The Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) was established to record aspects of the history of the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University. It is based on 28 interviews with scholars and, currently, has 66 hours of audio recordings and transcripts, but also includes over 800 photographs and numerous associated items including biographies, bibliographies, obituaries and eulogies. Entries for faculty members cover the period from WWII to the present, while 13 entries focus on the incumbent Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science. The archive is a rich source of information for researching aspects of legal communities, and in this contribution I focus on three aspects: personal histories of scholars, faculty history, and more socially-broad topics. In the first category I seek to show how the ESA identifies crossroads in the personal legal journeys of professors Higgins, Baker, Smith and Crawford, while I use their common remembrances to record an institutional landmark. For the latter, I selected the 1995 Faculty move from the Old Schools to the Foster building on the Sidgwick site. Finally, I show how ESA illustrates components of legal life writing in a broader societal context. Here I compare the experiences of curators of family histories at the British Library, and ‘group biographies’ of court officials as researched at LSE, with aspects of documenting careers of senior legal academics at Cambridge.

This article, written by Samuel Wiggins, examines current trends within commercial law firm libraries, and considers how those trends might continue over the next five to ten years. Areas considered include legal technology, the future of the library space, the role of the professional body, training, and the relationship between traditional librarianship and knowledge management.

Much has been written and discussed about the outsourcing of library staff. In the following article, Dunstan Speight, Library Manager at Berwin Leighton Paisner LLP, looks at the role of in-house information teams. Although written from the perspective of the manager of a team of researchers in a City law firm, the author hopes that elements of his experience will have a relevance to other sectors and team structures.

Phil Wilkin runs the Archive of European Integration (AEI), University Library System, University of Pittsburgh, an online repository and archive for research materials on the topic of European integration. The AEI uploads both privately-produced papers and official European Union (EU) documents, which are freely available to all. Because the EU is a treaty- and law-driven organisation, a small percentage of the privately-produced papers and many of the official EU documents on the AEI are relevant to EU law, primarily in the areas of the implementation of EU law in policy and administrative areas and the work of the court system.

Sources of family law encompass a wide range of disciplines from children law to civil law and domestic law to international regulations. Geraldine Morris, solicitor and Family Practice Area Champion at LexisNexis Butterworths considers the wide ranging sources needed to support family lawyers.

European Sources Online (ESO) is an electronic information service that provides information focusing on Europe. This article, by Ian Thomson of Cardiff University and Executive Editor of ESO, describes the development and the background to ESO, the key features and objectives of the service and current challenges.

Jules Winterton recounts his experiences attending a recent conference in the Philippines and also provides a history of the professional information organisations in the Philippines and their relationships with IALL.

The statute book is a large, complex system; a vast corpus of texts dating back to the thirteenth century, now evolving at a rate of around 100,000 words a month1. The volume and pace of change combine with the constraints of current generation of digital tools to present a real barrier to researchers, limiting the type of research that is currently possible. The statute book is simply too big, and changes too rapidly, for any one person to easily comprehend. This situation is transformed if you view legislation as data, and then apply big data technologies and new data analysis techniques to that data. The aim of the Big Data for Law research project2 is to do just that; applying the latest analytical techniques to legislation, making it possible to research, interrogate and understand the statute book as a whole system. An important part of the initiative is to make available the raw data for conducting this type of research, alongside new tools and methods for working with the content. In this article, John Sheridan, Head of Legislation Services at The National Archives, sets out some of the ideas that underpin the project and describes the new service that researchers can use from Spring 2015.

In this article John Franssen, Head of Research at Travers Smith LLP, gives an overview of what private equity is (including a brief glossary of some key terms), how private equity invests, the type of work lawyers in private practice are involved in and some of the key resources that they need and that are available. This article will also highlight the growing importance of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability investment for private equity managers.