at the time of her tragic death, gillian sands had already established a successful career in law librarianship. she had trained at city university school of information science and worked in professional posts at two of the most prestigious legal research libraries in the uk. gillian had also made friends at each stage of her career across all sectors of law librarianship and was highly valued by those with whom she had worked. she had played an important role in the social life of her workplace as well as being valued for her dedication, conscientiousness and initiative. as a tribute to gillian, this article traces her career in law librarianship and her various achievements. i record my thanks to her friends and colleagues alison, caroline, christine, emily, wendy, and others who wrote to me in february this year.

since the restructuring of the reader services department (now the academic services department) of ials library in 2000 and the subsequent investment in additional staff capacity, ials library has consciously sought to develop and improve both the public training programmes delivered to researchers and the in-house training programmes provided for library staff. this article seeks to explain the key changes that took place and to describe the resulting expansion in both types of training programmes. the department was fortunate in being able to appoint gillian sands as llm services librarian in january 2001 in a move from the library's book acquisitions section and gillian quickly became an integral part of the reader services team. happily gillian's invaluable years at ials coincided with an exciting and rewarding period of expansion and innovation in the library. as in so many other areas of her work, she bought sensible practical ideas, much bubbly enthusiasm, and a great deal of hard work to help the team make these improvements to services a success.

gillian sands started her career by studying the msc in information science at city university in the session 1998–99. among the standard skills, she studied in particular legal aspects of library and information work and also services and documentation about the law in general, in other words, information law and legal information.

as ever, it started with an innocent looking email. “idea” stated the subject line, but who could be emailing ideas to me on a sunny wednesday lunchtime in june? jennifer barrow, as it turned out, had not been spending her lunch in the park drinking too much pimms, but had been browsing through mary blake's history of biall (as a good council member does) and discovered that the law for librarians course (as was) had been running for 20 years. the very first course had started in the autumn of 1984, meaning that our 2004/2005 year would be the 21st year of the course, surely reason for celebration! after much deliberating over what would be most suitable for such an esteemed and valuable part of biall's portfolio of courses, a special logo was created for the year's course materials, and a successful evening reunion was held in april. this took place at bpp's new law school at waterloo and was attended by over 30 past and current law librarians, including a brave few who attended that very first year.

this article by dilshaad brey, reference librarian, is a description of the brand van zyl law library at the university of cape town (uct), south africa. the author met gillian sands whilst on an internship at the ials library in june 2004.

paper given by amy b. osborne, foreign and comparative law specialist at university of kentucky college of law library at the biall pre-conference seminar on treaties and international law, harrogate, june 9, 2005. eisil, the electronic information system for international law was fully launched in september 2004. a project of the american society of international law, eisil is designed to assist researchers both experienced and novice, who are looking for information within the realm of international law.

international law and treaties was this year's theme at the seminar in harrogate. maria bell reports on two of the papers. professor anthony aust gave the opening paper on the basics of international law and the treaty framework. paul barnett and nevil hagon of the foreign and commonwealth office treaty section presented an overview of their work in maintaining treaty records and in advising on treaty procedures and processes.

legal information has specific features due to its nature, its different utilisation purposes and the intrinsic need for integration of its components, represented by legislation, cases and doctrine. access to legal literature in particular is a primary requirement; it responds to the demand for understanding and interpretation of statutes and cases, an objective that law scholars and professionals greatly contribute to.

the sarbanes-oxley act of 2002 has established a new reason for legal publishers to bring out books and loose-leaf services on a new topic. in his second contribution dave rogers from sidley austin's chicago office describes materials of greater interest to law librarians and lawyers.

hazel hewison, biall chair, reports on her experiences at the carall conference workshop on disaster planning, following the disastrous 2004 atlantic hurricane season and the devastating asian tsunami tragedy in december 2004.

as part of a drive to deliver better government, ireland's unfair dismissals acts 1977–2001 are about to be extended to civil servants. the civil service (regulation) bill 2004 when enacted will apply the statutory code of unfair dismissal to thousands of officers whose remedies previously lay exclusively in public law. while preserving the principle that civil servants hold office at the will and pleasure of the government, the bill provides for the delegation of power in this respect from the government to ministers and to secretaries general. mary redmond, consultant solicitor at arthur cox considers the practical and, above all the legal implications of this stepchange.

it was in an e-mail from christine miskin discussing what i could write about in this article that i learnt of the death of gillian sands. i was saddened by this news as although i never met her in person, we did “meet” via e-mail. only a couple of weeks before her death she responded to a request we had sent out on the listserve for an obscure english case. her friendliness and willingness to assist a colleague were immediately apparent. her name was also familiar to me from articles she had written for legal information management and i know that the librarian in our london office had contact with her when she worked at the institute of advanced legal studies. to gillian's family, friends and colleagues we extend our deepest sympathy.

my hypothesis on the thinking behind this list is that libraries are organisations which are dynamic self evolving complex systems and so i have applied the simple systems theory template to how to merge two libraries. i think the key thing to remember is that systems cannot change radically or quickly and that they depend on feed-back to adjust their equilibrium. that said it follows that any merger, with its implications of big rapid change, will be difficult for any library system. it will be essential to keep open channels of communication and feed-back both within the immediate environment (the law firms themselves) and the external environment (publishers, service providers, journal subscriptions)