The following article began life as a ten-minute presentation titled ‘Building student engagement brick by brick; using Lego® Serious Play® to explore subject engagement in HE’, presented at BIALL's 2020 virtual conference on 12 June 2020. Since 2016 I have been incorporating Lego® Serious Play® (LSP) within my practice as an academic librarian at Middlesex University. This article will explore how I have embedded LSP into workshops with students and staff, the tactics employed to gain acceptance for using LSP within academic settings and offering some tentative predictions on whether playful approaches will be successful in the current Higher Education (HE) landscape, dominated as we currently are by virtual learning and screen technologies.

This paper written by Ginevra Peruginelli is devoted to a discussion of the issues concerning the provision of free access to law in our global society and investigates the effects and benefits of freely available information to the legal profession, citizens and governments. The knowledge of rights, responsibilities and policies allows people and institutions to know what is expected of them and which protections they enjoy. In particular, the paper focuses on the main actors, namely the Legal Information Institutes, involved in the free access to law all around the world. These institutions publish legal information from more than one source for free, and mutually collaborate both politically and technically through membership.

In this short article Rónán Kennedy explores fundamental issues surrounding the use of algorithms in the context of the rule of law in our society. He states, ‘The issues that are buried in these systems should be a matter of serious concern for law and lawyers as we try to protect fundamental values in the 21st century, and we try to properly represent our clients’ interests against systems errors that we cannot easily identify’.*

In a previous article for LIM, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj wrote about online legal information services and their uses at the Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.1 This new article looks at Institutional Repositories (IRs) which in the academic world, help to re-define the production, dissemination and the use of the intellectual output from an institution. A project to develop an IR offers numerous opportunities to become engaged with information and scholarly material beyond the nature of traditional library services. In this paper, Raj Kumar Bhardwaj and Shikha Kaushik jointly discuss some of the issues, experiences and theories around the institutional repository that has been developed at St Stephen's College.

Law has been a little slow off the mark in the UK when it comes to the world of mobile applications (apps). In an environment where students spend more time using mobile applications than they do browsing the internet, the authors were keen to take their Learnmore website to the next stage by developing an app for law students. The Learnmore website (part of the Lawbore suite of resources from City University) has received much attention for its quirky visuals, multimedia learning tools and winning marriage of librarian and student generated content. With an ultimate aim of easing the transition between A-levels and degree and making the ‘building blocks’ of legal skills more interesting. Emily and Sanmeet secured substantial funding from JISC after a call for universities to create mobile apps from existing content, teaming up with a colleague in City University's Human Computer Interaction and Design department. The app was to be designed to help students learn essential legal skills in an innovative way, employing more interaction than was possible via the web. The emphasis on video content meant an early decision to fix on iPad rather than iPhone as the tool for mobile learning. The JISC funding paid for the services of a developer to help bring their ideas to life. This paper looks at the transformation from standard wiki to mobile application; focusing on the process of developing the concept for the app and the major milestones, as well as providing an insight into the expected challenges along the way. These included: working in a multidisciplinary team, communication of ideas, recognising the differences required in design for an app as opposed to a website and managing conflicting visions. The team motto was that creating an app cannot be simply a re-skinning process; but a re-working of content to to ensure a truly effective learning resource.

This article by Paul Magrath considers the role of law reporting not only as a service in support of the administration of justice and legal education, but also in the wider context of open justice, transparency and public legal information. It traces the history of law reporting and considers the pros and cons of the more comprehensive publication of judgments of the senior courts made possible by digitisation and the internet, in comparison with the more selective approach adopted in the past. The article is loosely based on a presentation given at the annual conference of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians held in Bournemouth in June 2019.

The proliferation of digital legal resources over recent years has profoundly changed the way in which lawyers carry out legal research. Law librarians have had to adapt rapidly to these new ‘disruptive technologies’ and have had to develop new ways to train their users in how to carry out the most effective legal search. As a consequence, training has become an increasingly important role of a law librarian. The literature shows that these issues have been much discussed, but often confined to either the academic sector, or to the role of the law librarian in a law firm. Over the past few years, the concept of information literacy has increasingly been seen as a way of developing more effective legal research training programmes. This study, conducted by Steve Mishkin*, examines the views of law librarians working in both the academic and non-academic sectors, regarding how to deliver legal research training most effectively. The study concludes by recommending greater cooperation between academic and non-academic law librarians and suggests that both need to make the case for the benefits of legal research training, in order to win support from their management for better resourced programmes. It also suggests that the quality of legal research training will be improved if law librarians themselves are provided with training, on how to deliver it most effectively.

This article by Jennie Grimshaw presents an overview of the transition of UK government publishing from print to electronic between the mid-1990s and 2016. It goes on to describe the tools being developed by the British Library in collaboration with the other five legal deposit libraries, to collect, preserve, organise and provide access to born digital government publications. This paradigm shift in official publishing gives the libraries a window of opportunity to improve their management of these materials and ensure that they can be found through their catalogues more easily than their print predecessors.

This article by Alvin M. Podboy of Baker Hostetler in Cleveland, Ohio, examines the future of 21st Century law librarianship from an American perspective. It reviews developing legal information trends as they affect our profession. The article melds our historical and philosophic law library foundation to our continuing professional evolution.

Within the legal library world “outsourcing” has become a hot topic, and not necessarily a welcome one. In the last 12 months there have been several law firms making the move to outsource their Information Services, so why is this happening and what are the options? Kate Stanfield, Vice President, Knowledge and Research at Integreon examines the issues. Her article is based on a presentation given at the BIALL Conference in June 2011.

Professor Mashood Baderin of the School of Oriental and African Studies explains the basic concepts of Islamic law. He discusses its sources, including the distinction between Sharīcah and Fiqh and its methods and principles. He concludes with a discussion of the various Schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

This article by Dr Peter Clinch gives details of where to find not just law reports but also other documents relating to cases. It covers a wide range of courts, from the High Court through to Coroners Courts and Administrative tribunals

The global recession has wrought havoc on the budgets of libraries worldwide, forcing administrators to reassess priorities and change direction midcourse. Privately funded academic libraries which typically rely heavily on large endowments have not been exempt and in fact have probably been hit the hardest. The challenges encountered by this long drawn financial crisis have ultimately provided opportunities to reassess priorities and conduct business more efficiently. This paper was presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2010 by Femi Cadmus and Blair Kaufmann.

Guy Holborn, Librarian of Gray's Inn, gives some very practical help on how to catalogue the law collection whilst ensuring compliance with cataloguing standards

This article by Dean Mason looks at the retrieval effectiveness of the online legal research tools Lexis Professional and Westlaw UK and is the result of research carried out for his Masters Degree in Information Science.

In the article Jackie Fishleigh, a regular contributor to LIM, looks at the vital and seemingly never-ending task of how to provide relevant and effective training in legal research to lawyers. The author shares her experiences in putting the new BIALL Legal Research 5 Stage Model through its paces with real audiences of live humans!

This article describes research which suggests that much more could be done to prepare Library and Information Science (LIS) graduates for a career in legal information, both in terms of greater career information availability and in greater preparation before working with legal information, such as knowledge of legal materials and ways of working. Greater promotion of this interesting and challenging information sector would ensure that LIS graduates are fully aware of law library work as a viable career path and are clear about what the work entails. Implications for CILIP, BIALL, Library Schools and university careers services are discussed.

This article was written by Hannah Chandler, the Official Papers Librarian for the Bodleian Libraries. Her article looks at how the print collections were managed in the past and how the collections are managed and arranged today in Oxford. It looks at the complex and dynamic environment of official publishing in terms both of print and e-format. Looking to the future, it considers how shared working practices and policy on giving access to and archiving born digital material are benefitting the legal deposit libraries. Finally, the article outlines the breadth of the challenge, not only giving access to information in perpetuity but also making it accessible to the information professional and user.

There is a perception in the legal information profession that levels of information literacy among law students and trainee solicitors are lower than they should be. In this article Ian Hunter considers if this starts at sixth form level and discusses the Google generation stereotype. Training sessions given to sixth-form students by the author are described and the students' levels of information literacy are considered against various information literacy standards. The suitability of these standards for sixth form students is assessed and suggestions for future information literacy training at school, HE and trainee solicitor level are discussed.

This article reviews the kinds of resources available to support the training of legal researchers and to guide them in their research, so that law librarians can avoid “re-inventing the wheel”. Karen Crouch places her emphasis on practical legal research. She also highlights some work in progress and possible future directions for legal learning resources and reviews some of the online tools that enable legal researchers to work more efficiently. The emphasis is on low cost resources, and those which enable additional value to be extracted from existing legal database subscriptions.