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.

Taxonomies are key to creating certainty in language across the legal landscape. In this article Alice Laird and Katy Snell of Howard Kennedy examine why taxonomies are still important in the age of AI. They also discuss how they have built on their expertise on taxonomies for the benefit of their firm, and how they have become involved with a cross firm project called noslegal.

This paper considers how a taxonomy of conjugality—marriage, common-law marriage, and visiting relationships—emerged as a specialized vocabulary to apprehend and govern the postcolonial Caribbean. Although the metaphor of intersections does not fully capture the ways these categories relate to each other to produce social meaning, I employ an intersectional framework to offer a close reading of the routes through which these and other social differences and equivalences are produced as dimensions of citizenship in specific historical contexts, such as the period of decolonization and Caribbean nation-formation. In so doing, I illustrate how the categorization of intimate relationships codified a hierarchy based on intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation, and established rough moral boundaries for a heterosexual Caribbean nation. The lives of working class Black women animate the categorization. I show how by centering these women in intimate relationship codes their sexuality is contained and patriarchy naturalized. In this paper, I suggest that we should mark the role intersectionality plays in constituting categories of intimate association, explore how these categories shape sentiments about belonging, and articulate the social costs of their instantiations.

Mark Scott and Nigel Smith provide the background to the development of Sweet & Maxwell's Legal Taxonomy before outlining its structure and explaining how it is used by Sweet & Maxwell and other Thomson Reuters companies.

Martin Jones of Advice Services Alliance describes a specialist classification scheme and thesaurus devised for use by the general public when searching for legal advice on free websites, and explains how it is implemented and maintained.

Peter Jordan and Helen Lippell describe the role of metadata, including taxonomies, in re-designing the flagship government website, Directgov.

This article by Paul Billingham of Concept Searching and Phil Ayton of UC Logic covers the history of computerised searching aids in the context of knowledge management projects and describes conceptSearching, which is a scientific approach to trying to solve natural language searching problems using a number of techniques, not just an algorithm. They also consider federated searching and describe the Sysero information portal and a taxonomy manager application.

Stella Dextre Clarke provided an article for our Winter 2003 issue on the government's drive towards interoperability, and the role of a controlled vocabulary in easing access to information. Here is an update, casting light on the relevance of the government's standards, from the viewpoint of our profession.

Animals from distant lands fired the imaginations of people living in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This is attested by a considerable wealth of iconographic and written material which has been explored from many perspectives, providing valuable insights into medieval western conceptualizations of the fringes of the known world and the otherness of exotica. However, the physical remains of non-indigenous species – both those recovered from archaeological contexts and extant in private collections – have generally been examined in isolation and rarely incorporated into a broader framework exploring the reception and utility of exotica. This article offers a new perspective on the topic by focusing on the zoological identity of non-indigenous animal body parts as ‘material culture’.