Tony Simmonds explains the six types of Open Access licences which are available to academic users to preserve rights in their publications.

Jas Breslin gives a brief overview of the type of work corporate lawyers are involved with and the key resources that they need.

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.

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!

Taxonomies are becoming trendy! What do you, as a legal information professional, need to know about them? Do you already know a good deal because they appeared under the guise of classification schemes when you were studying librarianship or information science? In this article an attempt will be made to explain in comprehensible terms the place of taxonomies in current thinking about information retrieval, and in particular their relevance to your work as a legal information manager.

This article is written by Hélène Russell, author and teacher in the field of legal sector Knowledge Management. It presents an easy to read foundation level guide to legal sector Knowledge Management for law firm Information Professionals. It explains what Knowledge is, what Knowledge Management (KM) is, how it differs from Information Management (IM) and how law firm Information Professionals can expand their roles to help their organisations meet business goals through strategic KM as well as IM, or manage an imposed transition from IM to IM+KM.

No, I am not about to start an agony aunt copyright column but rather aim to select and try to resolve one or two copyright problems law librarians may have. Law librarians are no different from any other set of library and information professionals in finding copyright a difficult area. Copyright may be a minefield, as is so often said, but if one is aware of the potential problems and treads carefully, a safe path may be found through it.

A vendor launches what they promise to be a fantastic new product which you can not do without so you set up a trial. At the end of the trial you have lots of well-balanced feedback from across your organisation that you can use to determine whether or not to take the product and which also gives you some points for negotiation. Well, that is the theory anyway! In this article Chrissy Street aims to give some guidance about how to get closer to this in practice.

Scientific scholarly communication is subject to selection rules. In recent years, the issues around the assessment of research results has assumed a central role in academia. Despite recent efforts, by several initiatives both at national and international level, and the adoption of guidelines that emerged from the evaluation of research programs at European level, the measurement and evaluation of the quality of research still faces strong opposition from all bibliometric areas, in which the instruments available (amount of citations identified, the impact factor, and so on) are not appropriate to the humanities and social sciences. In particular, specific attention is paid today to the role of the book, which is a fundamental resource in the processes of scientific scholarly communication. In this regard this paper, written by Ginevra Peruginelli, analyses the missing link between the indicators and legal scholars' notions of quality, with reference to the role of the monograph in legal science.

This article by Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley introduces the Women's Legal Landmarks Project. The project is an interdisciplinary collaboration involving feminist scholars from law and other disciplines engaging in the process of identifying, researching and producing critical accounts of the key legal events, cases and statutes which represent significant turning points for women in the UK and Ireland. In creating the first scholarly anthology of legal landmarks for women spanning four jurisdictions and spanning eleven centuries, it seeks to contribute both to the development of the discipline of feminist legal history as well as societal understandings of the contribution women have made to public life and, more specifically, their involvement in the production of law, law reform and justice.

The COVID-19 pandemic has heavily impacted Australian universities and their libraries but has been felt most strongly by students and staff who are already marginalised. This article, written by Kay Tucker and Becky Batagol, draws upon both published literature and the authors’ own experiences as a librarian and academic employed at Monash University, Australia's largest university. Important lessons from the pandemic for universities and university libraries at times of crisis and disaster include: actively recognising and responding to structural inequalities amongst students and staff; organising services so that all can participate to their fullest ability; providing students with opportunities for social connection, enhanced digital capabilities, safe and inclusive spaces and accessible materials; as well as flexible employment practices.

This paper is drawn from a presentation, by John Morison, that was made to a plenary session of the 43rd BIALL Annual Study Conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland 2012. The presentation introduced the audience to a research study, recently funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, entitled “What Makes an ‘Important Case’? A Study of the Creation, Transmission and Validation of Legal Knowledge”, and being carried out with Professor Gordon Anthony. The presentation to BIALL also attempted to engage the audience of legal information specialists with the specifics of the project and enlist their help in understanding how an important aspect of legal practice actually works. This paper has the same objective, and, additionally, it reports on some of the initial findings of the research which aims to develop a comprehensive sociology of legal knowledge.

Legislation on the Web gives rise to a unique set of challenges. The content has strict rules governing its structure and typographic layout. One piece of legislation can change others, often in complex ways. The text may or may not be in force and may or may not extend to a particular jurisdiction. This unique linked data service and its value proposition is discussed by Carol Tullo. This is a data source that underpins and drives the UK legislation publishing processes and the validation of secondary legislation, providing a streamlined end to end set of online legal tools for all to use.

This article by Renae Satterley discusses a trial conducted over a four month period at Middle Temple Library where members were allowed to borrow iPads for a week, free of charge. The iPads were lent to the library by LexisNexis and had ebooks and a subscription to LexisLibrary loaded on to them. In this article the author discusses the pros and cons of lending tablets to library users and whether law ebooks are as popular as some claim. It also examines the possibilities of integrating tablet computers into legal research training sessions.

In a response to issues raised at User Groups on the research capabilities of young lawyers, Tom Laidlaw of LexisNexis looked into the current legal skills environment and as a result LexisNexis have introduced the LawCampus website for students and are planning a programme for trainee solicitors involving “virtual mentors”.

This article, written by Josephine Bailey and Kate Faulkner, discusses the collection of library usage data at the Squire Law Library, an academic law library embedded in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. Two initiatives were employed to survey usage: firstly, regular headcounts of library users and secondly, occasional spot-checks of university cards. This article details the data that was collected and how it fits into a wider ethnographic approach to understanding how students and researchers use libraries. The article also discusses how the pilots have developed into long-term procedures, and how this has led to improvements to the delivery of the service.

Undeniably the perception of success of an information unit or library in a law firm (or any other organisation for that matter) is down to two main factors. The level of support from the organisation is one, and often that could be interpreted as attitude and/or the level of the person who is responsible for allocating budget etc (ie the library partner) and/or how influential he or she is. The second: the way in which the Library or Information Unit Manager operates, their influencing and interpersonal skills, their general management of the information function, in particular creating the perception of being good value for money and invariably providing the right (quality) information in the right quantity at the right time.

In her BIALL Conference Paper last June, Ann Hemming considered the potential impact of e-learning on the legal profession and legal information professionals in particular. She discussed what is meant by e-learning and how it can be incorporated into our current knowledge systems. She then considered the needs of the current generation of info pros and the potential uses of social networking tools, such as Second Life, in the e-learning environment.

The internet provides access to a huge amount of information, and most people experience problems with information overload rather than scarcity. Glenda Browne explains how indexing provides a way of increasing retrieval of relevant information from the content available. Manual, book-style indexes can be created for websites and individual web documents such as online books. Keyword metadata is a crucial behind the scenes aid to improved search engine functioning, and categorisation, social bookmarking and automated indexing also play a part.

This article from the Chair of the Bar Standards Board, Baroness Ruth Deech, considers the impact of the Legal Services Act 2007 on the regulation of the Bar.