In this paper Steven Whittle describes recent work at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies to provide open online access to the IALS/SALS official journal Amicus Curiae and selected papers from the Institute's annual W. G. Hart Legal Workshop. It discusses some of the issues involved in a transition from print to web publication and looks at the benefits anticipated from additional web delivery.

The Squire Law Library has designed and run a series of popular escape room-style events, aimed at masters and undergraduate law students. Intended to prompt students to explore the full range of legal resources available to them, the games typically challenge participants to open a locked safe: relying on legal databases, the library catalogue and print materials to decipher a six-digit combination. This article, based on Lizz Edwards-Waller's presentation at the BIALL (virtual) conference 2020, reflects on the practicalities of running and promoting code-breaking events within the library and considers the benefits of this style of event in addition to, or instead of, more traditional law library orientation tours.

The Advocates Library provides a library and information service to around 470 members of the Faculty of Advocates, the Scottish Bar. The library also acts as the national law library for Scotland, having the privilege of claiming law materials on legal deposit. The Senior Librarian, Andrea Longson (the author of this article), and the library's management group work closely with staff at the National Library of Scotland and have been involved in strategic discussions about the drafting and implementation of legal deposit legislation for over ten years.

This article is written by Rebecca Herle who is the Head of Sales and Marketing at the Incorporated Council of Law Reporting for England & Wales (ICLR). Her article draws on material delivered by two of her colleagues at the ICLR, namely Daniel Hoadley's recent plenary session at the BIALL Conference 2014 called, ‘The Curious Case of the Judgment Enhancers’ and Paul Magrath's article published by Infolaw.co.uk, entitled ‘The Future of Law Reporting’. It also refers in part to Lord Neuberger's speech for the first annual BAILII Lecture (in 2012) entitled ‘No Judgment – No Justice’, and reflects upon the position of the ICLR in the legal profession today. From the birth of the ICLR in 1865 to the present day the article provides a brief history, and then explores the current day issues, of this charitable publisher in its surrounding legal environment. She also offers a glimpse into what the future might hold.

In a previous life I was a yuppie. Double breasted suit, briefcase and a state-of-the-art-library with views across the harbour from the top floor of a glass tower in downtown Auckland. I worked hard and played even harder. My time was charged in ten minute units and I can still remember the middle initial of every partner in the firm. So how on earth did I end up trading my well polished lace-ups for flip flops and the beloved kiwi Sauvignon Blanc for a dirty brown liquid called kava?

We are a law firm with over 4,000 staff, including over 2,000 legal and business advisers, providing services to the private and public sector business and finance community. With a network of over 24 offices throughout Europe and in Asia, including offices in London, Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Doha, Madrid, Milan, Rome, Shanghai, Singapore, Sofia, Valladolid and Vienna, Eversheds' lawyers combine an in-depth knowledge of local markets with the resources and international capability of one of the world's largest law firms.

Amanda McKenzie writes about how information professionals can play a role in creating and implementing an effective knowledge management strategy within a law firm and how they and professional support lawyers can work together.

Joseph A. Semugabi, Chief Librarian at the Law Development Centre, discusses political-legal developments since 1986 which resulted in the restoration of rule of law and the liberalization of university education in Uganda. He then explains how these have had a significant impact on the country's only institution of practical legal training and its law library.

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.

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.

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.

‘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

Josephine Bailey, the inaugural recipient of BIALL's Professional Studies Bursary, provides a student's perspective on current LIS qualifications, what they can offer to individuals hoping to enter the profession and the challenges facing new professionals today. Her observations and comments are based on her experiences of the MA course in Librarianship and Information Services Management which is offered by the University of Sheffield and is currently ranked as the top university for Librarianship and Information Management.

This article written by Hester Swift is based on the online course entitled, ‘Customary International Law’, which was created by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) Library for the Postgraduate Online Research Training (PORT) platform and is available to all at <https://port.sas.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=120>. The PORT service is provided by the University of London's School of Advanced Study.

Alison Lorrimer, who works at the Departmental Solicitor's Office Library in Belfast, reflects on how the sources of legal information have been affected by the changing political landscape in Northern Ireland.

Virtual learning environments (VLEs) are successfully used by many institutions to provide content which supports and enhances taught courses. In this article, Lizz Edwards-Waller explores the role of the library in uploading articles, case notes and book excerpts to a VLE for law students, and discusses the need for librarians to collaborate with course leaders and administrators. The article also considers the decision-making process involved in determining which resources to make available and highlights some key copyright issues to be aware of.

The Financial Services and Markets Department is one of 11 main departments at City law firm Travers Smith LLP. Shirley Lofthouse, Head of Information at Travers Smith, considers the work of the financial services lawyer and the resources needed to support the research requirements of the department.

The authors, Karen Gray, Diane Miller, Karen Scott and Kate Stanfield, are experienced legal information professionals who are responsible both for designing and delivering in-house training sessions, and for running the BIALL Training the Trainer seminar for the last three years. The aim of this article is threefold: to explore the rationale for providing training; to examine the groundwork and preparation necessary to create the right training culture; and to offer practical guidance on how to deliver successful training activities.

In this paper Carole Hinchcliff, Megan Fitzgibbons and Claudia Davies review free resources that can be used when researching the law in Australia, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea. Background descriptions of the countries' legal systems are provided, along with brief descriptions of websites which provide access to the legislation and case law of the relevant jurisdictions. The article is based on a presentation developed by Carole, and subsequently delivered by Megan and Claudia, at the International Federation of Library Association (IFLA) meeting in August, 2013.