Susannah Rayner provides an introduction to the archive collections held at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Library which relate to legal studies, based on a presentation given at the National Socio-legal Training Day on the subject of legal biography, held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies 15th May 2013.

This is an edited version of an article by A.R. Hewitt which first appeared in The Indexer in Autumn 1963 and was re-published in The indexer in 2014. The editor of LIM felt that the article deserved a wider audience and is grateful to The Indexer for allowing it to be reproduced here*. Although contemporary indexers do not have to trouble themselves with the layout of index cards, much of the advice contained in it is still applicable a half-century later. It is concerned with English law, but again, many of the principles apply to indexing works on legal subjects for other jurisdictions.

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.

Lesley Dingle describes the ESA, a digital archive based on interviews with prominent personalities associated with the Law Faculty of Cambridge University. It constitutes a unique repository of audio, textual and photographic materials, providing insights into the careers of scholars, jurists and practitioners. Motivations for the establishment of the archive in 2006 were: recording reminiscences of scholars back to WWII and its immediate aftermath; documenting developments in administration and teaching in the Faculty and colleges; archiving voices of scholars taking about their early lives, careers and published works; compiling a cross-indexed reference of personalities mentioned in interviews; and generating an awareness amongst students and younger staff of the rich heritage of the Faculty. The methodology and strategy of conducting interviews and compiling entries is briefly described. Finally, in the broader context of legal biography, it is argued that such oral histories are an essential component because they capture aspects of personality that written accounts cannot and thereby reveal traits that conventional biographies may miss. This claim is illustrated by selected examples from the archive, that currently contains twenty interviewees.

In this article Jackie Fishleigh provides an introduction to the issue of Big Data, gives the definitions for the subject and offers an explanation of the key issues about Big Data and what involvement we have as information professionals.

The Holy Grail for most biographical researchers is a large hoard of unpublished personal papers such as letters or diaries. In reality that quest will usually be in vain. Research must instead focus on institutional sources. Because of their long history and pervasive role in the English legal profession, the Inns of Court and their records are likely to be the starting point for many legal biographical research projects. They also very usefully illustrate what the biographical researcher is likely to gain (and unlikely to gain) from using institutional archives in general. This article, written by Guy Holborn, describes the main classes of records held in the Inns' archives and what they can yield.

In this conference report Vola Walker gives an account of the conference of the Australian Law Librarians Association (ALLA) held in Sydney in 2013.

In this article Wirt Soetenhorst explores a paradigm shift that is already taking place in the legal education market and that will accelerate over the next five years. This development will have consequences for all the parties that are active in the field of academic legal education: authors, institutions, libraries, students and publishers. The article analyses the current traditional business model (the sale of physical textbooks) and outlines several potential scenarios for the future of legal publishing in which publishers move into teaching and academic institutions.

The Advocates Library provides a library and information service to around 470 members of the Faculty of Advocates, the Scottish Bar. The library also acts as the national law library for Scotland, having the privilege of claiming law materials on legal deposit. The Senior Librarian, Andrea Longson (the author of this article), and the library's management group work closely with staff at the National Library of Scotland and have been involved in strategic discussions about the drafting and implementation of legal deposit legislation for over ten years.