proposes a solution that would not only offer more consistent guidelines for the government but would empower the public to assert their right to primary legal information more powerfully and effectively.

In this article John Bell follows his previous LIM article which was published in December 20121 by suggesting that, despite the development towards an open access world for publically funded research, the journal as a form of publication for peer reviewed research is far from dead; indeed, it has an active role to play in the future.

This article by Renae Satterley discusses a trial conducted over a four month period at Middle Temple Library where members were allowed to borrow iPads for a week, free of charge. The iPads were lent to the library by LexisNexis and had ebooks and a subscription to LexisLibrary loaded on to them. In this article the author discusses the pros and cons of lending tablets to library users and whether law ebooks are as popular as some claim. It also examines the possibilities of integrating tablet computers into legal research training sessions.

In this article Jackie Fishleigh provides an introduction to the issue of Big Data, gives the definitions for the subject and offers an explanation of the key issues about Big Data and what involvement we have as information professionals.

In this conference report Vola Walker gives an account of the conference of the Australian Law Librarians Association (ALLA) held in Sydney in 2013.