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 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.

In this article Ruth Bird examines the issues around moving, or relocating, a library. Drawing on her experiences of moving, relocating and renovating, and in the context of current work that is happening at the Bodleian Law Library (BLL), she compares the issues in relation to both law firm libraries and academic libraries. The article examines space management and collection management issues, planning, allocating roles and how the burden of moves can be shared in a collaborative way. Ruth also looks at the ‘people’ issues and the implications for collections.

This article by Stuart Reid and Janice Edwards of Maclay Murray & Spens, focusses on three areas of the Scottish legal system: the Scottish courts system; the impact of devolution in Scotland and some examples of differences between the Scottish and English legal systems.

First, here is a quick recap for those not familiar with the Library and the Document Supply Service. The Institute Library is a postgraduate academic research library, known for its collections of foreign and international law, particularly Commonwealth law. The main funding for the Institute and its library comes from HEFC. However, in our experience, the collections need to be available to practitioners. Lawyers may not always be willing or able to visit the library in person so a commercial document supply service was devised in the early 1990s, to meet a legal need and to help serve the administration of justice. A significant side-effect of the document supply service has become its ability to generate income to supplement the annual grant from HEFC. The workings of the scheme are set out fully in Gee (1999) but, in outline, practitioners must Join the Library as subscribers and are then able to access our priced document supply service. Full details are available at http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/iservice/iservice.htm.

Jonathan Sims looks at the way the British Library has been redefining its role in light of the changing environment of society's information revolution. An overview of challenges from the information society and the institutional complex is followed by descriptions of how the Library is responding through content strategy and programmes for digitisation, digital preservation and web archiving. A brief look is also taken at the new social science strategy and a new content specialist role for law and socio-legal studies.

In this article, Nick Jarrett-Kerr examines the long delayed implementation of the ABS structure which is likely to be finally implemented in October 2011. He reviews the plans of some early movers towards ABS and considers the possible benefits to law firms, to external investors and to clients.

The definition of mashing in the context of content is different depending on where you look. In this example from Fiona Fogden of Baker Tilly, mashing refers to the blending of content from a variety of sources into a single location. It is a process librarians have been undertaking for years in bulletins and abstracts, but new technology brings with it new terminology as well as new opportunities.

Allie Lustigman from Linklaters updates the information collated from a survey of the internal use made by law firms of social software tools and provides an insight into how blogs, RSS feeds and wikis are also being implemented for external use for clients.

Helen Dewar has written a very practical list of do's and dont's when implementing a law firm intranet, based on her own experience.

This article has been written by Harpreet K. Dhillon, with contributions from colleagues at Gray's Inn Library, Inner Temple Library, Middle Temple Library and Lincoln's Inn's Library. During the course of the article, Harpreet looks at the way the four of Inns of Court libraries support barristers, though will use the term members interchangeably throughout. The Inns have their own histories, and the libraries function in their own unique ways, so the focus of this article are those key services provided by all the libraries and their relevance to the continuing work of Inn members. The article has been written using anecdotal evidence and contributions from all the library teams, concluding that the Inn libraries play a crucial and ongoing role in supporting the work of barristers, a role that evolves and will continue to do so alongside the legal profession's demands.

In this, the second of two articles, Nadine Fathers looks at what information is available through the various legal online subscription databases in relation to pending appeal cases. Her first article was published in the Spring 2012 issue of LIM.1

In this article Kate Faulkner describes her experience of creating an index for 36 volumes of committee minutes for the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple, and explains the processes involved. She explores the unique issues associated with the indexing of minutes and relates some of the aspects of human interest found within the material and discusses the role of the indexer.

John Eaton from the University of Manitoba at Winnipeg, describes an important Canadian knowledge initiative within the academic library community relating to acquisition of digital resources.

Smart contracts, which were once theorised, are now somewhat realised, thanks to recent developments in distributed ledger technology. Yet, these self-executing agreements written in code are not a panacea to businesses’ and individuals’ contracting woes. It is argued that smart contracts worsen existing power asymmetries between contracting parties, thus, fallbacks must be provided for.

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.

Gail Boelens discusses how library and research training is delivered in a large Australian law firm. She also considers some of the challenges involved, including dealing with multiple jurisdictions, databases using different operating platforms and having adequate resources to develop and deliver training.

Tony Simmonds describes the various initiatives undertaken, and the lessons learned by the information staff at the College of Law's multiple sites, in relation to social networking including blogging, wikis, and social bookmarking.

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.

The Scotland Act 1998 which established the Scottish Parliament confers on that Parliament the power to make laws which are known as Acts of the Scottish Parliament. However, the legislative competence of the Parliament is restricted. The main restriction relates to reserved matters, that is those matters which the UK Parliament has not devolved to the Scottish Parliament. These are listed in sch 5 to the Act and cover such matters as defence, taxation, social security and macro-economics. Other significant restrictions on the Parliament's legislative competence are that an Act of the Scottish Parliament cannot make any provision which is incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) or with European Community law, nor can an Act of the Scottish Parliament modify certain “protected enactments” - including most provisions of the Scotland Act 1998 itself and the Human Rights Act I 998. Finally, an Act of the Scottish Parliament cannot have effect outside Scotland, nor can it remove the Lord Advocate from his position as head of the systems of criminal prosecutions and investigation of deaths in Scotland. An Act of the Scottish Parliament is not law so far as any provision of it is outside the Parliament's legislative competence