There are three main themes in this, the first issue of LIM for 2005. We begin with a series of short articles on the perils, pitfalls and challenges of multi-site working within the legal information environment. I am very grateful to the large number of people who have contributed to this theme by answering a short questionnaire that we put together in an attempt to ascertain what the key issues are. Some of our contributors have elected to answer the questions given as a template and others have adopted a more narrative style. Unfortunately we did not manage to get a contribution from an academic library. We do have articles from a number of our well-known large regional/City law firms, plus contributions from two smaller Scottish firms and the experiences of the College of Law. As a precursor to this theme our topical issues section features an article by Elisabeth Tooms, until recently Global Head of Library Services at Allen & Overy, on the challenges involved in running what must be the ultimate multi-site library with a staff of over 70 information professionals scattered around the world. Elisabeth also traces the history of her involvement in the development of the service from its beginnings in the early 1980's. At the other end of the spectrum Isabel Hood has written a wonderfully down-to-earth account of the stresses and strains of being a one-person library and information service in a multi-site law firm.

Elisabeth Tooms has recently taken early retirement from Allen & Overy, one of our largest law firms, after many years of service there and she has been persuaded to look back and consider the most significant changes which have taken place in law firm information work over the last twenty years.

The following articles were written by law librarians employed by a variety of organisations in response to a questionnaire sent out by the Editorial Board. The aim of this brief survey was to try and find out what the key issues are facing librarians who operate in such situations. We were unable to get a contribution from an academic library operating a multi-site system. Some of the articles have followed the format of the questions posed in the survey and others are more discursive, but the Editorial Board hopes that readers will find useful nuggets of information in these different accounts. They certainly offer interesting organisational schemas.

DLA LLP is currently the seventh largest law firm in the UK, with offices throughout the country and many others overseas. We have over 3,600 people working in the firm, which includes 380 partners. This article will explore how we used to provide legal and business information to the lawyers in the UK, and how it compares to what we do now following a recent restructure.

We are a law firm with over 4,000 staff, including over 2,000 legal and business advisers, providing services to the private and public sector business and finance community. With a network of over 24 offices throughout Europe and in Asia, including offices in London, Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Doha, Madrid, Milan, Rome, Shanghai, Singapore, Sofia, Valladolid and Vienna, Eversheds' lawyers combine an in-depth knowledge of local markets with the resources and international capability of one of the world's largest law firms.

There is an overall Head of Library and Information Services (LIS), who has responsibility for all the UK libraries and also has a ‘dotted’ line responsibility for the library teams in the international offices.

Is each site autonomous or is there an overall head of information?

There is an overall Head of IS.

Who is the information team answerable to?

The Head of IS who reports to the Managing Partner.

It is quite the norm these days for the larger Scottish law firms to have more than one office, and for each of those offices to have its own library. For the most part there is a main office with satellite offices in other cities. We have four offices, in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and London. Edinburgh, Glasgow and London all have established libraries, and until recently both the Edinburgh and Glasgow libraries were staffed full time. This changed in November 2003 and I now have to co-ordinate all three libraries and keep an eye on our new office in Aberdeen. I am based in the Edinburgh office, which is currently spread over three sites all on the same street. The Glasgow office is split between two sites, slightly further apart, and our London office is all in one building.

I haven't opened my mail this week (it's only the end of Wednesday after all); last week's mail is opened and it's sitting in another unloved pile waiting for whenever I have a chance to actually do something with any of it, though all the critical stuff is at least removed and done. The open boxes in front of my desk are the new library materials which unfortunately have arrived just before the Glasgow library moves to the bigger space with more shelving that I require in order to get any of it integrated into stock. My desk appears to be a perilous pile of email printouts from research queries with hand-written scrawls all over them about progress to date; bits of faxes and new floor layout plans. I won't even discuss the state of my unread email inbox, or the other piles of less urgent backlogs behind my chair, mostly cat/n/class, journals to be delved through for current awareness nuggets and material for adding to the library know-how system.

The College of Law is the largest provider of vocational legal education and training in Europe, and has a client base of both pre- and post-qualification students. It has five centres across the UK in Birmingham, Chester, York, Guildford and London, and caters for over 5,000 students each year. Although it is a multi-site organisation, the aim at the College is that students should have the same experience in terms of course structure and delivery, regardless of which branch they choose.

I begin this article with some trepidation in that I am the first “international correspondent” to try his hand at informing BIALL members as to developments of note in another country and hope that readers will find the information which follows to be of interest as it is instructive and often helpful to learn of the issues and problems confronting our colleagues from other jurisdictions.

Candy Jannetta presented a training session at the BIALL Newcastle Weekend Study Conference which was specifically directed towards teaching legal information professionals how to improve their relationship building, marketing, influencing and negotiating skills, by using a combination of teaching and practical exercises.

Lesley Robinson presented a workshop session at the BIALL Bristol Study Weekend covering using report writing to build business cases for dealing with reductions in library budgets, non-replacement of staff and introducing new service initiatives.

Alison Johnson reviews Eversheds' approach to delivering legal research training and the development of an effective training module which was first delivered in 2002 and has recently had its first cohort moving into qualification and the workplace as fully trained lawyers.

Jennifer Barrow, Head of Knowledge Management at Baker & McKenzie, presented a paper to the BIALL Annual Conference in Edinburgh in June 2004 which discussed effective strategies for managing the sometimes difficult relationship that can exist between legal information professionals and professional support lawyers in large law firms.

In 2001, the British Library of Political and Economic Science completed its two year building redevelopment. The Library is now in a modern environment that it had been in desperate need of. This article looks at the building, the layout of collections and services, public study spaces and office space. A view of how the Library works after three years in a new environment.

Ann Lees explains the background to the move of Kings College Library from the Strand to its new headquarters in the very imposing former Public Records Office building in Chancery Lane and shares with us some of the delights of her new residence.

Rochelle Rawlinson outlines her experiences as the Lovells' London office's library manager when its library research team, the main library, and group libraries, moved to a new building in July 2002. She looks at the lead up to the move and its aftermath including a merger of the information teams. An underlying theme is managing and dealing with change.

Clare Monk and the library team at US law firm Sidley Austin recount their experiences of merging two physically separate library sites into one and the advantages of their brand new location.

In October 2004 Google announced the availability of its Google Search Appliance throughout Europe. It is an integrated hardware and software search solution that enables corporations, universities and government agencies to deliver Google-quality search results on their intranets and public websites. Google are promoting its key features as: relevant results (as it leverages many of the same search algorithms as Google.com); familiarity with the Google search; ease of deployment and administration; a continuous crawl; and enterprise security.