Dear Colleagues,

By the time you read this, we will likely be in the waning days of summer. I hope you’ve had a good one—summer, that is.

Sassi of Matera

The highlight of mine was a trip to Puglia and Basilicata in southern Italy. For Italophiles who haven’t been south of Rome, this is a fabulous trip. Much different than northern Italy, these regions are washed in sunshine and speckled with thousands of olive trees (some centuries old) and buildings constructed from cream-colored limestone. Perhaps the most intriguing structures, however, are the Sassi of Matera (Basilicata), which together comprise a UNESCO World Heritage site. The Sassi are complexes of houses, churches, and other structures built into natural caves that were inhabited and used for thousands of years.Footnote ¹ Of course, all of this beauty and history are embellished by wonderful local olive oils, wine, gelato, and pasta (the orecchiette are Puglia’s specialty).

Pasta sold in Bari

Voodoo Doughnut

In July, I headed to Portland, Oregon, for the American Association of Law Libraries’ annual conference. It was fun seeing colleagues and friends, and I learned a few things at the programs. The star of the conference, however, was Portland itself. From Powell’s Books and Voodoo Doughnut, to the Portland Japanese Garden and the International Rose Test Garden, the place has a lot to offer. The afternoon before I returned to Chicago, while in downtown Portland, I serendipitously encountered a wonderful mural of former US Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (RBG). Painted by local artist Allison McClay, with the encouraging caption la lucha sigue (the fight continues), RBG is depicted as larger than life, holding court over a Portland street.

Mural painted by Allison McClay

Amidst these adventures, I managed to compile the summer issue of the International Journal of Legal Information (IJLI). In this issue, there are two very different articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI): Henderson Waithe, Public Services Librarian at the Faculty of Law Library, University of the West Indies in Barbados, looks at AI from a Caribbean viewpoint in “Emerging Trends in AI for Academic Law Libraries: Global Insights with a Caribbean Lens.” Professors Bakht Munir, W. Blake Wilson, and Allen Colombo Jr. of the University of Kansas School of Law and Muhammad Zubair Abbasi of the University of London School of Law and Social Sciences add to the growing literature on AI in the legal orbit with a new study, “Evaluating AI in Legal Operations: A Comparative Analysis of Accuracy, Completeness, and Hallucinations in ChatGPT-4, Copilot, DeepSeek, Lexis+ AI, and Llama 3.”

From South Africa, Khulekani Khumalo, Chief Librarian, Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO), and Mandisa Msomi, University of South Africa, present and discuss the results of a study they conducted on the “Utilization of Online Databases by State Law Advisors in the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, Pretoria, South Africa.” Many of you know Khulekani from recent IALL meetings. Also from the African continent, Raliat Alabi, head of the Law Library, Fountain University, Osogbo, Nigeria, shares her take on “Legal Research without Barriers: Free Legal Databases as Alternatives for Law Students.” Even though the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs) have been covered before in the IJLI, Dr. Alabi provides some new and useful information about why the NigeriaLII has not been as successful as other African LIIs.

From India, Rajat Dafta, Lecturer and Assistant Dean at the Jindal Global Law School, contributes “Invisible Assets, Visible Gaps: Redefining the Principles of International Taxation.” Tax law isn’t an area that I’d usually include in the journal, but Dean Dafta’s paper is well-written and successfully explains the major issues in international tax law in straightforward terms. Finally, Janet Kearney, Reference/Foreign, International & Comparative Law Librarian at the New York University Law Library, offers an excellent “Bibliography on Judicial Independence in International Tribunals and Apex Courts.”

As far as the regular features, “Behind the Books: Global Insights from Law Librarians” profiles Judy Wairimu Ng’Ang’a, Senior Library Assistant, Kenya School of Law (Nairobi). Many thanks to Judy and to column editors Mike MacArthur and Julie Wooldridge of the Duke University School of Law. Rounding out the issue are Amy Flick’s “International Calendar” and book reviews penned by Christina Lowry and Jennifer Elisa Chapman.

Thanks to all of the authors!