Current debates about decolonisation and diversification raise practical issues for librarians. The Bodleian Law Library is engaging with these challenges, in co-operation with the Oxford Law Faculty, the wider Bodleian Library and the collegiate university. This article by Margaret Watson describes how the Library is taking a fresh look at its collections and their organisation, with a view to acquiring, revealing and collocating material that might otherwise by overlooked.

Legal research is an important aspect of the legal profession and is something that students will learn how to conduct during their education. David Hand and Matthew Terrell describe a research project, conducted by Justis, a vLex company, which has identified that the teaching of legal research is highly variable across universities, who broadly adopt one of three models. At individual universities, students are not always aware of the legal research platforms to which their university may subscribe. These are factors which can have an impact on student confidence in conducting legal research and may contribute to the level of additional support that students seek. To address these issues, this research suggests the possibility of a standardised approach to legal research teaching.

Simon Drane writes that the next decade will see a shift within legal service provision, where it will transition from a model which is predominantly geared around internal work processes to one that is geared around customer outcomes. Law firms will complete their evolution from a bill by the hour service-based model to something closer to a product subscription model. This shift will deliver growth, sustainable recurring revenues at high margins and new higher value service opportunities. At the core of this shift is the changing nature of consumption driven by consumer technology and the inexorable drive for base level information to become free. Law firms are sitting on vast quantities of data, and yet very few are currently harnessing this effectively in their offerings. The effective use of data combined with technology will allow innovative organisations to provide a new form of productised offering which will not only drive new recurring revenues but will allow them to offer higher value business advisory services. Whereas effective use of data within the organisation will lead to better evolutionary efficiency, quality and risk management, the use of data externally for clients will lead to more revolutionary changes. It will also blur the lines further between traditional law firms and LegalTech product businesses, in the way alternative legal service providers (ALSPs) and the Big Four are already exploring.

This is the latest report analysing the results of the annual Academic Law Library Survey that is jointly sponsored by the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) and the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). It has been compiled and written by David Gee, Librarian at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, a part of the School of Advanced Study at the University of London.

This article, written by Mark Hatcher, provides an overview of the background and achievements of the Bar Council, the professional body for barristers in England and Wales, since its formation in 1894. It traces the early years of the council and its expansion after the second world war, following the growth in legal aid and other post-war reconstruction measures. It describes changes in the structure and organisation of the Bar Council culminating in the implementation of reforms which followed the Legal Services Act 2007, which resulted in the separation of representation of the Bar from regulation of the profession which was delegated to the Bar Standards Board in 2006. It concludes with an overview of the key issues that are driving the Bar Council's activity to promote the Bar's high quality specialist advocacy and advisory services, and to promote access to justice for all.

This article written by Hester Swift is based on the online course entitled, ‘Customary International Law’, which was created by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) Library for the Postgraduate Online Research Training (PORT) platform and is available to all at <https://port.sas.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=120>. The PORT service is provided by the University of London's School of Advanced Study.

In this article, John Sinkins, Chairman of Wildy & Sons Ltd, outlines a brief history of the company and how his family have been involved since 1895. It describes how the company has evolved, particularly since the turn of the millennium. He describes his personal journey and that of the company since he joined in 1968, more than 50 years ago.

With the adoption of the new 17 SMART Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), access to government information becomes essential for these goals to be realised. This view was corroborated by IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) at its 2015 Cape Town Declaration. In Nigeria, the drastic reduction in the revenue accruable to the government following the sharp decline in the price of crude oil and the subsequent impact on the nation's economy have made it imperative for citizens of the country to insist on transparency and accountability regarding the activities of the government. Otherwise, the SDGs could end up like the much-talked-about MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) whose records were unimpressive despite the oil boom of that era. Public libraries could serve as useful channels for providing government information to citizens. However, their managers lack the necessary technical skills. This article considers how public libraries in Nigeria could provide access to government information for its users. This study is based on existing literature, international binding documents and observations, as well as drawing on the wealth of experience of the researchers themselves and their interactions with public librarians. It is recommended that the scope of the curricula of library schools in Nigeria be broadened to include the mandatory teaching of management of government information to budding librarians. Also, there should be collaboration between public librarians and law librarians. Such collaboration would help provide more access to government information for the citizens of Nigeria. Law librarians could also benefit from the collaboration and devise better skills to help improve their services to users.

This short piece makes reference to an event that was held in May 2019 at the London School of Economics. The occasion was entitled ‘Oral History Research: Illuminating the Past’. There were three speakers and the session was chaired by Professor Michael Lobban. One of the speakers that evening was Lesley Dingle and, following this introduction, her talk is featured in this issue of Legal Information Management.

The Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) was established to record aspects of the history of the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University. It is based on 28 interviews with scholars and, currently, has 66 hours of audio recordings and transcripts, but also includes over 800 photographs and numerous associated items including biographies, bibliographies, obituaries and eulogies. Entries for faculty members cover the period from WWII to the present, while 13 entries focus on the incumbent Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science. The archive is a rich source of information for researching aspects of legal communities, and in this contribution I focus on three aspects: personal histories of scholars, faculty history, and more socially-broad topics. In the first category I seek to show how the ESA identifies crossroads in the personal legal journeys of professors Higgins, Baker, Smith and Crawford, while I use their common remembrances to record an institutional landmark. For the latter, I selected the 1995 Faculty move from the Old Schools to the Foster building on the Sidgwick site. Finally, I show how ESA illustrates components of legal life writing in a broader societal context. Here I compare the experiences of curators of family histories at the British Library, and ‘group biographies’ of court officials as researched at LSE, with aspects of documenting careers of senior legal academics at Cambridge.