LIM Readers' Survey

We are very grateful to all those members of BIALL who took the time to complete the survey about LIM – one of the comments was that it was too long, which we have taken note of! Rebecca O'Rourke, our Editor at Cambridge University Press, who ran the survey for us has written up the results and we are taking active steps to implement as many of the suggestions as possible. We hope to introduce some of your ideas in Volume 10, 2010.

BIALL Conference

The BIALL Conference Safeguarding Information was held between the 18^th and 20^th June at University Place in the heart of Manchester University's campus. We were entertained and educated by a wide variety of people including one of our favourite keynote speakers, Professor David Snowden of Cognitive Edge, who entitled his presentation Thinking and Acting New. Some of his ideas appeared to be slightly frightening, as he seemed to be saying that many of our traditional skills, including cataloguing and indexing are no longer needed because computers can do it all, probably better than us! He also suggested that knowledge management was dead – another chilling statement to the assembled masses of information professionals.

We are publishing some of the plenary session papers in this issue, though unfortunately several of the speakers declined to write up their presentations. Linda Holbeche from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development has written about optimum methods which should be used by organisations in the knowledge and service industries to cope with change management in these turbulent economic times. Jenny Rowe, who is the Chief Executive of the UK Supreme Court, talked to us about the background to the creation of the court and the importance of its new library. At the time of writing it has just commenced working, so her paper is very topical.

There were lots of excellent parallel sessions to choose from. We are publishing two very interesting presentations on the use of social networking tools. One is by Emily Allbon of City University who has tried a wide variety of different tools during legal research training sessions. Tony Simmonds from the College of Law gave a practical paper on the use of Web 2.0 among the information team on their distributed campus and, particularly usefully, he describes the lessons learned.

Nicola Franklin gave a timely talk on marketing yourself in these recessionary times and we have included this paper as our Checklist. Sarah Rudman from Field Fisher Waterhouse described how her information team implemented a completely new intranet. She covered the introduction of a new content management system and the use of RSS feeds in the current awareness services, plus how to manage the potentially difficult problems of transferring content ownership.

Figure 1:

BIALL 40^th Anniversary Party. 1-r Retired Members Dan Raistrick; Robert Logan and Barbara Tearle

Figure 2:

BIALL 40^th Anniversary Party. Daniella King, President of BIALL

Alison Pope from Staffordshire University has written about their new legal research skills module which concentrates on information literacy skills and ensuring that the course is fully embedded in the law school curriculum.

Figure 3:

BIALL 40^th Anniversary Party. Party goers enjoying themselves on the dance floor

BIALL Foreign and International Law Seminar

Other papers include a description of the FLAG and FLARE projects by Peter Clinch and Hester Swift. We are very grateful to Hester because she has also contributed an excellent and extremely clear survey of sources of US legal information which is based on the presentation she gave at the BIALL Seminar on Foreign and International Law held earlier this year. We are also grateful to Lesley Dingle as she has contributed no less than three items to this issue, including her paper given at the same seminar which is a comprehensive survey of the materials available in the field of international law. Both these articles should be of long-term value to any legal information professional needing to undertake legal research in either of these areas.

Current Topics

Our Current Topics feature includes a very practical article by Wendy Small on how to manage your knowledge management and library resources through the recession. Her key theme is that these resources must always be business critical and this may include new ways of working which should be embraced as the future shape of law firms begins to emerge. Penny Bailey has contributed a fascinating account of her career as it has moved from law librarian to managing director of her own company and covers the highs and the lows she encountered.

Craig Gerrard attended the 8^th Nordic Law Library Meeting in Finland recently and has reported on the sessions where the new Finnish National Digital Library project was discussed. We have Part 2 of Lesley Dingle's interview with Professor Bob Hepple, who was hugely influential in shaping labour law in this country during the late 20^th century and Lesley has also written a review article of a recent book on the use of digital technologies in academic law libraries.

Correction

In the obituary of F. Paul Richardson published on pages 154–5 of Vol. 9(3) two dates were given incorrectly. Paul became responsible for law at Hammersmith Public Libraries in 1957 (not 1975) and he retired in 1985 (not 1957). Our sincere apologies to Tina Richardson for these errors.