Work on the official history of criminal justice prompted Paul Rock's interest in why it was that so many government papers, amounting to some 98% of the files produced, have been destroyed over the years. Successive crises in the accumulation of records, accompanied by only a limited increase in the shelving capacity of the Public Record Office - later The National Archives - led in the 1950s and beyond to a firm emphasis being placed on the destruction rather than the retention of papers. Officials and politicians were adamant that the unforeseeable demands which future historians might make on the archives had to be accorded less importance than the economic practicalities of what was called ‘weeding’.

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.

The quarterly bulletins on crime statistics in England and Wales are compiled from two sets of data: crime survey and police-recorded crime. Whilst the former is considered to give the most reliable trends, the latter has a greater level detail for a fuller spectrum of crimes types. This paper by Allan Brimicombe, explores the advantages and problems of analysing police-recorded data for the insights they contain. This is illustrated by examples from an analysis of domestic violence.

There is a wide range of sources that might fruitfully be used in criminological research. This article, by Andromachi Tseloni* and Nick Tilley**, overviews the type of evidence used in research that has recently appeared in the British Journal of Criminology, gives examples of unobtrusive administrative data that have been used in recent projects, and focuses on a single data set, the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which covers a wide range of criminological topics. Finally, it will be suggested that criminologists may be missing opportunities to draw on valuable data sets that, though imperfect, could be useful to them in their research.

This article by Lizzie Seal is adapted from a presentation given at the Sources and Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice socio-legal research workshop that was held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in November 2015. It explores the selection of qualitative sources for a project that aimed to uncover public responses to capital punishment in the mid twentieth-century. The article discusses which sources were selected and considers their strengths and weaknesses. It concludes that the particular sources chosen as data can, in themselves, help to shape researchers’ thinking about their findings.

The Radzinowicz Library is the specialist criminology library of the Institute of Criminology, a research and teaching department of the University of Cambridge. As Stuart Stone explains, it is the premier academic criminology collection in the United Kingdom and indeed it is one of the major collections in this subject in the world. The library primarily serves the Institute and the University but also the wider community of criminal justice researchers, many of whom are regular visitors. In common with other libraries, financial pressures are a continuing concern, especially because of the interdisciplinary nature of the subject. Outreach and engagement with organisations outside academia add to the distinctive characteristics of the library.

The National Archives has an important role in providing access to records of crime because of its role as the national archive for the records of the higher law courts and central government departments. Because of its status as the national archives for the United Kingdom, it has a pivotal role in shaping and influencing the developing freedom of information and data protection issues concerning records of crime. As Nigel Taylor describes in this short article, it has also created internal structures to cope with the increasing workload, complexity and need for transparency when dealing with these matters.

This article by Adrian Howe is based on a presentation given at the ‘Sources and Methods in Criminology and Criminal Justice Conference’ in November 2015, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Education and the Socio-Legal Studies Association. She begins by querying whether there are indeed distinct feminist methods in the social sciences. She outlines the impact of what she calls the ‘methodical revolution’ on the criminology discipline, Foucault's contribution and Foucauldian methodologies deployed in criminological and criminal justice research.

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.

In this second of a series of two articles, Daniel Bates considers some of the most popular online platforms which are available to host and promote audio and video content for purposes including knowledge-sharing, teaching, research dissemination, and profile-building.

Hester Swift writes about the successful one-day courses on foreign and international legal research that have been run since 2009 at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) in conjunction with BIALL. These courses have been a collaborative venture between the Foreign and International Law Librarians at the Bodleian Law Library at Oxford, the Squire Law Library at Cambridge, and the IALS Library, together with law librarians from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies and the University of Cardiff. The courses have attracted delegates from many different sectors of the legal information profession. The post of Foreign and International Law Librarian, or Foreign, Comparative and International Law Librarian, is relatively new to the UK, but has a long history in the United States. The BIALL-IALS foreign and international law training initiative complements the cooperation of the Foreign Law Research (FLARE) Group.