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

In this philosophical article John Eaton from the University of Manitoba recounts the current legal education system in Canada and reflects on the issues involved in teaching legal research skills, including problems with where to base the training within the curriculum, and difficulties encountered in the migration from hard copy research, to current students' predilections for using electronic sources. Whilst based on the Canadian process his article has a wider application in relation to the “Google-generation” of students.

This article is based on the presentation given by Suzanne Wheatley at the BIALL Conference in June 2010 giving advice to prospective interviewers on how to make the best recruitment decisions.

Europeana is the focus of a number of IPR issues. The portal provides access to three sets of assets: the Open Source code base, the authority-controlled metadata and the digitised content. Europeana has integrated metadata standards across the heritage domains and will now licence the metadata as a resource for the development of linked data and semantic web applications. The main rights issues concern the digitisation of public domain content and orphan works. Digitisation of out-of-copyright analogue material does not create new rights and the Europeana Public Domain Charter provides guidelines for the sector. An inhibitor to digitisation is the problem of orphan works, now under review by the European Commission.

Derek Sturdy explains the importance of search engine optimisation for the legal information professional involved in the organisation's website in the Google era and suggests that the most important pieces of information are the title and the abstract. He also discusses the rise in automatic classification in the enterprise search context.

Amanda McKenzie from Olswangs presented a paper at the BIALL Annual Conference 2010 on the potential impact of the reforms contained in the Legal Services Act 2007.

Natalie Wieland, who teaches legal research skills, reflects on her own experiences as a law student undertaking legal research using only paper-based searches and compares them with her current experiences training completely digitally-aware law students in a world heavily biased towards electronic resources.

Google's plan to digitise huge numbers of books from over 40 libraries has been controversial from the start with court actions still taking place in the United States. Chris Holland traces the history of the project and discusses its potential impact on copyright issues.

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.

David Wills describes his experiences at the AALL summit with particular emphasis on the sessions on legal education, digital ephemera preservation, disaster planning and the rights of indigenous people.

Alison Pope, Keith Puttick and Geoff Walton have been involved in the information literacy aspects of a project to help students improve their research skills and they report on this and the wider current debates on information literacy with an emphasis throughout on legal research skills.

A new Law Licence was agreed between the legal profession and the CLA in late 2008 and Paul Rollins of the The Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, describes its main features and the role of the CLA in enforcing copyright law in the UK.

The team responsible for Legal Journals Index explain how journal articles are selected, indexed and loaded to this online legal information service provided by Sweet & Maxwell. They outline the history of LJI and discuss the criteria for determining which journals are included in the service; how the Articles team decides which articles will be indexed; the content of an LJI index entry; how an abstract is written; the use of the taxonomy; the full text journals service on Westlaw; and the work of the Document Delivery team.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Survey. It has been written by Peter Clinch, Senior Subject Librarian for Law, Cardiff University.

At large City firm Herbert Smith, the legal research training programme for trainee solicitors is taken very seriously and includes a compulsory training course in their first two weeks, followed by research exercises and further courses which have been carefully designed in association with the partners to ensure that trainees qualify with excellent legal research skills.

Catherine O'Sullivan of Norton Rose outlines the benefits of using the Moys scheme in a large law firm library. She also briefly discusses how the firm has tailored it to their specific requirements and she finishes by pointing out the potential disadvantages of the scheme.

Gail Boelens discusses how library and research training is delivered in a large Australian law firm. She also considers some of the challenges involved, including dealing with multiple jurisdictions, databases using different operating platforms and having adequate resources to develop and deliver training.

Vanda Broughton describes the methodology of constructing a thesaurus from a faceted classification for law (Bliss Bibliographic Classification 2nd ed. Class S). The structure of the classification is described, and the way in which the thesaural relationships are derived from this is demonstrated. Recent work to automate the process, using the encoded classification data used for the schedule display and alphabetical index, is explained. Examples of the way in which this functions are included, and an analysis of the output shows where editorial work will help to improve the resulting thesaurus.

This article by Steven Whittle gives a comprehensive picture of not only how metadata has been used at the Institute but also the technical details and scope of the very impressive range of digitisation projects and other resources developed to help fellow legal information professionals access a wide array of information which was previously very hard to find.

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.