Last year Jake Hearn, Vice Chair of the LIM editorial board, created an elective module on the core components of and types of roles within the legal information profession, which was offered to postgraduate students at City, University of London, with the module being hosted at City, University of London and The Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. Here Jake gives the reasons for creating the module and tells us how it all came together and how it has progressed since then.

Digital transformation increases the need for interdisciplinary collaboration along the product lifecycle. It is currently hindered by a low data consistency resulting from the use of heterogeneous systems and data models. Especially in work planning, where several data models are combined, this decreases efficiency. Systems Lifecycle management (SysLM) offers a solution to this remedy. However, a sudden switch to SysLM is not possible in brownfields. Thus, it is necessary to examine the challenges and opportunities to derive case-specific measures that enable its adoption in work planning.

Czechoslovakia as a victorious, yet still fragile post-imperial state, considered censorship and state propaganda to be a necessary tool to secure its legitimacy at home and abroad. From the very beginning, Czechoslovakia defined itself as a democracy with freedom of speech as its basic principle, yet at the same time, it had to deal with inner fragility and outer vulnerabilities. The strategic agenda of people's nutrition, which was closely associated with the perceived competence of state institutions, serves as a litmus test for the state's regulation of press and public speech and the implementation of republican practices and acceptable limits on public discourse. This study analyzes how the new republican state regulated information on food supply shortcomings in the press and at public gatherings. It argues that Czechoslovakia maintained the prewar Habsburg practices of censorship; however, instead of the vaguely defined public interest of the multinational monarchy, it was now used to protect the public interest of “the national state of the Czechoslovaks.” This study analyzes how the government thought about the consistency of its communication during the postwar (supply) crisis, and thus also options of how to shape a clear and positive brand of the state.

In an era where efficient information management is crucial, KnowAll Matrix stands out as a transformative tool for legal informational professionals. It was developed by an experienced UK legal library consultant, Penny Bailey, and here Bailey Solutions explains how this innovative platform goes beyond standard library management systems to offer a future-proof solution, revolutionising access to legal knowledge. Utilised by large law firms, barristers' chambers, government libraries, European agencies, a European parliament, and other organisations, KnowAll Matrix supports information staff to proficiently manage all traditional library functions, including cataloguing, subject indexing, classification, circulation, loans, acquisitions, and serials management. Furthermore, it offers essential features for modern electronic resources management. Its user-friendly interface ensures seamless discovery of both print and digital resources in a single search, prioritising user convenience. Over two decades, as the legal and technological landscapes have evolved, so too has the product, with innovative features like multi-hierarchical taxonomies, practice group resources, single sign-on, and contract renewals. This article delves into these new features and their utilisation by clients to make the library and information centre a primary resource for legal professionals seeking information.

This essay takes a close look at Maura Dykstra's monograph Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine (Harvard Asia Center, 2022). It analyzes the book's multitude of problems, such as its flawed conception, numerous factual blunders, failure to engage existing scholarship, problematic choice of primary sources, and dubious citation practices. Most significantly, this essay aims to provide ample evidence to demonstrate how the book systematically misrepresents the majority of its primary sources to support an untenable thesis. It argues that the book's central claims are ungrounded in evidence.

As part of the digital transformation towards Industry 4.0, the tasks of staff on the shop floor are changing. Despite increasing automation, complex assembly steps still have to be carried out by humans, especially when it comes to complex products rich in variants, whose assembly cannpt be fully automated for various reasons. Due to increasing individualization and the steadily growing complexity of products, providing the right information at the right time and in the right place is becoming more important. In this context, the visualization of information via novel technologies such as augmented reality plays a crucial role towards an efficient and error-free production process. This paper compiles existing challenges when using augmented reality as a visualization form for an assistance system. On the one hand, the challenges found originate from a systematic literature review and are organized according to predefined categories. On the other hand, these challenges are complemented and compared through findings gained from expert interviews, which are conducted with employees of two European commercial vehicle manufacturers in the field of production. The analysis of the two methods highlights the need for further research.

Additive Manufacturing (AM) has traditionally been used for prototyping of products, however, in the last few decades, it has seen a rising growth in the manufacture of final products. The addition of AM as a manufacturing method in the portfolio of a company's production capabilities increases the complexity of decision-making. This is because the decisions are often not based on the same criteria and constraints, as related to conventional manufacturing processes. In this paper, we investigate this challenge by studying how AM affects the current workflow and the associated information flow for a design-make process in a Swedish manufacturer before and after the integration of AM. In this paper, it is argued that apart from an understanding of how to design for AM, it is equally important to consider how introducing AM alters the existing information flow and how to benefit from information available in various design-make process steps to facilitate decision making process. The result clarifies that the current process relies largely on tacit and experiences-based knowledge, whereas to take advantage of AM, more precision is required to capture and process the available information.

While volume-driven industries such as automotive are characterized by a high degree of data backflow across all production cycles, there is still a certain residue in the planning and construction of process plants. This is firstly due to the high proportion of customer-specific requirements and secondly to the significant amount of value added on site during construction. To handle recurring project-specific process plants as time- and cost-efficiently as possible, optimal information exchange among contractors of various disciplines and the plant developer is a prerequisite. For this purpose, a holistic digital representation of the plant is created, which consolidates all relevant information in one place serving as a foundation of multiple digital twins. An approach to identify and define relevant information depending on their subsequent use is developed. On this basis, a framework is proposed to enable a multipliable BOM-based automatic definition of information backflow to instantiate digital representations in parallel to the planning and construction process. Furthermore, project-specific contextual information will be captured and referenced in a structured form preventing their loss for subsequent similar projects.

Sharing information between stakeholders is a critical success factor for ecodesign projects. This sharing is based on indicators that can be interrelated, i.e., impacting each other.

This article focuses on the perception of environmental performance indicators’ relationships during the design phase of projects. It uses a DEMATEL approach combined with a graph-database visualization linking environmental performance indicators. While the DEMATEL approach highlights the critical environmental indicators, the graph-based visualization maps the primary interrelations of these factors and defines the best scale to manage them. The novelty here lies in the complementary use of these two methods to facilitate environmental project monitoring.

This research is applied to rail infrastructure projects. The main results insist on land optimization, landscape insertion, carbon footprint, economic benefits, and biodiversity measures as critical factors when designing these projects. The graph-based visualization maps the main oriented links between indicators, allowing managers to identify the gaps between the perceived knowledge and the ground truth, facilitating their project monitoring.

Complex research problems are increasingly addressed by interdisciplinary, collaborate research projects generating large amounts of heterogeneous amounts of data. The overarching processing, analysis and availability of data are critical success factors for these research efforts. Data repositories enable long term availability of such data for the scientific community. The findability and therefore reusability strongly builds on comprehensive annotations of datasets stored in repositories. Often generic metadata schema are used to annotate data. In this publication we describe the implementation of discipline specific metadata into a data repository to provide more contextual information about data. To avoid extra workload for researchers to provide such metadata a workflow with standardised data templates for automated metadata extraction during the ingest process has been developed. The enriched metadata are in the following used in the development of two repository plugins for data comparison and data visualisation. The added values of discipline-specific annotations and derived search features to support matching and reusable data is then demonstrated by use cases of two Collaborative Research Centres (CRC 1368 and CRC 1153).

This study aims at revising the history of knowledge management in service design organizations to discover what sources, technologies, tools, and users have been used and how knowledge management may thus help to improve consultants’ performance. Also, this study sheds light on the importance of decomposing knowledge (knowledge-leveling being said in this article) before tackling knowledge management. Moreover, this study provides a real case study investigation of knowledge management in a service design organization. Through this investigation, the authors propose their knowledge-leveling classification model and how knowledge management activities satisfy each class. Thus, the authors showcase the essentiality of knowledge leveling in knowledge management.

Fiona Fogden has spent much of her career in law firm libraries, but she has recently taken on the role of Knowledge & Information Service Manager at RICS – the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. So, who better to give LIM an overview of the RICS Knowledge & Information service, describe what the collections contain, and also tell us how the service would be of interest to legal information professionals.

MBSE and SysML are increasingly finding their applications in industry as well as in academia. The reuse of the information described in SysML models depends, among others, on the modelling methods, management of dependencies between elements and on the needed remodelling effort. In this paper, a modelling method is presented that address the reuse of SysML models and descriptions as well as reuse of model variants in SysML. A case example is presented to explain the modelling methods and the gained experience is summarised in the form of general recommendations for further use.

Process modelling (PM) is used to support designers by providing guidance on what needs to be done. Change processes in development organizations accompany introduction of new procedures, new methods (also digital form), tools that have to integrated into existing processes. Objective of this paper is to provide guidance to designers in selecting the appropriate PM language to support structured changes in processes. Requirements are derived from frequent change needs in SME and a PM morphology is provided assisting the selection and use of suitable PM languages for change processes.