Welcome to the winter 2016 issue of Legal Information Management and the end of another editorial year and the completion of the 16th volume of this journal.
ELAINE WINTLE 1953–2016
We begin on a note of true sadness and an obituary for our colleague Elaine Wintle who was the Librarian at Blackstone Chambers. I am most grateful to Alison Million and the other contributors for writing this fitting tribute to Elaine who will be very greatly missed by so many members of our profession.
LAW LIBRARIANSHIP: AN EVOLVING PROFESSION
In this first section we take three papers that were delivered at the BIALL Conference 2016 which took place in Dublin last June. The theme of that conference was ‘The Value of Change’ and to quote Karen Palmer, BIALL President for 2015/2016, the meeting aimed at allowing us, ‘to explore and reflect on how our profession, our environment and our skills can evolve, transforming services and priorities’. The three papers in this section discuss some of those issues. The first article by Helen Marshall and Kelly Taylor describes how the team of research analysts, which includes people from a law librarianship background, provides the firm Pinsent Masons with in-depth sector and market analysis. Then, Peter Wilson and Cosmo Anderson, from Slaughter and May, write about embedded legal information professionals in law firms, while Alex Smith addresses big data technology and the emerging roles and the expertise needed to make these essential tools work in law firms.
CURRENT ISSUES
In this section there are four separate articles on offer. Marci Hoffman, the General Editor of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, reports on how this major multilingual legal index handles its content, and how it is developing in the electronic era. Allie Lustigman and Amy Hanley explore how certain customisations to SharePoint 2010's out-of-the-box capabilities can be successfully applied to a knowledge repository on a limited timescale and budget. David Gee provides the latest report of the SLS/BIALL Academic Law Library Survey for the year 2014/2015 and, finally, there is an interesting review of objectives and challenges for law libraries concerning social media. This article is written by Channarong Intahchomphoo, Margo Jeske and Emily Laudriault.
CONFERENCE REPORT
In this section Glenda Browne, a freelance indexer, writes about the ‘Law Via the Internet’ conference that took place in 2015. In the context of making legal information more freely available, she addresses the ways in which indexers and informaticians explore meaning, develop standards and consider user needs to make information widely accessible.
CURRENT AWARENESS
As ever, considerable gratitude goes to Katherine Read and Laura Griffiths of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies for the current awareness section. We end this issue with a book review.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As the editor of LIM I am very thankful for all the excellent contributions that we receive. I am also grateful to our colleagues at Cambridge University Press, especially Craig Baxter, and for support of the LIM Editorial Board including the chair of the committee, Loyita Worley and the team of proof-readers.
