The article below, which is written by Gloria Orrego Hoyos, presents an overview of the Inter-American Human Rights System, its main instruments, its organs for the protection and promotion of human rights in the Americas and the available tools for the academic research and the activism in the vindication for human rights in the region. This information is presented from the contextualization of the system within a history of violation of human rights in the region, and the role of both the Inter-American Convention and the Inter-American Court in the transformation of the social, political and institutional realities of the people of the continent.

Paper presented by Sandy Ghandi at the Joint Study Institute held at St Anne's College, Oxford, August 2006.

Distance learning at the graduate law level offers exciting opportunities for non-traditional students to learn not only substantive law but also new skills. One of these skills should be information research. In this paper, which was presented at a Parallel Session at the 38th Annual BIALL Study Conference in Sheffield in June 2007, Edward T. Hart looks back on his experience as a distance learner at Northumbria University, observes what worked and did not work and offers suggestions for law faculty and librarians to consider. The final section is a brief description of the current status of distance learning in American legal education.

This article by Michael Saporito, Access Services Librarian at the Boston Social Law Library, discusses the new co-operation scheme which has been put together by two leading law libraries to exploit their document delivery schemes for the mutual benefit of their clients.

Philippa Smith gives a brief introduction to the records of the City of London livery companies held by the Manuscripts Section of Guildhall Library.

This paper is based on a parallel session at the BIALL Conference 2016 which was given by Helen Marshall and Kelly Taylor from Pinsent Masons. Pinsent Masons has a ground-breaking team of research analysts providing the firm with in-depth sector and market analysis. This innovative approach has benefits for Pinsent Masons and also for the research team. These include increased visibility within the firm and developing a role as a trusted adviser to the business. The team are drawn from a variety of backgrounds, including experienced law librarians. In this article, Kelly and Helen, who are both from a law librarian background, will explain Pinsents' unique approach to business and sector insight. The article covers how the team adds value to the firm and charts the development of our existing skillsets to meet this new challenge. The article also includes some practical insight into approaching business research and how to overcome common obstacles, notably the challenge in expanding our output from traditional legal research to more business and commercially aware pieces.

‘Transactional learning’ at its simplest means learning from doing transactions. When professionals learn they often do so, as Donald Schön reminds us, by learning from within transactions – ‘knowing-in-action’. By this Schön means that professionals solve problems by constructing for themselves a repertoire of precedents, images and remembered actions. Problems are not solved by using rules alone, but are framed or constructed according to the repertoire. Professionals try out solutions for fit, re-frame, feed back to themselves, try out other solutions. The result is what Schön calls ‘;reflection-in-action’. According to him, this is what produces the doctor's “feel’ for a specific diagnosis, or a lawyer's ‘feel’ for a case, (Schon 1983).

This site contains information on copyright, designs, patents and trademarks. The legal decisions page includes selected decisions issued by the Patent Office since the beginning of 1998 and links through to the Patents Court website, European Patent Office website and Copyright Tribunal. News and press releases on aspects of intellectual property and the Trade Mark, Patent and Design Journal notices can also be viewed here with all pages including a note of when they were last updated. A page with information on patent and trademark searches and a search facility for the whole site is available. A list of forms can be accessed and viewed along with guidance notes and fees information. Progress on implementation of the EU Copyright Directive is brief but helpful. The glossary of terms covers very few terms and some pages would benefit from hyperlinks being added such as the information about international treaties. URL: http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/index.htm

Lawbore is a subject-orientated gateway to legal resources developed at City University, which has been created as a community site for the law department. Lawbore's features include regular polls, articles written by City staff and students, legal news and useful legal quotes. It aims to attract students with its time based structure, snappy resource descriptions, direct links into articles within databases, interactive qualities, relevance to module content and easy navigation. Although launched at the end of April, it is expected that usage will be low-key at a time when most students are frantically revising. The real test will not come until the new academic year.

In October 2000 I was lucky enough to receive a BIALL bursary to attend the New Zealand Law Librarians Group conference in Christchurch, New Zealand. I had a stimulating and motivating time there and would like to encourage all BIALL members to apply for an overseas bursary at some point–the experience is so worthwhile, which ever conference you go to.

Following its General Election victory in 1997, the new Labour Government set out its plans for devolution in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The proposals for a National Assembly for Wales were outlined in A Voice for Wales, published as a White Paper in July 1997. A referendum on the proposals was held on 18 September and, as many people know, the result was very close, with the outcome not known until the very last result was declared. In the end, however, the people of Wales said “Yes” to the Assembly by a margin of just 0.6% – 50.3% voting in favour of the Assembly, with 49.7% rejecting the proposals.

On joining Browne Jacobson just over six years ago I inherited a paper based catalogue and notebook of items taken from the library which were then crossed out on return. Quickly finding this was impractical and cumbersome to use, to the point where it very often was not used, one of the main priorities was to automate the catalogue and circulation system as quickly as possible. Calm 2000 was purchased as a stand-alone system in the library with capacity for up to 10,000 records and worked well initially but as fee earners gained increasing access to a wide variety of resources and other local library catalogues from their own PCs demand grew for access to in-house library holdings and the cataloguing of websites, online journals and internally generated documents. Difficulties arose in using a stand-alone system when I ceased to be a solo, particularly for receipt of journals and loose leafs. The firm had also expanded significantly in size and opened an additional office. Libraries in the London and Birmingham offices being smaller than the main library at the Nottingham office created demand for holdings information to facilitate loans between offices.

I saw the ad for ‘Head Librarian’ at Central European University in Prague in July 1993 after I had stopped for coffee in a grotty service area on the M5, en route from the impossible job in Glasgow to the exciting job in Somerset (holding both of those down simultaneously was an interesting geographical challenge in itself…). Of course, I knew I had no chance at all, but applied anyway, and by some minor miracle they offered me the post.

UK and International case materials, news updates and commentary. This service includes

Current awareness. News and Updates on Human Rights.

Cases. Includes relevant cases from All England Next-Day Case Digests, Butterworths Human Rights Cases, European Court of Human Rights, All Englans Law Reports and Law Reports of the Commonwealth.

Commentary. Lester & Pannick: Human Rights Law and Practice

Human Rights Act 1998

Links. A Selection of links useful to practitioners affected by the Human Rights Act 1998

Catalogue

E-mail Alterter. Allows the user to recieve tailored daily or weekly updates Containing the development appearing in Human Rights Direct.

Elizabeth Mary Moys, known to all her colleagues as Betty, was born on 26 June 1928 at Wickford, Essex. She was brought up in Kent where she spent most of her life when in the UK. She attended Chislehurst County Grammar School then went on to Queen Mary College, London, to read English and took a BA (Hons) degree in 1949. Her first job was in Crayford Branch of Kent County Library Service from 1949–50. After library school in 1950–51 (Northwestern Polytechnic School of Librarianship, where she was one of the leading spirits in starting a School of Librarian-ship Students' Association), Betty became reference librarian at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in 1951.

Every night for ten nights last May, I returned to room 128 in the Westside YMCA (West 63rd Street, New York City – just off Central Park) armed with more behind the scenes insights, professional secrets and first hand accounts of US law library operation and management than one slim A5 notebook could hope to hold. I was fortunate to be in the United States on a two-week placement at Columbia University, visiting some of America's great law libraries – the law school libraries of Columbia itself, New York University and Yale University. Each morning, after orange juice, coffee and a toasted cream cheese bagel, I would head out with the commuters to join the subway at Columbus Circle – uptown for Columbia or downtown for NYU. Every evening I would admire the energy of the mostly silver-haired athletes in brightly coloured lycra returning to the Westside “Y” after numerous circuits of the Jackie “O” reservoir on the upper east side of Central Park. The park is 843 acres of creative space bounded by impressive hotels, apartment blocks and the streets of Harlem. In May it is in perpetual motion from dawn to dusk with joggers, roller-bladers and cyclists weaving their way around the trees, fountains and numerous statues. Indeed it appears to be a huge magic garden, complete with beautiful street lamps that seem to come from C.S. Lewis's Narnia – another world, like the City itself, at once familiar and fascinatingly different.

My Institute is part of, and funded by, the Max Planck Society, which roughly corresponds to an Academy of Science in other countries. The Society runs 80 research institutes today, out of which 12 conduct research in the humanities, including six institutes that deal with legal questions on a superior level, including mine. The different institutes are located in different parts of the country, and this very much corresponds to the federalist foundations of the German state.

This paper, which was written by Rona Blair, is drawn from her presentation at the 2015 BIALL Annual Conference. The article looks at the challenges of working in a geographically dispersed team and how to overcome these challenges using pragmatic and workable procedures.