Linda Holbeche discusses how knowledge and service industry organisations should change in recessionary periods and she explains the cycle of change.

Free access to public legal information for the general public and professionals promotes justice and the rule of law. Presenters at the 2015 Law via the Internet conference discussed projects using the power of technology combined with expert human input to make information accessible, and to extract new information from large document collections. Although the scale is different, there are similarities in the ways in which indexers and informaticians explore meaning, develop standards and consider user needs to make information widely accessible. Glenda Browne reports on the conference.*

Diane Gwynne-Smith writes about the project, which she managed, to create the most comprehensive and freely available online database of materials on social care. It can be found at: www.scie-socialcareonline.org.uk

This article explores how and why LawCare came into being. LawCare is the only charity dedicated to promoting and supporting good mental health and wellbeing across the legal community in the UK. The charity started in 1997 to help solicitors with alcohol problems, but has developed over the years and now supports all legal professionals in the UK, Channel Islands and Isle of Man with any mental health and wellbeing issues. This article by Mary Jackson is based on a presentation she gave at the BIALL Online Annual Conference held in June 2021.

This article by Rebecca O'Rourke, Commissioning Editor, Humanities and Social Sciences Journals, Cambridge University Press discusses the results of the recent survey carried out by CUP on our behalf to see whether LIM is still relevant to our readers.

In the 150th anniversary year of both Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the inception of the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting (ICLR) this article by Alison Million considers any possible common contemporaneous connections between their authors. It makes particular reference to Lewis Carroll's legal associations and his fascination with the processes of law, considering to what extent these may have influenced Alice. In briefly reviewing ICLR history and the instigating factors behind reform it looks at the requisite skills needed finally to devise a successful scheme and any potential overlap between those and some of Lewis Carroll's many subject disciplines. The article concludes that just as the law helped shape Alice, so has Alice contributed to English case law by providing a descriptor for “perfect nonsense”.

The concept of placemaking has been widely utilized by public and university libraries to create spaces with library users in mind. This article by Lee F. Peoples describes how academic law libraries can employ placemaking concepts to support their parent law school's program of legal education, encourage collaborative learning, and connect students with their school's community, values and traditions. This article explains how academic law libraries can assess placemaking activities and other uses of library space and demonstrate a return on investment made into library spaces. The article concludes with some predictions for the future of assessing library space use.

Simon Drane writes that the next decade will see a shift within legal service provision, where it will transition from a model which is predominantly geared around internal work processes to one that is geared around customer outcomes. Law firms will complete their evolution from a bill by the hour service-based model to something closer to a product subscription model. This shift will deliver growth, sustainable recurring revenues at high margins and new higher value service opportunities. At the core of this shift is the changing nature of consumption driven by consumer technology and the inexorable drive for base level information to become free. Law firms are sitting on vast quantities of data, and yet very few are currently harnessing this effectively in their offerings. The effective use of data combined with technology will allow innovative organisations to provide a new form of productised offering which will not only drive new recurring revenues but will allow them to offer higher value business advisory services. Whereas effective use of data within the organisation will lead to better evolutionary efficiency, quality and risk management, the use of data externally for clients will lead to more revolutionary changes. It will also blur the lines further between traditional law firms and LegalTech product businesses, in the way alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) and the Big Four are already exploring.

Ivo Vogel brings us news of the latest areas of interest in German legal information, with a report from a recent conference entitled Legal Information in Change, held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, including information literacy, the Virtual Law Library, copyright and catalogue enrichment.

Disability discrimination law is a fast evolving area of the law in England and Wales. This article sets out the basic concepts of what constitutes a “disability”, what constitutes “discrimination” and some of the factors that tribunals, employees and employers should consider in a disability discrimination dispute.

New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa, in the windy city of Wellington in the Southern Hemisphere spring of early September was the venue for 2002's conference “Visible Justice - evolving access to the law”. This was my first overseas conference as a BIALL delegate and one I approached with trepidation, not really knowing what to expect, but my overall impression was without doubt a positive one. I was able to obtain a network of valuable contacts and gain an important insight into legal librarianship in the Country.

One of the perks awarded to the BIALL Chair is the opportunity to attend the AALL Annual meeting in the summer. I had been once before, as a BIALL bursary recipient, to Washington DC in 1999 and knew that there would be a great deal to observe and learn apart from the main conference programme. The scale of the American conference is, of course, very different to ours: nearly 1800 delegates compared to the 400 we had in Liverpool in June; 74 scheduled conference sessions and several hundred business meetings, a conference centre over a mile long (!), and of course the whole “larger than life” experience of being in Orlando. I knew the heat would be a problem for me, so I opted to stay in the Peabody Hotel just across the road from the conference centre, with its twice-daily “Duck Walk” to the fountain in the hotel lobby.

“I am an indexer” as the answer to the usual occupation enquiry is pretty much guaranteed to stop a conversation stone dead. It is much easier to say ‘librarian’, which was on my passport for 20 years, or even ‘information scientist’, which I was trained to be. Sometimes I get quite defiant. I am an indexer, and yes a human actually does prepare those pages at the back of books, and no, it is not all done by computer.

Having worked in law librarianship in the United Kingpdom for almost five years and known colleagues who had attended overseas conferences, I always thought what a wonderful opportunity it is to attend an overseas conference. Where else would you be able to meet like-minded folk from a completely different part of the world and possibly also a different culture? When I saw that the 2002 ALLG symposium was being held in Brisbane I decided this was the year I should apply to attend. Of course the fact that I have friends who live near Brisbane did not influence my thought process or affect my enthusiasm to attend!

E-government first came on the scene for local authorities in 1999 with the publication of the White Paper Modernising Government by the Cabinet Office. The Government of the time was persuaded that, due to the substantial and high publicity advances in online and dot.com businesses, public services in general and local government functions in particular would have to be capable of being delivered technologically. If this was not to be the case, then the Government expected a backlash from those who could buy goods online, download music from Internet sites and post messages on bulletin boards but who could not report a fault, make a complaint or pay their council tax in a similar way. Ironically, during the intervening years, the business world has seen the dot.com crash and many of the young upstart businesses which appeared on the scene around that time have either gone bust or been swallowed up by more traditional businesses that approached the electronic agenda much more slowly and cautiously. This means that one of the main drivers to have e-government at all, has substantially reduced in its ferocity.

Although one can read differing accounts of what is involved in information auditing, most commentators would probably accept that audits are, in some form or another, a type of investigation undertaken for the purpose of optimising information use within organisations. In practice this can range from the compilation of a straightforward inventory of published materials to an analysis of information use and flow across the whole of an organisation's operations. Despite differences in scope, most audits are likely to consist of a survey of the organisation combined with some form of gap analysis.

This article, by Sarah Bracey and Tony Simmonds, explores professional and cultural challenges confronting two BIALL members involved in a project to enhance law library services in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It considers approaches to developing effectual supportive partnerships in a developing country context where the legal information ecosystem and provision of resource differ to an extent that all but inverts the familiar working world. The article traces the boundaries of what change is feasible in such a context, cautioning against over-ambition and advocating areas for future focus around staffing, co-ordination of donation programmes and digitisation of primary materials.

Kay Munro, Senior Assistant Librarian at Glasgow University Library, writes about the courses offered by the Faculty of Law at Glasgow, the law library's collections and the services offered to students.

In this article David Wills, the Librarian of the Squire Law Library, offers a brief description of the extraordinary range of architecture at the University of Cambridge with particular reference to the David Williams Building, designed by the world-renowned architects Foster + Partners. He suggests that, in the context of the Squire Law Library, which occupies the top three floors of the David Williams Building, the building has truly come of age; he looks at some of the features and challenges of its modern design; and notes that the building looks set to play a major part in the education and research activity of legal scholars and university students into the distant future. This article is a personal reflection based on the author's experience of using and working in the building for some 26 years since it was constructed and opened in the mid-1990s.