This article, written by Adam Woellhaf, describes the legal research training offered by Middle Temple Library to Inns of Court members. It examines the challenges of designing and delivering legal research training to practitioners, as well as offering guidance and advice to others in their own legal research training efforts. It also looks at the potential for using mobile technology in legal research instruction.

This article argues that a migration from print resources to electronic access is required to democratise access to legal information for lawyers, and that resource managers should seize this opportunity to ‘go digital’ while lawyers are more accepting of change and open to new technologies as a result of forced changes to working practices during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author, Jas Breslin, a law library professional with 20-plus years of experience, explains how the sector is now grasping the nettle.

This brief note describes the procedures followed and the results obtained through updating the FLAG (Foreign Law Guide) database (http://ials.sas.ac.uk/flag.htm), which took place over summer 2004. The results indicate generally a decline in the acquisition of new primary legal material in traditional paper format, within the foreign, international and comparative law collections of UK universities, national libraries and other major law libraries. From a small number of observations and comments noted by contributors to the survey, there appear to be three reasons for this. First, the availability of an increasing number of materials on the internet (a few titles are now no longer published in paper format). Second, difficulties in regularly acquiring material from some countries where publishing and distribution of publications are intermittent or severely delayed and, third, the cancellation of subscriptions due to budget cuts and a reappraisal of the value to the individual institution of maintaining particular collections.

In this article James Hamilton, Research Principal at the Society of Writers to HM Signet in Edinburgh, describes the history of the Signet Library as it approaches its 300th anniversary. He writes about some of the changes that have taken place over those three centuries and he also mentions some of the challenges for the library as the nature of the legal profession has altered, not least those presented recently by the Covid-19 pandemic.

This article, written by Lesley Dingle, is based upon an in-depth interview with Dame Rosalyn Higgins in March 2014. It highlights particular elements that characterise her contribution to legal scholarship and international adjudication, and should be read in the context of the biography presented in the Eminent Scholars Archive: http://www.squire.law.cam.ac.uk/eminent_scholars/dame_rosalyn_higgins.php. Dame Rosalyn Higgins was born in Kensington in 1937. She grew up in London during the Blitz and her matter-of-fact account of these times epitomised her later career: application to the task in hand, and a lack of a sense of expectation. After the War, she passed successively through grammar school, Girton College, Yale and the Royal Institute of International affairs, steadily immersing herself over fifteen years in the work of the United Nations during its formative period. It was on the UN's role as the global peace-keeper and international law-maker that she became the acknowledged authority. There followed a long period of formal academia (1978–95: Kent and LSE), during which she rose to high office. This experience further honed her scholarly and administrative instincts, and she was honoured in 1995 with a DBE. Later that year Dame Rosalyn was appointed to the Bench of the International Court of Justice – the first woman to rise to this position, and in 2006 was elected its President. She retired in 2009.

This article aims to identify and define some of the legal issues, the computer misuses and the information misbehaviour associated with IT security that are increasingly a matter for civil litigation, criminal cases and national policy where fighting serious organised crime and cybercrime are concerned. The author, Brunella Longo, investigates this subject, suggests criteria and offers practical guidance for researching the issues. The article also includes references to relevant legislation, normative technical standards and best practices that have emerged as a result of corporate IT developments.

The concepts of agile working, the emergence of the entreployee and generational issues: are these concepts game changers or just gimmicks? Jackie Fishleigh examines new ways of office working in the commercial and information environments. Her thoughts are informed and inspired in part by her attendance at the London Law Expo, Europe's largest senior legal management conference and exhibition, which took place on 13th October 2015.

In this article, Jackie Fishleigh reflects on her first taste of e-learning whilst undertaking the revamped Legal Foundations Course. She explains how the course now works and compares it to the original version she took 20 years ago. She also looks at the views on e-learning expressed by Professor Richard Susskind and educationalist, Alan Clarke. The advantages and disadvantages are explored, together with the characteristics of a successful e-learner. The article aims to be informative and entertaining.

Following an introduction to the Hungarian legal system, highlighting some of the main events of the history of the Hungarian state and Hungarian law and reviewing the system of Hungarian legislation, this article provides sources of legal information in Hungary, including the most important acts, reference books, legal periodicals and sources of legal information in printed and electronic form and on the internet. It has been contributed by Tamás Böszörményi, Eszter Horváth, Tibor Kövér and Krisztina Orphanides.

Increasing access to digital works and the proliferation of digital genres has changed the way in which we conceive of information, and particularly legal information, including how it is represented within legal citation practice. This article, written by Melissa Castan and Kate Galloway, contributes to the discourse around legal citation in two ways. It first provides a theoretical justification for citation practice as an element of legal information management crucial to effective scholarship, including knowledge creation and dissemination. Secondly, and based on this theoretical foundation, it identifies the challenges facing existing legal citation practice in the face of new media, new representations of legal scholarship, and new objectives for citation practice. Finally, in this article we distil foundation principles for citation to integrate these diverse elements. To illustrate the application of these principles, the article closes with suggested citation practices designed to enhance the existing framework in this digital landscape.

The Library is of value as a physical and social space, as a place that can facilitate learning; independently and in distinct ways to its role as repository of, and point of access to, information. The problems that defenders of this “learning place” aspect of the Library face are bound up with a very powerful, and indeed prevalent, metaphor. This metaphor is of teaching and learning as the transfer of information from one place or head, to another place or head. Therefore, Graham Ferris and Angela Donaldson put forward a far more realistic account of learning, and combine it with an example of learning being enacted in practice. We need to articulate the value of the Library as a place of learning because it is under threat from pressures on resources that are being deployed on a “common sense” but fallacious assumption that Libraries are about the storage and manipulation of information only.

Tony Simmonds describes the initiatives taken at the College of Law to assist students to perform effective practical legal research including a Legal Method foundation course; a vocational course for the Legal Practice Course and additional in house learning activities devised by the information professionals.

Over the past few years the cataloguing community has seen radical changes in cataloguing standards, changes which appear to have been largely ignored by legal information professionals. This is a mistake according to Helen Doyle; the new cataloguing model can have enormous implications for the legal community, particularly in the spheres of information and knowledge management, and the profession is missing a huge opportunity by ignoring it. A new cataloguing standard (RDA) has been developed based on an alternative theoretical approach, known as “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR). FRBR seeks to change the way we approach the bibliographic universe: from stand-alone, individual repositories of information to networks of linked data built on a structured hierarchy. Commercial law firms are constantly trying to make connections between their traditional resources, online repositories, internal know-how, etc, but struggle to achieve complete synchronicity. FRBR provides a solution to this knowledge management problem: all resources (including people, events and subjects) become searchable, and because everything is linked, users can access information by navigating to it, establishing their own pathway through the data. Moreover, the major legal databases are already utilising linked data in this way – it is time for law firms to catch up.

This practical checklist by Nicola Franklin, Head of Recruitment at Sue Hill Recruitment, gives useful tips on how to market your skills in preparation for internal promotion or a new job.

Professor Bill Cornish was a legal scholar of vision, who was well ahead of his time in two widely disparate areas, and in both he became a recognised leader and authority: legal history and intellectual property law. In the former he applied what was then the novel approach of stressing the contemporary social conditions to which the extant law had to apply - something that modern commentators could well ponder, but which he was honest enough to acknowledge was also criticised by some of his peers at the time. As for intellectual property law, his place as the ‘father of intellectual property teaching and scholarship in the UK’ was acclaimed by his admission as a Fellow of the British Academy in 1984, and his place as the inaugural occupant of the Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law, at Cambridge (1995–2004). Both these activities had their origins in Bill's long stay (1970–1990) as professor of law at the London School of Economics, where he was influenced by their emphasis on societal tertiary education, and his friendship with the renowned Anglo-German scholar Otto Kahn-Freund, respectively. In reality, though, Bill's upbringing in the unique milieu of immediate post-War South Australia, which he describes as a backwater of tranquility, and his urge to see Europe were the roots of his expansive vision of the law. Lesley Dingle interviewed Bill for the Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) in 2015, nine years after his retirement, and these observations of this remarkable scholar are based on those conversations, and her readings of his works.

In this article Wirt Soetenhorst explores a paradigm shift that is already taking place in the legal education market and that will accelerate over the next five years. This development will have consequences for all the parties that are active in the field of academic legal education: authors, institutions, libraries, students and publishers. The article analyses the current traditional business model (the sale of physical textbooks) and outlines several potential scenarios for the future of legal publishing in which publishers move into teaching and academic institutions.

This Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2015, delivered by Professor Stephen Mayson2, explores the commercial evolution of law as a business, and draws attention to the disconnect between this development and continuing significant unmet need for legal services and prohibitively high fees for consumers and small businesses. The evolution is therefore supposed to be far from complete, and is hampered by the broken business model of law firms. A further shortcoming is the regulatory framework for legal services. Although this, too, has evolved in recent years with the introduction of the Legal Services Act 2007, the framework is nevertheless built on the still-complex and limiting structure of reserved activities, regulatory objectives and prescriptive detail. The author then explores the implications for information professionals, and highlights the opportunities for them to contribute to the development of ‘knowing management’, to the better education and training of legal practitioners, to helping them and their organisations address greater complexity and fluidity in regulation, and to harnessing market and client intelligence to improve the quality and relevance of legal services and the value of client relationships. The themes of cooperation, collaboration and connectivity underpin all of these opportunities, and contribute to the possibility of shaping and re-forming the role of the information professional in the 21st century.

This paper, written by Sue du Feu and James Lambert, outlines the challenges faced by the Jersey Legal Information Board (JLIB) in providing free access to legal information. The power of modern internet search engines has implications for a small island jurisdiction wishing to make its case law available on-line (see: www.jerseylaw.je). Having established protocols and policies to ensure a balance between open justice and privacy, several years later, JLIB is faced with concerns from individuals who feel that continuing public access to their earlier misdemeanours is an unfair burden. The paper will explain how the JLIB addressed the challenge of publishing court judgments online while safeguarding the interests of the individual.

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.

When faced with a U.S. legal research question, what options does the non-U.S. based researcher have, short of purchasing a subscription to one of the fee-based databases or visiting a major research library? This article will briefly discuss a number of no-cost and low-cost resources in the context of the process required to perform U.S. legal research and will also provide explanations of the different types of primary sources that a legal researcher might encounter.