Jennifer Vass and James Mullan of the BIALL Blog take a look at the UK law librarian blogging scene, dispelling some of the myths associated with blogging before asking, “Where do you want to go today?”

This article by Loyita Worley examines the potential effects of outsourcingknowledge management processes in law firms and discusses the impact it may haveon the firm, its information resources and the clients involved.

Peter Lake is the Managing Director of Sweet & Maxwell, a Thomson company. As part of our feature on law librarianship and legal information in the 21st Century, we arranged to interview him to ascertain his views both on the future of legal publishing and on how Sweet & Maxwell are faring in the early part of the century.

Outsourcing is now a reality for the legal profession. Sarah Fahy from Allen & Overy LLP asks how we decide its relevance for know how. Key to deciding is an objective review of our current internal practices and an appreciation of the relationships and skills necessary for compiling successful know how. Establishing a productive partnership with an outsourcing company takes commitment and investment. Success is forged through a shared vision of success from an agreed starting point.

Ruth Bird considers how the facilities and services at the Bodleian Law Library will evolve in the 21st Century given its status as a member library of the Copyright Deposit Scheme, which means that whilst other libraries are shrinking their paper collections, it is still expanding them.

For over 100 years colleges of higher and further education have played important roles in the education of library and information professionals. However, the last decade has seen some significant changes in both the structure of teaching departments and the types of courses they deliver. This paper, delivered by Martin De Saulles at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, outlines some of the pressures currently facing the library and information profession and describes how teaching departments have responded in terms of course developments.

In a paper given at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, Samantha Steer covered key findings from the 2007 Sweet & Maxwell Survey Information Managers in the 21stCentury. The survey was prompted by changes in the legal market, including those that will follow from the Legal Services Act, and the wider availability of new technology, altering the delivery of legal information. The findings cover past changes to the information management role, and perceptions as to how the role will continue to change over the coming years.

Gillian Kalitsi, the current European Union librarian at Middle Temple, describes the scope of the collection, the types of enquiries she receives and also details the other holdings of this major professional organisation law library.

This is a further contribution to the Squire Law Library Eminent Scholars Archive by Lesley Dingle. It is based on interviews with Stephen Schwebel about his distinguished career as an international jurist in the United States and at the International Court of Justice.

This article by Caroline Shenton, Clerk of the Records at the Parliamentary Archives, describes the rich legacy of records relating to the judicial function of the House of Lords from the sixteenth century to 2009, when the new Supreme Court was established.

The team responsible for Legal Journals Index explain how journal articles are selected, indexed and loaded to this online legal information service provided by Sweet & Maxwell. They outline the history of LJI and discuss the criteria for determining which journals are included in the service; how the Articles team decides which articles will be indexed; the content of an LJI index entry; how an abstract is written; the use of the taxonomy; the full text journals service on Westlaw; and the work of the Document Delivery team.

In the first in our series of very short articles devoted to practical library and information management issues, Dean Mason from Salans provides helpful advice on how to set up a business continuity plan for your information service.

Derek Sturdy explains the importance of search engine optimisation for the legal information professional involved in the organisation's website in the Google era and suggests that the most important pieces of information are the title and the abstract. He also discusses the rise in automatic classification in the enterprise search context.

It took just a simple e-mail in the Autumn of 2000 to set the ball rolling towards one of the most informative, enjoyable and interesting professional experiences I've ever had. The e-mail in question was a request to fill in a questionnaire from the Foreign Comparative and International Law Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries. The questionnaire concerned participation in AALL's Clearinghouse for Internships & International Personnel Exchanges. This is a program used to promote exchanges and visits between law librarians in the US and abroad in order to develop both personal and professional relationships, and also to give librarians the chance to work with legal information sources pertaining to other jurisdictions. Library and Information Services (LIS) management here at the University of Wales Swansea (UWS) kindly agreed to explore both the avenues of hosting and that of ‘sending forth’ a law librarian within the program.

Many organisations, be they publishers or other information rich enterprises, are in possession of large volumes of data to which they are looking to add value in various ways. The motivation behind this might be purely commercial (a desire to publish revenue-generating material, for example) or, if the data is not intended for external consumption, an attempt to facilitate and improve the flow ofinformation within an organisation.

Does the following scenario sound familiar? You have an enormous amount of data that needs putting into some sort of coherent order. Your external Web site and company intranet contain vast numbers of documents and offer links to yet more information sources, all containing yet more data.

Your role in this deluge of information often leaves you feeling as though you are running to stand still. There are thousands of users (company employees as well as external browsers) searching for thousands of different documents and you have the unenviable job of making all of this information available to them in an efficient manner. Too much data, too little data, or data which is inaccurate are all potential problems to a user.

Amy Bell examines the controversial Bribery Act which will come into effect on 1st July 2011 and why most businesses will have to prepare for it.

Loyita Worley reports on the SLA Europe1 seminar held in March 2011 on the impact of outsourcing in law firms. The panel included the perspectives of the provider companies and experiences of law firm information professionals who have already adopted outsourcing and those who are about to.

Daniel Harrison, professional support lawyer, and Lisa Bunker, senior information officer, at Clifford Chance LLP explain why competition law research is so heavily based on European Union (EU) law and briefly describe the organisational framework and where to find key documents.

Lawyers are threatened as never before by the commoditisation of services and the automation of legal advice. Information professionals have been facing such threats for years. In this keynote article, Tim Buckley Owen asks whether it is time to make common cause?