Marianne Barber offers some practical observations from a trial introduction of eTextbooks at the College of Law. Ebook versions of the textbooks produced by the College (and published commercially by College of Law Publishing) were made available for the first time in 2010 to its Legal Practice Course students. This paper was originally presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2011 and included an overview of the variety of licensing models/platforms available, an analysis of the then level of response from teaching staff and students and likely touch-points for mass adoption in the legal field.

This paper, by Ginevra Peruginelli, examines the general issue of mapping concepts of different legal orders, with a focus on legal terminology and semantics of the law. Interoperability between legal thesauri is a possible operative solution in so far as it meets two important functions: cross-collection retrieval and cross-language retrieval. At a practical level a feasibility study, carried out by the Institute of Legal Information Theory and Techniques of the National Research Council of Italy is described. The study aims at aligning a number of thesauri used in e-government services within the EU, while testing new methods of automatic mapping.

This article by Isabelle Brenneur-Garel, President of Juriconnexion and its working group, ‘Journée’1, focuses on the Juriconnexion association's annual conference, held on 21 January 2021 by videoconference. The choice of topic was motivated by the recent pandemic: changes to legal information and work in times of crisis. How have professionals navigated this ongoing crisis? What coping strategies have they developed? What does the future hold? More than twenty speakers from academia, legal publishing, legal associations and networks, and the legal and legal-related professions shared their experiences with members of the working group.

Elizabeth Dawson's article outlines archival sources for legal biography held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, focussing on primary sources of information on individuals, including the Law Society and Bar Examination results. It also summarises additional sources which provide biographical information on legal practitioners and scholars eg. the archives of The Society of Legal Scholars and the Council of Legal Education, IALS institutional archives, The Bar Council, The International Law Association and academic membership associations. The article also provides guidance to researchers on using the IALS Archive, and advice on using related external archival sources.

In this article Peter Kargbo describes the impact of the first national lockdown, due to Covid-19, on students using the Hartley Library at the University of Southampton. He describes some of the ways that library services responded and looks at some aspects concerning collection development. He begins his article by taking a brief look at life in the library for students prior to the arrival of the pandemic before describing the period that followed up to the end of the academic year in summer 2020.

This survey of United States law sources, by Hester Swift, Foreign and International Law Librarian, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, is based on a presentation delivered at the BIALL Foreign and International Law Seminar on 3 March 2009.

This article, written by Claire Bonello, presents the French collaborative project to digitise, spread and preserve heritage law collections. As a result, Gallica, the French national digital and encyclopedic library, gives freely access to a “law information universe”. This digital law library from heritage collections on Gallica is set to become a central point of access to legal contents for researchers as well as for jurists.

This paper written by Samuel Wiggins and Marie Cannon is drawn from their presentation at the 2013 BIALL Annual Conference. The article presents the findings of a survey conducted to explore the perceptions of New Professionals in the library and information sector, and the various challenges and issues they face on entering their first professional roles within law librarianship. The relevance of the professional library and information qualification within the legal sector is considered, as are potential barriers to working with legal information. The required skill sets and training needs for New Professionals and experienced professionals are also compared.

In this article Michael Maher, Librarian of the Law Society of England and Wales, examines the history of the extensive library on Chancery Lane, the range of services it provides to help support its members (including their agents i.e. law librarians) and the future plans for the library.

The emergence of the National Assembly for Wales as a devolved legislature producing first Measures and now Acts, together with the establishment of a Welsh Government with a range of powers to make secondary legislation, has added a new layer of complication to the already over-complicated legislative landscape of the United Kingdom. This article, written by Daniel Greenberg, examines briefly some of the resulting complications.

In this article Beth Flerlage and Renae Satterley reflect on the library staffs’ experience of using Agile project management techniques and cloud-based tools to restructure resources at Middle Temple Library.

In this paper Lesley Dingle provides a detailed account of the historical development of the public international law collections at the Squire Law Library in Cambridge. She explains the close involvement of the academic lawyers and the librarians, past and present, in developing an important collection which reflects the significance of the subject at Cambridge's Faculty of Law. Finally, she brings things up-to-date by detailing the extent of the electronic provision which benefits the modern scholar in this discipline.

Within UK law firms, marketing or business development departments have traditionally been responsible for the provision of business information. Sue Lamond, from Addleshaw Goddard, explains how her firm differs in that the Information Services department is responsible for this provision. The department compiles company and sector profiles and analyses, and is directly involved in the pitch process for new work from clients, supporting client partners' information and development needs.

Elizabeth Marley describes the addition of subject and other indexing metadata at the UK Parliament, contributing to the internal databases and to services to the public on the Parliamentary website, and the operation of the thesauri and controlled vocabularies used in enriching Parliamentary content.

Professor Graham Virgo, in delivering the 3rd Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture, asks if it is possible to become a legal practitioner in England and Wales without having studied Law as an academic discipline. Is there any point in studying for a Law degree? Students study any academic subject to acquire knowledge and to develop key skills. This is just as true of students studying Law. But is the knowledge acquired by a Law student and the skills which they develop really of benefit to them in legal practice? Crucially, what can the managers of legal information do to support the particular needs of Law students and academic researchers?

Abstract: The purpose of this paper by Uma Narayan is to provide an insight into how to use Indian legal materials for research purposes. The following subjects are covered: the evolution of the Indian legal system; systems and procedures in enacting laws in Parliament; Indian legal information sources - both government and private - as well as print and electronic sources and how to understand the method of publication of legislation.

Cath Hancock, Staff Development Officer at Cardiff University, and Alison Clayton of Cameron McKenna have supplied us with two articles addressing aspects of the recruitment and selectiom process. This article from Cath Hancock concentrates on the pre-intervies process but also looks briefly at post-interview issues.

This article by Nicola Wakefield looks at the project to build a new academic law library at the University of Salford. It examines the tasks involved, resource planning and communication as well as highlighting successes and issues raised during the construction and design process. The conclusion of the article discusses the lessons learned from undertaking a task of this scale, as well as recommendations for others who may be about to embark on a similar project.

This article has been written by Janice Sayer, a freelance information manager, who has extensive and unrivalled experience of working on the content of the Westlaw UK legislation database.

This paper is based on the presentation given by Heather Semple of the Northern Ireland Law Society to the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008 and covers the historical and constitutional background to the country. The paper then considers sources of legislation and case law and provides helpful tips on how to undertake research within the complicated and difficult system of legislative publishing.