Middle Temple Library has recently significantly enriched its portfolio of electronic resources. This situation was caused not only by the Covid-19 crisis, which certainly accelerated its efforts in this field, but also by the changing demands and habits of the Inn's members. The library specialises in arbitration and competition law, so a decision was taken to try two new digital platforms and, as Lenka Geidt writes, to share their experiences in the course of this article.

Claire Greening explores some of the challenges that library and information professionals face when weighing up hard copy and online resources. Rather than trying to establish a preferred or ‘best’ format, this article instead explores the advantages that both formats have to offer and considers how they can co-exist within the law library. The article concludes with some questions to ask when purchasing and organising resources and explores some of the practical considerations to take into account regarding training.

The ever increasing capabilities of online legal research platforms have revolutionised the strategies we adopt in tackling routine research questions. It is now possible, for example, to comprehensively identify later judicial references to any given earlier case at the click of a button. However, we are potentially running the risk of believing that the online platforms are capable of providing us with answers to questions that they are not yet able to deliver. In this short article Daniel Hoadley focuses on the capability of the current spread of online research platforms to answer a frequent and fundamental legal research question: “is this case still good law?”

In this paper Samuel Wiggins uses the results of a survey undertaken by the author in 2011 as a way to contemplate both current and future issues for the legal information sector. The survey results act as a point of reflection for four key areas challenging the profession; relationships between lawyers and librarians, changing budgets, the nature of enquiries, and job roles. The article concludes by reminding the reader of the importance of reflection on their work, as well as highlighting areas where law librarians might strengthen their position within their firm.

Universities enter into contracts with publishers or providers of aggregated resources on behalf of university libraries to provide staff and students with access to material in electronic format for educational and research purposes. Following a brief review of twelve database provider contracts, our research demonstrates that Australian academics are potentially breaching the contractual terms and conditions of electronic resources when accessing, downloading and printing articles and other materials. They are covered for research purposes, but not for educational purposes.

Elena Shishmolina writes about the foundation and growth of the work of the Legal Information Centre in the National Library of Russia, Saint Petersburg, including information about its website and electronic guides.

Because the focus of most of the themed articles in this issue of LIM is vendor relations from the point of view of the customer, it seemed sensible to allow the legal publishers to present their own views of relations with their customers to the readership, via a short survey carried out by BIALL's Legal Information Group.

Fiona Fogden gave a very practical talk at the BIALL Conference 2010 in Brighton on contract negotiation with online vendors and it has been held over to this issue of LIM as it fits so well with our vendor relations theme.

This paper, originally presented at the BIALL Conference in June 2010 by Rory Kingan, introduces the concept of Electronic Resource Management systems and how they can help law libraries deliver better value from online services. The goals and functions of these systems are presented, benefits that firms are achieving with them are described and several advanced uses are discussed.

This article by Steven Whittle gives a comprehensive picture of not only how metadata has been used at the Institute but also the technical details and scope of the very impressive range of digitisation projects and other resources developed to help fellow legal information professionals access a wide array of information which was previously very hard to find.

The team responsible for Legal Journals Index explain how journal articles are selected, indexed and loaded to this online legal information service provided by Sweet & Maxwell. They outline the history of LJI and discuss the criteria for determining which journals are included in the service; how the Articles team decides which articles will be indexed; the content of an LJI index entry; how an abstract is written; the use of the taxonomy; the full text journals service on Westlaw; and the work of the Document Delivery team.

In a response to issues raised at User Groups on the research capabilities of young lawyers, Tom Laidlaw of LexisNexis looked into the current legal skills environment and as a result LexisNexis have introduced the LawCampus website for students and are planning a programme for trainee solicitors involving “virtual mentors”.

This article reviews the kinds of resources available to support the training of legal researchers and to guide them in their research, so that law librarians can avoid “re-inventing the wheel”. Karen Crouch places her emphasis on practical legal research. She also highlights some work in progress and possible future directions for legal learning resources and reviews some of the online tools that enable legal researchers to work more efficiently. The emphasis is on low cost resources, and those which enable additional value to be extracted from existing legal database subscriptions.

European Sources Online (ESO) is an electronic information service that provides information focusing on Europe. This article, by Ian Thomson of Cardiff University and Executive Editor of ESO, describes the development and the background to ESO, the key features and objectives of the service and current challenges.

John Eaton from the University of Manitoba at Winnipeg, describes an important Canadian knowledge initiative within the academic library community relating to acquisition of digital resources.

This new service won the Halsbury's Award for the Best Legal Information Service – Non-Commercial Sector at the recent BIALL Conference in Dublin. Chris Holland explains the background to the project and outlines plans for its future development.

The purpose of this article by Peter Clinch and Ruth Bird is to outline the latest findings from the recent review of foreign law holdings in the United Kingdom, and, in Part 4, to raise key questions relating to the future of these potentially endangered resources. The authors invite the legal research community to consider the many issues of concern raised by the results of this latest FLAG survey.

Online legal resources are increasingly the sole official source. Authentication – the means to demonstrate that materials are what they purport to be – is inseparably interrelated with the official status of sources on the web. This article by Richard J. Matthews examines key features of the UK Statute Law Database, the US Government Printing Office future digital system (FDsys), and the Ohio Supreme Court database of judicial decisions that are relevant to assessing appropriate authentication procedures for those resources. Archival and computational authentication methods are reviewed. Overall findings of AALL's State-by-State Report on Authentication of Online Legal Resources and its recent national summit on authentic legal information on the web are analysed.

Lesley Young analyses how the acquisitions process has altered in an academic law library with a huge international collection of both hard copy and electronic resources, following the increasing introduction and use of electronic sources of legal information.