This article by Niamh Burns, Senior Manager for Library & Member Support Services at the Bar of Northern Ireland, provides a brief overview of the history of the Bar of Northern Ireland and an explanation of the Bar Library model and the services it provides. She provides an insight into some of the current issues facing the barrister profession in Northern Ireland, then focuses on what the Bar of Northern Ireland's Library & Information Service is doing to support members of the Bar Library in meeting some of their challenges.

This article, by Jas Breslin, is a summary of a panel discussion held at the BIALL Conference in July 2022, an in-depth and absorbing debate with a focus on the changes in legal research across the globe over the last decade. Entitled ‘Thoughts on the ever-changing landscape of international legal research’, the discussion saw four panellists from different working environments explain exactly what international legal research meant to them, and what significant transformations they have witnessed in recent years. Interestingly, some universal key themes emerged during the discussion, regardless of the jurisdiction or sector the speaker worked in.

There is plenty of advice for those about to take an interview for a job, but what about if you're sitting on the other side of the table? Here Jas Breslin, Research & Information Services Manager at top city law firm Charles Russell Speechlys, guides us though the key things to keep in mind when you're the one asking the questions.

In this article, based on his presentation at the BIALL Annual Conference in July 2022, the author Greg Bennett, a law librarian, discusses the insights he gained by becoming a student of law, and so, a user of a law library.

This article by Nuala Byrne describes how the Library and Information Service of The Bar of Ireland, The Law Library, developed to support the profession of barrister from 2004 to the present day. It highlights key priorities addressed in the earlier years and how the service has developed since to deliver a modern, networked, knowledge-based library and information service, to barristers who are members of The Bar of Ireland.

This opinion article, by Channarong Intahchomphoo and Christian Tschirhart, explains the evolution of data and how it becomes useful information and then insightful knowledge. In the current era we are witnessing a high increase in the development and adaptation of artificial intelligence (AI) in society. AI technologies have the ability to process large volumes of data and information to help in finding insightful knowledge. However, AI is not perfect and there are ethical concerns, particularly when unintended negative consequences result from it; this paper also discusses ethical concerns currently confronting our society related to the freedom of expression and hate speech issues with AI. Importantly, this paper notes that governments are working to find ways to regulate social media and internet companies through legal channels as governments are no longer confident in the ability of social media and internet companies to self-regulate and thereby to guide society on what content is right or wrong. This is a critical new development in internet and AI governance that information and technology professionals and public and private organizations need to monitor closely the situation as it evolves.

This paper, written by Gineke Wiggers, Suzan Verberne, Gerrit-Jan Zwenne and Wouter Van Loon, addresses the concept of ‘relevance’ in relation to legal information retrieval (IR). They investigate whether the conceptual framework of relevance in legal IR, as described by Van Opijnen and Santos in their paper published in 2017, can be confirmed in practice.1 The research is conducted with a user questionnaire in which users of a legal IR system had to choose which of two results they would like to see ranked higher for a query and were asked to provide a reason for their choice. To avoid questions with an obvious answer and extract as much information as possible about the reasoning process, the search results were chosen to differ on relevance factors from the literature, where one result scores high on one factor, and the other on another factor. The questionnaire had eleven pairs of search results. A total of 43 legal professionals participated consisting of 14 legal information specialists, 6 legal scholars and 23 legal practitioners. The results confirmed the existence of domain relevance as described in the theoretical framework by Van Opijnen and Santos as published in 2017.2 Based on the factors mentioned by the respondents, the authors of this paper concluded that document type, recency, level of depth, legal hierarchy, authority, usability and whether a document is annotated are factors of domain relevance that are largely independent of the task context. The authors also investigated whether different sub-groups of users of legal IR systems (legal information specialists who are searching for others, legal scholars and also for legal practitioners) differ in terms of the factors they consider in judging the relevance of legal documents outside of a task context. Using a PERMANOVA there was found to be no significant difference in the factors reported by these groups. At this moment there is no reason to treat these sub-groups differently in legal IR systems.

A working knowledge of copyright is essential for academic library staff at all levels if they are to effectively support their users. However, it is an area that causes anxiety amongst staff who often feel underprepared to deal with the questions they receive. The Covid-19 pandemic and the corresponding online shift has highlighted the need for embedded copyright expertise but how do academic libraries equip their staff with the copyright knowledge they need and (perhaps crucially) give them the confidence to use it? Although formal training is available, copyright is a changeable area requiring ongoing education which is no longer practical in the age of limited training budgets. This case study of the approach at Cambridge University Libraries explores some of the potential reasons for staff apprehension around copyright, the range of copyright knowledge and skills needed in an academic library and how a collaborative approach has helped to increase the copyright confidence of staff across the institution. This article has been written by Claire Sewell, Research Support Librarian at the University of Cambridge.

This article, written by Kate Faulkner and Wendy Lynwood, considers the skills of law librarians and shows how they can assist those who also hold a copyright specialist role. Most librarians encounter some aspects of copyright within their role. However, the understanding that law librarians have with regard to law, legal research capabilities, teaching and liaison skills equips them to take on copyright, sometimes in addition to their law library role, or to move into a full-time copyright specialist role.

Most scientific publications have their metadata available as freely accessible and machine-readable information at CrossRef. However, student-edited law reviews have not followed suit with this practice. Consequently, a large part of legal research remains in a blind spot for scientometric analyses and tools. The present paper, by Andreas Nishikawa-Pacher, investigates whether the law reviews’ RSS feeds could serve as equivalent sources for open scholarly metadata. The suitability of RSS feeds from 51 student-edited law reviews (as indexed in Web of Science's Social Science Citation Index) was assessed with regards to three fictitious meta-scientific applications – namely (1) a ‘latest paper’-tool that lists the law reviews’ newest publications with links, abstracts and dates, (2) an author database and (3) a calculation of the mutual citation counts among different law reviews. This paper finds that only 21 law reviews offer functional RSS feeds, and while they were suitable for a basic ‘latest papers’-tool, due to their low metadata quality they cannot aid in generating an author database or in counting the mutual citations among law reviews. The result suggests that law reviews would be advised to adopt digital object identifiers (DOIs) and start depositing openly accessible metadata, for otherwise their scholarly impact and visibility will further decline.

New emergent technologies, like cloud computing, blockchain, the ‘internet of things’, and artificial intelligence (AI), have received significant attention from research and industry. Public and private organisations benefit from these technologies, but the privacy of individuals is threatened. This research paper, by Varda Mone and CLV Sivakumar, analyses the existing data protection laws with respect to new emerging technologies like AI, big data, and algorithms. The purpose is first, to discuss and analyse the impact and emergence of modern concepts like big data, algorithms and artificial intelligence (AI), Cloud computing, and the ‘internet of things’, etc mainly in light of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) provisions. The article examines the challenges of GDPR compliance posed by the features of these technologies, both individually and collectively. Due to the unique features of these technologies, we are able to identify areas of compliance that needed attention. With regard to the compliance issues identified, we discuss possible solutions as well as raise new questions for further investigation. It is not an exhaustive assessment of these fields but an attempt is made to shed light on a few of them from a data protection perspective.