This article, by Rosemary Hunter, is based on a presentation given at the national training day on ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: Sources and Methods in Socio-Legal Research’ in May 2014, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the British Library. She begins by describing the uses of judgments as sources within feminist research on judging, and then outlines three different methods of analysis employed within this research: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and the newest method, that of rewriting judgments.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been compiled by Peter Clinch, Information Specialist – Law, Cardiff University.

The intersection of freedom of information, privacy legislation and library services may be interpreted as the relation between two bodies (law and library) and how they influence one another directly and indirectly. This means library services can be shaped enormously by both federal and provincial freedom of information and privacy laws. We notice that there are cases in various Canadian courts involving disagreements concerning the rule of law in the fields of freedom of information and privacy with libraries. The combined effects of legislation and stronger library policies may make it more challenging for users to understand how to use shared library resources and services properly. For many libraries, this means operational policies and professional ethics codes have to be revised to strictly respect the users and employees’ confidentiality rights. The research method used for this paper included a search of relevant Canadian court cases as case studies.

This article, written by Natasha Choolhun, follows the progress of submitting a proposal to BIALL Council on the topic of devising a ‘Legal Information Literacy Toolkit’ following discussion at the 2011 BIALL conference.

In this digital age, users require immediate access to information. To foster the process of research, the legal fraternity demands efficient online legal information systems. Raj Kumar Bhardwaj provides a view from India and reports on a case study that has been conducted on the use of various legal information databases in the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi, India. In his paper, he also reviews and discusses the various aspects relating to legal information retrieval systems, with particular reference to the various essential legal databases that cover Indian law.

This paper is adapted from a presentation given by Sara Roberts at the 2015 BIALL Annual Conference. On September 4th 2010 Christchurch suffered the first of a series of catastrophic earthquakes which continued over the next two years and damaged much of the city. During this time the University of Canterbury suffered greatly, both through physical damage to the campus and from a loss of students willing to come and study in Christchurch. Subsequently, the dedicated Law Library on campus was closed and it was necessary to reassess the service in the light of severely reduced resources. More than four years on from that first earthquake, the law collection is situated in the central library on campus, and the number of professional law librarians supporting the service has reduced from four to two. Yet despite the changes the service has not diminished and, indeed, is stronger in some areas.

Maria Mawson explores the extent to which universities still teach undergraduates how to use print legal research sources. It also examines the level to which these sources are still provided, in the light of increasing costs, shrinking budgets and the convenience of online access.

Stella Dextre Clarke provided an article for our Winter 2003 issue on the government's drive towards interoperability, and the role of a controlled vocabulary in easing access to information. Here is an update, casting light on the relevance of the government's standards, from the viewpoint of our profession.

Although nowadays most courts publish decisions on the internet, substantial differences exist between European countries regarding such publication. These differences not only pertain to the extent with which judgments are published and anonymised, but also to their metadata, searchability and reusability. This article, written by Marc van Opijnen, Ginevra Peruginelli, Eleni Kefali and Monica Palmirani, contains a synthesis of a comprehensive comparative study on the publication of court decisions within all Member States of the European Union. Specific attention is paid on the legal and policy frameworks governing case law publication, actual practices, data protection issues, Open Data policies as well as the state of play regarding the implementation of the European Case Law Identifier.

This article by Karen Waldron describes the experiences of LexisNexis in implementing Agile as a framework in product development and across the organisation. It discusses the principles of Agile, the aims of LexisNexis of greater collaboration, quicker delivery of value to customers and continuous improvement, the main activities introduced, and the benefits experienced at LexisNexis as a result. It also discusses the applicability of Agile as a framework outside of software development, as the goals are common to most organisations, and sets out the view that incorporating simple agile activities into current working practices can have incremental and short term benefit for most teams.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been written by David Gee, Deputy Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.

In this article, Mark James and Guy Osborn discuss how the relationships between the various members of the Olympic Movement are governed by the Olympic Charter and the legal framework within which an edition of the Olympic Games is organised. The legal status of the Charter and its interpretation by the Court of Arbitration for Sport are examined to identify who is subject to its terms and how challenges to its requirements can be made. Finally, by using the UK legislation that has been enacted to regulate advertising and trading at London 2012, the far-reaching and sometimes unexpected reach of Olympic Law is explored.

It was only three years ago that I was told that publishing valuable digital content on the Internet would not take off for 10 years. Today it is happening all around us with MP3 music files being swapped by our children and market research reports openly passed between business colleagues. The problem is that the intellectual property owners lose control of distribution through publishing content on the Internet – in its raw essence, an unregulated global arena – and then, more often than not, do not get paid for use of a large percentage of their content, This is perhaps the greatest reason why publishers have been unwilling to place valuable content online. Historically low-value content has taken up the vast majority of what we have been able to access online with companies hoping to recoup costs through advertising revenue. The reason is simple; conventional Internet technologies do not have any facilities for enforcing copyright, but the problem is that advertising revenues are dwindling so publishers need to find other ways of generating revenue. We can now look back with a sense of irony at straplines from major technology companies saying “Information at your finger tips”, “Information where and how you need it” as this is exactly what they are now trying to prevent so that they can keep an element of control.

This article by James Mullan is based on his paper delivered to the BIALL Conference 2009. It examines the role that social media and Web 2.0 technologies can play in the life of the legal information specialist.

Stella Dextre Clarke, our Guest Editor, provides an update on the latest developments nationally and internationally on producing standards for the creation of controlled vocabularies. After many years of inaction the advent of the worldwide web has stimulated the need for wholesale revision of existing standards and the introduction of new ones.

This article is based on a presentation given by John Bell at the annual conference of The Society of Legal Scholars (SLS)1 held in Bristol in September 2012. His talk reflects the immediate challenges facing law schools, academic lawyers and the legal publishing industry in the light of the recent Finch Report2 and the subsequent response by the Government3 whereby it has adopted an open access policy to publicly funded research.

This paper draws on the work of the Evidence and Insight Team, a dedicated research function presently at the Mayor's Office for Policing And Crime, previously based within the Metropolitan Police Service for over a decade. The aim of the paper is to make readers aware of the obliquely hidden data goldmine that exists within UK policing. Such data captures the decisions police make routinely, the kinds of situations police encounter and with whom. This rich data seam goes beyond crime – and should be used more outside of policing. The authors, Paul Dawson and Elizabeth A. Stanko, argue that interested academics need a better roadmap of the data in order to stimulate basic knowledge and usage. Three case studies are presented that illustrate the scope and challenges of working with such data.

In response to evolving legal technologies, this article by Dominique Garingan and Alison Jane Pickard explores the concept of algorithmic literacy, a technological literacy which facilitates metacognitive practices surrounding the use of artificially intelligent systems and the principles that shape ethical and responsible user experiences. This article examines the extent to which existing information, digital, and computer literacy frameworks and professional competency standards ground algorithmic literacy. It proceeds to identify various elements of algorithmic literacy within existing literature, provide examples of algorithmic literacy initiatives in academic and non-academic settings, and explore the need for an algorithmic literacy framework to ground algorithmic literacy initiatives within the legal information profession.

This research, conducted by Erin Gow, aims to explore the information literacy and legal research training needs of users of the Middle Temple library.* In order to do this it focuses on the patterns of use of library resources by users, reasons for these patterns, previous training users have received, and general evidence of user training needs in law libraries. The research as a whole was generated in result of the recognition that many Middle Temple library users require further legal research skills training in order to confidently find and employ the extensive resources available through the library. Before such training could be developed, however, research needed to be conducted into the specific capabilities and needs of the unique user base at the library. As a result of the research the current habits of library users have been explored, their general training levels and needs identified, and recommendations made about how to structure training so as to address these needs and best serve users. It was discovered that Middle Temple library users generally visit the library frequently, and are already confident using certain materials such as textbooks. Despite confidence in using certain common materials, users struggle to take advantage of the full range of resources available, making training necessary. The difficulties many users currently face in the library stem from a general lack of information literacy and library skills training.

This paper outlines the first part of a wider, two-part study on the information behaviour of law students. The authors are Zaki Abbas, Andrew MacFarlane and Lyn Robinson. The background and motivation for the study have been described in a previous publication1 which reports the results of interviews with three academic law librarians. Our initial work found that although mobile technologies offered benefits to law students seeking information for their academic studies, there was concern from law librarians that the use of electronic resources via both non-mobile and mobile interfaces resulted in a loss of skills required for information retrieval due to the increasing capabilities of electronic resources’ search interfaces. To gain more insight into how law students were using mobile information resources, and to further understand the advantages and disadvantages of such resources, we extended our study to a wider cohort. This second phase, of our first part study, was conducted over two years (2013–2015). During this time, we carried out interviews with thirteen law librarians and fielded both quantitative and qualitative questionnaires to 36 law students. We also conducted a greater review of literature and examined several existing information-seeking models. We used the results of the research from this phase of study, together with the knowledge from the literature to propose a novel information-seeking behaviour (ISB) model for law students. These findings are reported within this paper. The second part of this research will look at expanding our research cohort to cover a wider audience throughout the UK and use a focus group to validate our proposed model. This will be reported in a following paper.