This Conference paper by Martin Farley gives an outline of four wikis in the legal sector and examines why they were established, how they operate and how successful they have been at achieving their objectives. It also includes a brief introduction to wikis, a list of examples of other possible uses within the legal sector and a broad overview of advantages, disadvantages and probable future developments. It aims to provide an idea of what is practically possible at the moment and where the potential of law wikis lies.

Nick Holmes explains the advantages of the new web publishing formats for legal information professionals. He describes what a blog is, how to set one up and publish it. He lists the legal blogs or blawgs, and considers whether blogs are good for business.

In this very practical and useful Checklist, Anne Coles and Davina Gifford of LG guide us through the steps involved in moving a corporate library to a new building, whilst at the same time re-branding the information service. They highlight the most important issues to consider at the pre-planning and planning stages; the move itself and after the move. The most important message is not to enter unwinnable battles and to prepare as thoroughly as possible.

Jessica Sambrook tells about her experiences of not only working in the idyllic Cayman Islands but also having to avoid the forces of nature. She describes the sources of legal information in the Islands and provides an interesting historical view of how their legislation has developed from English law.

‘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

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.

There is plenty of advice for those about to take an interview for a job, but what about if you're sitting on the other side of the table? Here Jas Breslin, Research & Information Services Manager at top city law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, guides us though the key things to keep in mind when you're the one asking the questions.

This article, written by Emily Stannard, is based on her presentation at the 2015 BIALL Annual Conference. The article discusses the recent statutory changes to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and reflects on the impact it has had on information professionals, especially those working within the cultural heritage and education sectors. The wording of the legislation is considered in detail with the aid of case law to provide context where necessary, particularly with reference to fair dealing provisions. Developments within the Digital Single Market of the European Union also have a significant impact on national copyright law, and it is imperative that information professionals remain informed about upcoming copyright initiatives as well as making sense of the new statutory instruments.

The role of the law librarian or legal information professional is thought by some to have been diminished significantly by technological advances which provide instant access to an enormous range of materials direct to individual users at their desks. The reality is that the wide range of instantly accessible materials makes the experience and knowledge of the information professional more important, not less; and imminently expected advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence are likely to confirm the vital importance of the legal information professional at the centre of legal services.

Tim Williams explains that the use of modern digital data formats such as Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) enables the on-line searching and publishing of data held in data repositories where the ownership rights over the intellectual property are controlled. Understanding the security and quality of the content of the documents emanating from such data repositories is vital for good business strategies to be defined. As the larger publishers move increasingly towards global trading, they will control and distribute their assets globally via the internet.

With job hunters seemingly now outnumbering vacancies in the legal information field by some margin, recruiters currently have plenty of choice in front of them when seeking to fill a post with the right candidate. In the current market, the applicants themselves need to do everything they can to maximise their chances of selection. The general aspects of good and bad practice in job hunting and recruiting should be obvious to everybody of a professional status. But are they? We're all supposed to know the textbook dos and don'ts of recruitment and selection; but how much attention are employers and candidates in the information sector really paying to the detail? Through his role as Library Manager in the London branch of a national network of law schools, Mark Haines has sat on the recruitment and interview panels for over thirty posts over the past six years. He has also been job hunting himself during this time; applying for more than fifty posts over the past two years, and attending more than a dozen interviews. As a result of these experiences, he has witnessed countless examples of good and bad practice. Employers and applicants may all be aware of what they should be doing, but in this paper he will be discussing his experiences of what they're really doing; and most importantly, what can be done to improve performance in the light of this.

In September 2003, Nottingham Law School launched its innovative Postgraduate Diploma in Know-How Management for Legal Practice, the first course of its kind in the UK providing professional development and training for those engaged in knowledge management in legal organisations. Now nearing completion of a successful first year, with students from both private practice and in-house legal departments, and from a range of backgrounds in knowledge management, including librarians, professional support lawyers, heads of knowledge management, managing partners and in-house counsel, the Law School is currently in the process of recruiting intake for the second running of the course commencing in September 2004.

This article by Jenni Crossley and Claire Tylee examines the process of developing an online interactive guide for law students by librarians at the University of the West of England. The guide was based on material contained in the professional studies printed resource book and various multimedia applications were included to enhance the learning experience for students.

This article is based on the parallel session given by Jackie Fishleigh at the BIALL Conference in 2011 which looked at how Legal Information Professionals can get involved and contribute their skills to collaborative projects using SharePoint.

In this article Michael Maher writes about the declining print needs for law libraries within UK law firms in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. The article begins by looking at the initial financial impact Covid-19 had across UK law firms. The second part of the article covers how home-working patterns have become the preferable option to working in the office. Finally, the author takes a change management approach, addressing what information professionals need to do to best manage and embed the change so as to continue to play a key part of the future, post-pandemic, law firm business.