The web makes so much information available that we sometimes forget that there are still many hidden archives and collections that are not immediately accessible by way of a simple Google search.

One example is the pages created by government departments that house reports, policy papers and the gamut of related materials that are collected by the departments to keep the public informed, and which are often commissioned to inform the government of issues and concerns that may form part of policy. One of our academics was concerned recently when she went to the Department of Justice website to locate a report she had written several years ago for the previous government. The report, and all associated material, seemed to have vanished, without any indication of any new location, nor a clear lead to what had happened to it. Her assumption was that the new government, on coming to power, had removed all traces of the previous government's documents from the public sphere.

She was right that the new incumbents had taken an e-broom to the website and created a literal ground zero from their start in office.. This would not be so bad had they left an easy trail of where one could find all previous documentation, rather than creating a modern equivalent of rewriting history as if nothing had existed previously. On their website, there is no link to older material on the Research Papers page, where one would have expected to find this type of report, but when you trawl around, there is a link of sorts on Policy pages (!) – the breadcrumb trail is

Home» Publications» Policy» Ministry of Justice

… on the right hand side there is a note which says ‘Archived pages’ with a National Archives. How the average user would know this is where one might find items such as this report is questionable.

Since 2007, UK government information is harvested by the National Archives, including the entire corpus of reports, etc, produced for the DOJ under the previous Labour government. The NA is obliged under its charter to harvest government department websites on a regular basis, and keep the results online, in its site. The date when a site was last harvested can be found with some digging around, and the remit for web continuity is also explicitly stated. This will go some way to saving born digital information of an official nature, but is not fool proof, because the harvesting is not continuous, so some items might go up briefly on a department’s site and be taken down before the next harvesting period. For example, in 2012, the Ministry of Justice site was harvested on January 19, and then not again until February 27, a gap of over 5 weeks.

Interestingly – frustratingly – a Google search for the title of a report does not return reports listed on the National Archives site. An advanced title search on the National Archives own site does not return the report. You need to know the title, and that it was delivered to the Ministry of Justice, and then search in an A-Z list on the harvested MoJ site.

Sound complicated? It sure is. In many ways this one example is a symptom of a much greater long term problem for legal scholars, researchers, and historians. Because there are no longer general uniform retrieval systems in place, such as online catalogues, or even (don’t say it too loudly) the old fashioned, and not always perfect, card catalogues, the systems of organization that once provided a consistent means of locating government papers has become fragmented.

Organisations make decisions about their web presence without always planning for the future or realising the wider long term implications of their decisions. The web is not neatly indexed and organised, nor can it be.

The situation was reinforced recently when we were notified that Parliamentary Vote Office will no longer produce hard copy of the Public Bill and General Committee Proceedings in official bound volumes. They are now published on the Parliament website in html and pdf format only. The last completed paper set of bound volumes of general committee proceedings are for the 2006/07 session; no more will be produced. In the UK Parliament, the Vote Office is responsible for the provision and distribution of all UK and European parliamentary papers required by MPs in the course of their work. Bills, acts of Parliament, copies of Hansard and the Order Paper are all provided by the Vote Office. Our concern grows that the change to the publication of Proceedings may foreshadow a similar change for the Bills, Acts, Hansards and Order Papers. If we could be informed of changes, and we knew we could rely on web continuity for a full record such as we have now in our Official Papers collection going back over 400 years, we would feel more comfortable with these changes that seem to take place on such an ad hoc basis.

And one must also wonder how the ordinary punter gets to know that this is what has happened to more recent information from the government. Using one of the common search engines does not locate the report which sparked this blog piece. It requires someone to know the background developments that have taken place for storing these documents, to know what the archive is and does, and to feel competent in searching it. That is not open access, in the way that a book collection on shelves in a library is open access. The concern is that the majority of people do not use structured searching, they prefer serendipity, and they are thus likely to end up missing what they require without even realising that most government documents actually do exist somewhere on the internet.

Do you belong to a Professional Association? Have you become involved in it in any way? This column is written in praise of such bodies, and the work they do. It’s not very techie, there isn’t anything new or even greatly educational in it, but it is more a reflection on an unsung entity that is not often recognised beyond its own membership.

In December I participated in the annual meeting of the International Association of Law Libraries, which was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It was the 30^th meeting, with the first one being held in 1966; they became annual meetings from 1996. The list of past courses shows the great diversity and richness of this Association, and its efforts to provide its members and others in the profession with the opportunity to broaden their knowledge and understanding of legal systems and issues in various parts of the world.

It may not be widely known that all the work undertaken in this association is voluntary. The officers take on responsibilities which eat into their personal time, as membership secretaries, treasurers, presidents, and secretaries. The boards or councils or committees that oversee the running of this and other associations do so because they believe in the intrinsic worth of their profession, and of working with and for their colleagues.

I have been involved with professional associations throughout my career, and I recently stopped to ask myself why, because there are chunks of time one devotes to them, which can seem an unnecessary imposition when the rest of your working life is a bit out of control.

So once I got on the plane to KL, I jotted down all the reasons why I continue to value IALL, and BIALL, and AALL, and ALLA, and CALL, and the many other national and regional groups which bring together groups of librarians to educate, help, and socialise with each other across the myriad libraries we work in. So here are some of the things I value:

1. We learn from each other, we share ideas, and we are generous in providing assistance when it is requested.
2. We run useful list-servs as a way to share and disseminate information.
3. We often work in small libraries, and the only professional contacts we develop are through the associations. This applies in academic libraries, small law firms, barristers’ chambers, smaller court systems, etc.
4. We organise local professional education for our members and colleagues.
5. We produce, edit, and author the journals of our associations.
6. We often provide bursaries to colleagues to attend our annual conferences.
7. We have subcommittees working on projects such as legal information literacy standards to help colleagues determine how best to train lawyers in a complex world.
8. We negotiate with legal publishers on behalf of our members, and thus benefit their employers, the lawyers.

We know the world would not stop if our associations ceased to operate tomorrow. But enough people are happy to pay annual dues to these bodies to enable the provision of the activities they undertake, so the value is there for many professionals. It is comforting to have colleagues to consult whenever in doubt, or when you want to quickly beef up on new resources, software, etc.

Each profession has its professional body. Some have a lot of clout, such as the ABA in the US (which even sets out requirements for law libraries in universities to be independent of the university library and report direct to the law school Dean). They all perform similar functions to our library associations, holding annual conferences, and supporting members with publications, etc, and sometimes they are responsible for accreditation and professional conduct.

Has the internet made these associations redundant? I would argue not. The immediacy of information sharing has made our lives easier via list-servs, and a side benefit is that a query posed by one person often receives a shared response that enlightens many more. Compare that to the person to person phone call of 20 years ago. Library guides for users, our blogs and tweets, our websites, are there for all to access and learn from, so we can no longer be isolated silos. The associations often work to facilitate the management of the unorganised information world and help give shape and pointers for members. They run training sessions in person, webinars for those too far away to get to events, and produce wonderfully useful journals in paper and online with all manner of research, surveys, hints and clues.

Our associations are not restricted to library management and collection and budgeting issues; we also discuss and teach and inform each other on the law, legal systems, legal research and sometimes even legal gossip.

Lawyers will never know the true worth of these associations to law librarians, because they are only interested in the outcomes – the quick turnaround of locating an obscure case, correct interpretation of a scribbled citation, location of an old Explanatory Memorandum, the production of the legislative history of a section of an act, etc. Yet behind this expertise that so many law librarians demonstrate is the helping hand of a colleague or a course, or a list, which originated in a voluntary association of like minded colleagues.

The Incorporated Council of Law Reporting is an interesting publisher, established in 1865 by the legal profession in Great Britain, to bring some order to the then somewhat chaotic world of law reporting. Before this time, English law reports, now known as Nominate Reports, were produced on an individual basis by barristers, with a series lasting from one or two volumes, to the working life of the author barrister. Series varied in standard, layout and structure.

The ICLR oversaw the introduction of an orderly reporting system with the creation of The Law Reports, as the series that would report judicial decisions from the ‘Superior and appellate courts of England and Wales’. The Nominate Reports were collected together and republished as the English Reports, containing cases from 1220 to 1866 – although not all cases were included, as outlined in an article by Glanville Williams in the Cambridge Law Journal ([1940] 7 CLJ 261).

Although there are no official authorised reports in England and Wales, in a practice direction ([1998] 1 WLR 825) the Law Reports are named as the preferred source, ahead of the Weekly Law Reports and the All England Law Reports. Now all this background is actually leading somewhere. On October 18, there was an official launch by the ICLR for their online version of their publications, principally The Law Reports. It was a noteworthy event, held in Middle Temple Hall and guests included many High Court, Court of Appeal and Supreme Court judges, as well as leading barristers, academics, law librarians and other legal practitioners. The new service was being demonstrated on terminals in the Hall, and I overheard some of the older barristers marvelling at the ease with which one could locate and cross reference a case. It made me wonder what they had been using up to now to locate cases online – if anything!

To be fair, the new service appears to be aimed at individual members of the bar rather than at libraries and law firms. These online reports are already available in html or pdf version via Lexis, Justis or Westlaw, and have all the value added editorial features offered in those databases. However, because of their cost, these databases are usually beyond the reach of individual barristers, and even sets of chambers find the subscriptions to Westlaw, Justis or Lexis too expensive, and rely on their Inn libraries to subscribe. So in this way the ICLR service will fill a gap for those who want to search, cross reference, keep or read the final version of a case, rather than the initial judgment that can be found free of charge on Bailii without any of the editorial that is provided by database aggregators.

Features of the service include a ‘hover’ text box that references relevant cases, legislation or treaties, a link to the ICLRs citator/index card service which provides subject matter, appellate history and cases considered. There is also a briefcase tool which allows a collection of authorities to be stored in one location for reference at a later date. It is a useful tool, but not ground breaking in its use of the technology.

Our hope is that ICLR decides to maintain its ties with the existing aggregators, so that in organisations subscribing to these resources will continue to have The Law Reports on hand. As an aside – the first digitised version of the ICLRs was produced by a commercial provider, Justis (the same people who provide the only online version of the International Law Reports). Let’s just hope that the ICLR do not decide to follow in the footsteps of other publishers who have decided to withdraw from aggregators and try to capture their own market niche. This is a very unhappy trend for cash strapped libraries!

Of added interest was the brief speech made by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge (yes, that really is his name) who observed that the advantage of The Law Reports is that they are selected for the legal issues they raise. He was paraphrased thus:

It remains the case that too much rather than too little law is reported. The incompetent advocate, said his Lordship, is the one who confuses weight with authority. The competent advocate, on the other hand, is the one who directs the court only to those cases that really matter. Sometimes less is more. Selectivity in reportage has been ICLR’s guiding principle since its establishment in the mid-Victorian era and remains so to this day.

Lord Judge may not speak for all members of the judiciary, but in an age where even in the UK many more cases are available because courts send their judgments to free online services such as Bailii, it is worth remembering that not all that is reported has equal standing.

I was part of the Apple IIe generation – we installed them in the school I worked at in the 1980’s. They seemed great, but somehow the DOS computers that started to creep in seemed to allow us to do more in the background, and the techies decided that this was the way to go. I learned some Unix along the way, and that helped me create some smart databases in 1990 in my library, but I soon joined the crowds. My first computer purchase was a Windows PCc, and for more than 20 years I stuck with PCs. I could get ‘under the hood’ if I needed to, and I understood the way they were set up and how to bend them to my requirements if I needed to. However each new PC I bought seemed to be less open to my intervention, and that little bit slower than the last one, even though I maxed out on the Dell options for memory, Ram, dual core etc etc.

At work it was also all about PCs and MS Windows. On our workstations, we used Windows compatible software. In 2000 I went to a firm that had recently merged several offices in different cities, and they had Macs in some and PCs in others. My task was to find a document management system that could manage precedents on both. And we were in luck because at that time a couple of companies were working on web based solutions that could apply across all platforms, and thus met our requirements. But the choice was limited, and the IT people gradually made every office go with the Windows PCs. There were still many legal software applications that were not Mac-compatible, and this added to the IT team’s arguments in favour of MS.

About 3 years ago I was heading home to Melbourne, and one of the airport tax free stores seemed to offer a good deal on MacBooks. On the spur of the moment I lashed out and bought one, to teach myself the ins and outs of the Mac system. It took a bit of learning to use the shortcuts on the left of the screen rather than the right, and to work the dashboard, and to understand the Finder, etc, but it did seem easier to use. My brother had always used Macs, but I was a bit scared of not being able to get ‘into the works’ as I saw it, and it seemed odd to accept a ‘closed’ operating system; my experience with the MacBook suggested that it did not appear to need any tweaking anyway.

Despite this experience with the MacBook, on our main home computer I stuck with the Dell/Windows option, and cheered when Windows 7 came along. Yet soon after installing it, the system seemed to be slower than before, and the frequency of essential updates seemed to grow. I was almost too scared to start up the computer every morning, unless I had a good 10 minutes to wait as the thing cranked into action, or because another ‘essential update’ or another patch was waiting to be installed, shutting me down as it did its devious stuff.

Last year I was provided with an iPhone at work. Not bad, I thought, a girl could get used to this. I liked the apps, I loved the intuitiveness of the product. (In my heart of hearts I think it is really the ‘Son of Palm’, because Palm used to do a lot of these neat little tasks, albeit with a stylus and not your fingertips, but it sort of was left behind while the creative boffins at Apple forged ahead with this integrated and attractive new generation toy). And then I used an iMac in the first couple of months of this year when staying in Melbourne, and really took to it.

So after less than two years on the latest whizz-bang super Dell, we pulled the plug. The MacBook had been working away as our ‘downstairs’ computer, and always seemed to fire up straight away, so I decided we would splurge on the latest beautiful, sleek iMac using OS X Lion.

So in place of a large box for the processor, a separate Logitech camera, cords for all sorts of things going into the back of the processor, I have a sleek, all in one computer that sits very neatly on my desk, has a smart little wireless keyboard and a ‘magic’ mouse. I am so impressed by the way this computer works, as well as how good it looks, and of course now I wonder why I put up with the Windows issues for as long as I had. I have a computer that is ready to work as soon as it is turned on. It allows me to have many different functions running at once without slowing down, or hanging as I flick between applications. It does not need virus checking software. It talks to my iPhone, it happily houses my massive collection of cds on iTunes and syncs quickly with my iPod. All my files (even .pst Outlook email files) that I needed were transferred across from the PC, though I have to wait a bit for the iCloud to launch properly in November before my iMac and MacBook start to talk to each other, although the MacBook can already send files to the old non-wireless printer upstairs. I may experiment with the beta iCloud in the interim. I like Open Office, even though I realise MS Powerpoint has more features and may not be fully compatible. But I have to use it less anyway; presentations should not rely on .ppt!!

I am finding the search capability of iMail just wonderful. In fact the search capability across the whole computer means I do not need Google Desktop – vital on my work computer to help me locate those mis-filed files – anymore. I am able to edit websites easily, like iPhoto, find the Pictures file displays too small, but can live with that, and have yet to learn what Garage Band can do for me.

Sorry if I sound a bit ‘born again’ about all this. I just wanted to share my very positive experience of moving to Apple. It is not a matter of being a nerd or a geek or a Steve Jobs fan. I have not yet purchased an iPad, just to prove I am not a total convert – I will get one in good time, because everything I have read and seen makes me think it will replace my A4 note pad, and the endless printed out minutes of meetings, but I want to see the Apple cloud working. I have read the articles on SLAW about Dropbox, and iPads and the temptation is to rush out and get it now, but I will wait.

Windows, with its endless updates and patches and vulnerability to virus attacks and Trojan horses, seems to be losing its way. Many companies and corporations are run by IT depts. who are restricted to their IT choices of 10 or 15 years ago. Those who look at the workplace efficiency of their staff, the maintenance needs of infrastructure, and the future durability and longevity of IT systems might be persuaded that the initial additional investment one makes in kitting out an organisation with Apple/OS is the wiser long term decision.

Publishers across the board, not just legal publishers, are under George Monbiot’s microscope in this very interesting article in The Guardian the other day. The title is enough to make you look twice — ‘Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist’.

It is a similar tale in legal publishing. We need to be aware of the added power we put into publisher hands every time we cancel a paper subscription….

There is a trend that is causing me great consternation, and I think its impact is only just starting to hurt our users and budgets. It is the decision being taken by some publishers of electronic versions of journals and law reports to remove their titles from the aggregators, such as Lexis or Westlaw, and to build their own platforms and then sell the titles /access separately to consumers at a rate they think is achievable.

I admit to my fair share of cynicism in relation to legal publishers; many – though thank goodness not all – have always seemed to operate a pricing policy based on ‘what the market can bear’. In the old days, the value of a legal treatise seemed to be determined by the weight/number of pages as much as any rational pricing policy based on solid market research. Lawyers were seen as fair game, because books were their tools of trade.

With the advent of electronic provision, the product was suddenly harder to value; development costs of electronic resource retention, copying, and distribution were all front loaded and passed on to the purchaser. We accepted these costs initially because we agreed that they did need to meet the start up costs of e-development, and our payments could thus help to make the products more accessible. 

However, I have yet to hear of an e-resource provider coming to the consumer with the following proposition:

Well, we have set up our infrastructure, we have digitised all our backsets, we have added the software to allow for hyperlinking and many other great features. We can now reduce our price to you because the set up costs have been met, and we are now in steady state.

So the aggregators seek new and unique e-resources to add to their package and see this as adding value and justifying their above inflation annual price hikes. The fact that neither your library nor any of your users need a subscription to ‘Journal of train spotters’ law’ is irrelevant. However, the really annoying thing is that when a publisher, who has supplied their content to the aggregators for many years, suddenly withdraws their content from the aggregator’s site, we are never offered a reduction in subscription to compensate. 

What we did not anticipate some years ago when we all acceded to prices imposed on us by the large aggregators, was that we would soon be faced with some smaller, specialist publishers deciding to go it alone, by setting up their own e-resource site with access their own journal and report titles. The infrastructure costs of digitising and value-adding to content have reduced sufficiently in recent years for publishers to see self-publishing as their growth area, and the temptation to cut out the middleman appears to be the strategy for improved ongoing income generation in the future.

Thus we have recently been faced with two UK publishers removing key titles with little notification to either the aggregators or the customers. And whilst these publishers express surprise at the vehemence of complaints over this, they feel a month or two of free access while they sort themselves out will be enough to keep us happy. With one publisher, it has taken more than 2 years for them to try to sort out a suitable pricing structure that may see some take-up. Another publisher here, in a niche area of law, gave us about 2 weeks’ notice of their intention to go it alone and to pull their titles out of the aggregator. In so doing , both have presented customers with a price for their services that is fanciful, in fact in some instances ludicrous. For somewhere around 10% of our annual cost for full access to all content, local and international, on Lexis, we will be provided with 3 specialist journals, 1 law reports, and 2 textbooks as e-books. Another publisher thinks charging 25% of the cost of Lexis for 8 titles is fair. I just do not understand their thinking.

Libraries are in difficult economic straits. We are asked to purchase more and more e-resources because of their universal accessibility, their scope, and their general ease of use. Many libraries still have to purchase a raft of paper titles, reports, or legislation, or text books, etc. Budget allocations do not increase. It may be possible in law firms to recoup some costs through client charges, though I recall that firms were reluctant in the past to charge clients for research services. Times may well have changed since I left law firms. 

The other huge disadvantage is to our users – for every single tinpot e-publication, they have to learn a new method of access and searching; they have to know intuitively where to go to find the resource they need, and then they need to navigate pages of different bumpf each time. There are some federated search products available, but so far none of these provides us with a magic bullet that will make the users’ experience seamless. To some extent Google Advanced Scholar Search is on the way to filling this niche .

One purpose of libraries is to provide readers with resources that are too specialised and expensive for individuals to purchase, and to make them available to many readers. Libraries are altruistic institutions by the nature of their core sharing function. We appreciate that publishers are having a hard time envisioning their future, and that they need to make profits. But shouldn’t they look beyond this and consider the user as well; it could well be that their audiences will decrease if they go down this path. On an aggregated site, specialist titles are found not only by the specialist lawyers, but by all the users of that broad service. Once these titles leave the aggregators, just the specialists will be there to read the separate special titles; in many places the specialist items will just disappear because of the added cost.

So how do we deal with this insidious development? Can we refuse to take up the subscriptions, and be like Marie Antoinette, saying of our users –‘Let them read paper!’? Unfortunately I do not think so. But the problem is a growing one, and I fear it will not go away. Perhaps the raising of many voices could make a difference. It is worth a try.

The UK has faced a barrage of information-related news recently, from how it is obtained, to how it is restricted, and how it affects individual rights of privacy and freedom of expression. When you come from a country such as Australia, with robust defamation laws, the intense media coverage by the British tabloid press of anyone in the public eye can be quite a shock. It is the scurrilous nature of much this information, the level of detail revealed, and the distortion of facts in salacious headlines that still surprises me, despite living here for more than seven years.

Recently we saw the re-emergence of the celebrity phone hacking scandal. In a story that first surfaced 5 years ago, the then royal editor of the News of the World, Clive Goodman, was sent to gaol for 4 months for using phone hacking to obtain news scoops. There is a good outline of the development of this tale in the Press Gazette , following the story of journalists obtaining exclusive stories, often through the illegal activity of hired private detectives listening in on the voice mail messages of well known celebrities. Early in April, extended investigation led to the arrest of 2 more News of the World journalists. After initial denials and fighting accusations in court, we saw the unusual sight of a backdown when News International decided to admit its liability and offered compensation to the aggrieved victims in some 24 cases. The first settlement was with Sienna Miller, for £100,000, on May 13. There are those who argue that News of the World journalists are not the only ones who have used this means of obtaining information. Phone hacking is clearly a breach of an individual’s privacy, and even in the UK this sort of snooping goes beyond the public’s right to know.

The next information related scandal is about the awarding of super injunctions by courts to suppress stories in the newspapers, and the right to privacy (or otherwise) of the individuals involved. Super injunctions capture the imagination because they are inevitably granted to the wealthy or to celebrities. They are handed down by judges to prevent the press from publishing names or details of people who may be otherwise exposed in the press for their behaviour. In April a decision was taken by a BBC journalist, Andrew Marr, to reveal that he had taken out a super injunction some years ago to prevent publication of a story of an affair. This seemed to be a pre-emptive strike when other names, (including some innocent people who had never taken out super injunctions) were published shortly afterwards on Twitter. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, weighed in on the matter and called for Parliament to provide clearer guidance to the courts when awarding gagging orders. 

There were several threads of argument both for and against the use of super injunctions:

1. They lead to a two-tiered level of knowledge; the media all know who has taken out the super injunction, but the public do not.
2. Often the celebrity will be protected, but the other party – an ‘ordinary’ person (perhaps a lover, or a prostitute) is often not protected, and can be named in the press.
3. The injunction covers the printed press, but it cannot cover the internet, and tweets and blogs can name these people despite a super injunction.
4. Parliament should make the laws relating to privacy, not the courts.
5. The courts are interpreting the European law on human rights in a way that is protecting the rich who can afford to argue the case.
6. Freedom of the press, the right to know and other aspects of civil liberties are being eroded by the courts imposing super injunctions.
7. Foreign newspapers are not restricted by the super injunctions and often publish details suppressed in the British press.

A report into the use of super injunctions was published on 20 May, the results of an investigation by the Master of the Rolls, Justice Neuberger ; one recommendation is that the press be allowed to be in court to hear these matters, even if they can’t report the outcome. An interesting and evolving story is the request made by a footballer with a super injunction, who was named on Twitter, seeking details of the person who placed the post. The disclosure order was issued in the UK against the Californian based company, and whether Twitter pays attention and complies, will unfold during this week. 

In addition to the super injunctions issue, this week the European Court of Human Rights denied Max Mosley’s efforts to enforce greater restrictions on the press. This is hailed as a brake on ‘creeping privacy law’. The judgment, in Mosley v. the United Kingdom, stated that there had been no violation of Article 8 (right to protection of private and family life) of the European Convention on Human Rights in a story about his participation in a sordid, but not illegal, sado-masochistic party.

The role of the press in exposing the private peccadilloes of the politicians, etc, is very different in a country such as France, where the right to privacy of the individual is enshrined in the Code Civile. So no-one could report that a past President had a mistress, but everyone knew. Speculation about whether the wife of the current President is pregnant appears in the press in the UK, but not in the French press. But in the internet age, when Twitter and Wiki-leaks expose all sorts of hitherto secret or private information, how can any country expect to maintain restrictions on its printed press? And in the long run, should they even try? Are those who court fame, or power, fair game for the 24 hour news and gossip culture that has evolved over the past decade or two? If they wish to escape notoriety must they lead exemplary lives or just cop the consequences should they be caught out?

And finally, what about those who do not seek fame or power, but become celebrities by dint of their birth, or involvement in famous events? In this category I would place Prince William and his bride – a young couple who become the subject of information hounds potentially seeking to make a buck from intruding into every aspect of their lives. The royal couple successfully managed to control their special day, and their honeymoon, in a masterful way, beating the paparazzi at their own game. 

So when they could not provide an ‘exclusive’ on the Royal honeymoon, after Royal Wedding hysteria, (experienced not only in the UK, but throughout the world), the newspapers tried another tack. They turned to the issue of primogeniture, should the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have a daughter as their first child. This became a matter of considerable speculation in the blogs and newspapers. It was mentioned by Nick Clegg, Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Democrats, as an issue that might be pursued in Parliament. The 1701 Act of Settlement laid down the rules of who can be the monarch, so, no Catholics, and no daughters where there are brothers, can accede to the throne. So if you have no information to make a news story, speculate on a non-story instead. 

The relative size of library collections was once a source of pride for institutions, a tangible means of measuring their scholarly worthiness. In the 1990’s this gradually started to change, as the growth of collections continued well beyond the ability of the libraries to house all their books, either on open or rolling stacks. Libraries started to plan off site storage for the lesser used collections, and often collaborated via consortia arrangements to afford the construction and ongoing maintenance costs of the storage facilities. In some instances ‘last copy only’ schemes were devised to avoid duplication, and the methods of storage and retrieval evolved as the technology improved. In some cases the whole process is totally automated; in others, people mediate the fetching and retrieval of requested items.

The Bodleian Libraries is one of the rare group of academic libraries that double as legal deposit libraries. This is a wonderful asset to have in a research library; a guarantee that any book published in Great Britain in the last 400 years is most probably available to you as a researcher within half a day of requesting it. But the pressure of housing over 11 million items in the centre of a busy town like Oxford has been growing over the past 20 or 30 years, with the Bodleian looking for solutions to the problem by sending material both to salt mines in Cheshire, and a warehouse on an estate in a village close to Oxford (fetches from both are done every day). But lack of space to expand in any of these three sites meant that planning for a purpose built book storage facility became vital, as the collection grows by some 3 linear miles per annum just from Legal Deposit books. Oxford made the decision to build its own site rather than share with another institution, because it has to retain all its LD books in perpetuity, so can’t collaborate in any ‘last copy’ retention schemes.

There were constraints, including a reticence on the part of some academics and library staff to accept the need for a radical approach to book storage; the book as object has been seen as the raison d’etre of the Bodleian collection. After managing these concerns, and also various setbacks with planning , a site was selected near Swindon, about 30 miles from Oxford, and in October 2010, just 12 months after the first sod was turned, the Book Storage Facility was officially opened.

Coming later to the issue of dealing with the storage problem has meant that the design and operation has been able to take into account the experience of many of the book warehousing projects undertaken in the past 10 to 15 years by institutions around the world. So the end result is a great solution which combines many lessons learnt elsewhere. The BSF building is made up of four sections which will be filled sequentially, with a capacity of 8.4 million items – books, maps, manuscripts, journals and newspapers – on 153 miles of shelving. For those who like statistics, here are the relevant details about the BSF, taken from the website:

The Book Storage Facility consists of an 11-metre tall solid shelving system comprising 31 Very Narrow Aisles (VNA), with seven different bay type configurations to accommodate the different sizes of books and other materials. It also has a capacity equivalent to 153 miles (230 kilometres) of shelf space and a five level multi-tier structure for map storage. To guarantee the books’ preservation for the long-term, volumes will be stored in 745,000 bar-coded and specially designed storage trays and boxes that are of archival standard. Floor area of the warehouse equates to 1.6 football pitches although the High-Density shelving provides shelf surface area equivalent to 16.5 football pitches.

This description does not give the sense of the scale of the project anywhere near the actual experience of seeing the site in action. Library staff were given tours in December so that we could see for ourselves what is being done. For those concerned about the treatment of the books, it is great to see the storage trays are designed to house the books in a vertical stack, and there are handles to pull the trays off the shelves. The retrieval is by human operators on forklifts with sensors fitted to them so they never knock into shelving, and a mechanical hoist that takes the operator/book retriever up the 11 metres to the top shelves gently to take or replace the tray of books. 

Each book/item is being bar coded – an enormous undertaking in a library system that never used a bar code until this past decade – and each box, and shelf, is also barcoded, so the location of each item is random as far as its relationship to other books on the tray or shelf is concerned, but is always recorded each time a book is moved for a reader request. Books are housed by size to maximize the use of shelf spacing. 

Ingest of the lower use six million items currently housed in Oxford and current offsite locations will take up to 2 years, although the current rate of about 31,000 items per week is exceeding expectations, and auger well for an earlier end date. Each week the overall totals are posted on a special Twitter feed; since October 2010 over 850,000 items have been transferred to the BSF. As the millionth book arrives at the Bodleian's book store, it is timely to explore this huge undertaking in more detail.

The aspect of the project which makes the Bodleian Libraries venture unique is that we continue to offer a full book retrieval service throughout this project, irrespective of where the book is housed, so that in the majority of cases many readers will continue to be able to request items and have them delivered in the normal time frame. Readers can keep abreast of the progress of parts of the collection from the BOOK MOVES site. We have already tested this in the law library and books in the BSF were received within 5 hours of request. We are especially proud of this aspect of the whole book move process; the priority is to continue to get the book to the reader at all times.

The boffins will be pleased to know that the books are kept in a constant temperature of 18.5 degrees Celsius , with an ideal humidity level; fire safety precautions are state of art, and for many of the books that will end up in Swindon, they will be housed in far better conditions, and be far more likely to survive the ravages of time, in their new home.

As a sign of forward planning, the site on which the BSF is located has room for expansion into the future as needs arise; the University bought excess land which will lie undeveloped until new needs arise; we are guaranteed that while paper is discarded at an alarming rate in many libraries in favour of electronic, the Bodleian will continue to offer both formats well into the future.

There have been a couple of blogposts recently that are worth noting – the first one marks the impending breaking of the $1 billion mark for e-books – posted on James McQuivey’s blog – and a related post a few days earlier on Law Librarian Blog about the release of 40,000 e-books by Springer without any DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions.

Our library is like many others – we have purchased e-books to provide the best range of resources to our academics and students. These are in addition to the paper, because we are lucky and for the UK at least we still get most paper publications via Legal Deposit. The e-books we can buy that are on reading lists vary from the very best publishing from our sister department, OUP, through to less critical but still handy collections on international law and commercial topics from Brill and Kluwer. Sweet & Maxwell – via Westlaw – provide e-book versions of the major Common Law Series titles, for a similar cost, law school wide, to that paid for a single paper copy. 

I am in two minds about e-books. I can see them as an invaluable addition to the suite of e-resources available to our students, and if they mean the user can get to to the page or chapter they need at a time they want, and from a location of their choosing beyond the law library, then this must be a good thing. We now have tens of thousands of titles, all linked from our catalogue, and discoverable if you know what you are looking for, or if someone has provided you with a link, eg, through a reading list. You can get a flavour of the coverage here, though you won’t be able to read any of them unless you are a member of our university. That’s a problem.

And this is where the Springer initiative is so interesting. They are not only providing the libraries with the e-books – they are ceding ownership of the e-book to the library, in exactly the same way they treat paper copies of books. And this seems only right. But the access will still be limited to members of our institutions, which concerns me. We do not restrict access to our paper books – anyone who comes to our library in person can read or copy any book in the library, whether they are members of our university or not. 

I agree with copyright restrictions up to a point, but it is strange that we continue to apply the concepts of an intellectual property right that was established in 1709 to e-books in particular, because they are not going to be used in the same way as paper. With paper books anyone could browse shelves and read or borrow books because of the copyright exemption rights given to libraries to provide books to readers. These rights have not been extended by legislation to e-books.

We have electronic publishing totally tied up by lawyers before the products even hit the ground on the one hand, and on the other, the internet generation who really do not care about copyright restrictions and the implications down the track of not protecting the author’s rights of ownership. The restrictions of access to e-books owned by an institution are put in place by the institution, through single sign-on protocols such as Shibboleth. That is so that we comply with publisher restrictions, but now, if the restriction is lifted, as with Springer, will the institutions be the ones to decide whether to offer a two tier system of access to e-books? 

It is unlikely that public libraries will be able to afford all the e-books on offer in specialist subjects, so these will usually be restricted to academic institutions, and non members will have difficulty getting access.

So my question is – if the tipping point is reached soon, and the publishers move to e-book publishing in preference to paper, will we still have libraries acting as silos, holding the same material throughout the country, but with only their constituents being able to read these e-books? Where will the ‘man-on-the-street’ go to consult law material? Will Springer’s bold move challenge their competitors so that the digital future will be a truly open virtual library? As consumers of academic e-book publishing we still have issues to address before we can be confident that an e-book library is the digital mirror image of a real book library.

The looseleaf service is one of the legal publishing world’s more interesting phenomena of the last third of the 20^th century. Conceived in its most familiar form in the 1960’s as Keesing’s Contemporary Archive by the Commercial Clearing House, they were seen as a clever alternative to publishing new editions of books. It was acknowledged that the pace of change in passing new legislation was increasing, and it was difficult to make a bound book of legislation on a topic of law current, because of the delay between writing and publication. The idea of collecting a book as a series of loose pages, gathered together in a ring binder, and then distributing supplementary updates on a regular basis where pages were replaced with new ones containing recent updates to the law was, indeed, a revolutionary concept.

What advantages were there to these services? Unlike a book, which could only be sold once, publishers realised that they could charge for the original work, and then sell the service of updated parts as an ongoing subscription, generating a steady and reliable income stream. The cost of production would be less, as only packs of pages were produced, no hard backs, no need for new artwork, and little work for the publisher post production and mailout.

The looseleaf gained popularity with the profession because it was usually packaged to contain law and commentary – and later on cases, based on an area of practice, such as family law or tax law, etc. Suddenly the lawyers did not have to rely on series of law reports – a 2 or 3 volume ring binder set could provide the latest legislative changes, new caselaw, and commentary as well. As long as the lawyer had someone to file the updates – usually secretary or librarian, rarely the lawyer! – the services were an invaluable and usually reliable research tool. 

As with all money spinning ventures of legal publishers, these early successes spawned imitators, rival publications covering the same topics by competitor publishers, and a nightmare for librarians. In the 1990’s at law firms it was often deemed essential by partners that they have at least one or two of the leading looseleaf services in their office . Some would favour one publisher, others another, and all would expect the services to be updated on the day of receipt of the updated part. Librarians despaired. The time it takes to update a service varies on the experience of the updater and the complexity of the update and the number of volumes of the service. 

The frequency of updates was an issue – some arrived 4 times a year, others monthly, the nightmarish tax and company law as frequently as fortnightly!!! And a further complication arose when the postal service failed to deliver a part; subsequent updates would lie around waiting to be filed. Claiming missing parts was as frustrating and wasteful as the filing itself. In the good old days the publishers kept up their own master sets of services and offered advice and guidance on tricky updates. This service has gradually disappeared in many publishing houses.

The other nightmare scenario was the missing page – pages – sections, etc. Users would remove pages to copy them, or to hold on to them, and there was no way in a library that this could be prevented. So another form of chasing had to be done when missing bits were discovered by irate users. More frustration and time wasting for the librarian, and chasing up lost pages from many months/years ago relied on the publishers holding these in stock.

Other problems had to do with the expansion of volumes, taking up more and more shelf space.

Now this litany of woes, and historical review, serves as a reminder to us all of the loathsome nature of this form of publishing. The early attempts by publishers to transfer the contents to electronic format were laughably frustrating for users. The functionality of the looseleaf could not be replicated on CD Rom, although valiant efforts were made by publishers such as CCH. The static, unwieldy pages did not translate to flat files without hyperlinking and cross referencing of some sort. The lawyers rarely took a shine to this option, and the publishers continued to produce more specialised and costly services. 

Librarians were in revolt over the services from the early days, resenting the time consuming nature of the format; there would be few librarians who would champion the looseleaf and who would not have sad tales to relate of hidden piles of unfiled updates, of lawyers relying on out of date services to provide advice, and of chunks or sections of a service disappearing.

Publishers are now not holding masses of back stock of parts, storage is money and they are all more keen on the bottom line than they are on providing this sort of service to customers. PDFs are made available online for some updates – and again the librarian or the filer has to then cut these down to the right size, punch holes in the right spot (this varies from publisher to publisher – 2, 3 and even 4 ring binders, or clip-in binders, are all on offer) and yet be grateful that some sort of update/replacement service is provided in this format.

 The reason for this lengthy reminiscence is twofold. We recently got so fed up with being unable to obtain missing parts from publishers who no longer retain the stock on a just- in-case basis, that we employed a couple of postgrads for 5 or 6 weeks over summer to just get on with the filing backlog. We have over 300 multi-volume looseleaf services in the Bodleian Law Library, a truly horrendous number when you think of the rate of updates… So that project gave us a chance to gather our forces and bring things up to date, and to give up waiting for helpful cooperation from the publishers.

But perhaps the happiest development for me was the discussion I had with one leading publisher the other day as we looked at the totally new approach being taken to looseleafs online. At long last the publishers have stopped trying to convert static paper to static electronic flat content. They now see the information as an organic, interlinking resource that allows a serendipity of approach, hyperlinking and content are divorced from the format. And we now have to wonder how long the publishers will continue to produce the paper updates 

Will we lament the decline and fall of the looseleaf? I doubt it. Ask anyone who has filed updates – they won’t weep any tears. Nor would those who use the services and suffer the frustration of coming across missing pages – or worse than that, services that are meant to be up to date being months or years behind.. And those who have to check in the parts, claim the missing parts, and manage the subscriptions – they won’t be sorry either. I would be surprised to see this format around in another decade – another format that shot to prominence like a comet in the sky, and is now burning itself out after a 50 year lifespan…

What to do with print now that so much is online, and discussions of what’s the point of print are taking place well beyond the posts on Slaw. Working in a Legal Deposit library means I have had to take a step back, look at the issues, and accept a much more conservative approach than I might have done otherwise.

Before I start on legal deposit, I know two good reasons why print is important, and they are both to do with personal experience. Firstly, when there is an electricity blackout you cannot access the internet. Mostly this is not a problem, true, but a sub-station outside the library went kaput one weekday, term-time afternoon, and was out for 6 hours. We became redundant real estate for some readers as they hightailed back to their college rooms for power… or did we? No, many folk just got off their backsides and made their way to the shelves, discovering the books they usually ignore.

Secondly, until everything we need is available free of charge on the internet how can we abandon all the print? The online legal publishers continue to increase prices above inflation most years, as if they’d never heard of the Global Financial Crisis. While there are others, Lloyds Law Reports are a classic example. They used to be on the UK version of both Lexis and Westlaw, and whilst not a core reporter series, about 2 out of every five cases in each volume is not reported elsewhere. So for commercial lawyers they are still an important source. Given the significant advantage that this exclusivity provides, it would not be surprising if pricing decisions took advantage of that – lawyers had simply nowhere else to go. That’s fine, we can’t quibble with that in a capitalist world, aiming to take advantage of market factors seems to be what it’s all about in the end. But they actually took it a step further, by imposing unrealistically high prices on the online subscription version of their products, and, to my way of thinking, took their position to the limit. Law firms in particular are charged quite exorbitant rates for access. Even in an academic setting, where we are often given favorable rates, we are required to pay an amount for the Lloyds database equivalent to nearly half that paid for all of the Westlaw databases. To my way of thinking, something is wrong here!!

So back to legal deposit. It seems like a ‘good thing’ to be a legal deposit library. You are entitled to receive a copy of everything published in your country to add to your collection. At the Bodleian Law Library we select all the law material that comes through to the Bodleian Libraries twice a week. The system evolved from the request by Sir Thomas Bodley (our great and glorious founder) in 1610 to the Stationer’s Company that Bodley’s Library should be provided a free copy of all books registered with the Company. (There is detailed information about it on the Bodleian Libraries’ website.)

The system would be great if we knew all publishers always deposited materials as legally required. But the sad truth is they do not. And the problem has compounded with the gradual ingestion by the publishing behemoths of many smaller, quality or specialized legal publishers.

This is a problem for any library which is meant to hold all the wealth of a country’s published material in its collection. For a law library the problem is made worse by the very serial nature of much legal publishing. Format is our enemy – during the course of a year we receive loose part law reports, single copies of acts, single issues of journals, and single releases of loose leaf services. IF we receive everything we still have all the staff time and effort to process all this material, much of which is peripheral to the teaching that takes place in our law school.

But the problem is that we do not receive everything that we should, and so for us, what should be a wonderfully comprehensive and representative collection does have gaps. The gaps come from missing parts, but also from the ebb and flow of ownership of titles. Some titles that were published in the UK have moved to new locations in Europe, even though the title is the same. So the title is now no longer ‘free’; if we want to keep it, we have to find the funds to subscribe to it. The administration involved in keeping on top of these changes can be daunting; the Agency manages some of it, making claims if it knows something is out of sequence, but with our complex materials, they often have no idea that a part or an act is missing until we let them know. And if it is more than 3 months since publication, chances are the publisher no longer has spare copies.

There is a lot more to legal deposit that I could write about, but I wanted to explain that legal deposit ties in with the issue of whether to keep paper or not. If I were back working in a law firm library I would expect the local law school to have paper copies of what I need. Law schools who discard their paper have a belief and expectation that a library like the Bodleian will always have the paper copies on hand to help fill their needs when they dispose of paper. We could be entering a dangerous phase where unintentional gaps appear, and the impact of these are not felt for the next decade or two. I wonder whether my concerns are ill founded, and no-one really cares, or if there will be future law librarians who will look back and wish we’d done things differently in the rush to abandon the paper?

Law firm librarians are often critical of the lack of research skills demonstrated by the annual crop of new graduates when they start working in law firms. The issue has been a bone of contention for many years, and can create a divide between academic and firm librarians. I think the issue is not one of training, but of understanding that the purpose of a university education and that of a law firm placement are fundamentally different, and legal research needs and experiences have little in common from one environment to the other.

I was back in my home town of Melbourne last month, and it gave me the chance to catch up with my colleagues from my former firm, and others, and hear of developments there. As I was in Melbourne undertaking some research on legal information literacy, I was more attuned than normal to the issues being discussed, and when I heard the familiar complaints about the inadequacy of research skills of newly appointed law graduates, I felt as though the clock had been turned back 20 years, and I was the one complaining.

I came from a teaching background, and I remember vividly the groups of articled clerks I taught in my first firm. They were undoubtedly the brightest and the best; it was a top tier firm, the competition to get in was fierce, and great results at university were a key factor to selection. So why were these really bright young people unable to use the Digest, or the citator, or track the history of a section of an act without one-on-one guidance by a librarian? I was more than a little taken aback at this lack of ‘basics’. So I joined the chorus of law firm librarians laying the blame for this lack of fundamental legal research knowledge at the foot of the law schools, for their inadequate preparation of their students. 

The skills that students seem to lack compounded over the years, as digital resources became their mainstay, in place of the books that had formed our research world for hundreds of years. By the time the new century dawned, these trainees were the first of the digital native/google generation, and had a degree of confidence in their own research abilities that was quite frightening when their shortcomings were exposed in real life situations.

When I moved from law firms to academia I saw first-hand that students at law school were engaged in a form of legal research that was relevant to their task at university – to read the set texts and cases, to use the online resources in preference to coming to the library to read the cases, and to try to balance the reading required of them with their classes, tutorials, part time work and socialising. We made every effort to try to ensure they knew the importance of thorough research, but unless they could see it having a direct impact on their results, few took much notice of our words of wisdom. And I know that we covered all the same themes in law school as we had covered in the firms, in a precautionary effort to help them on their way. 

So the problem is not that law schools do not prepare the students for the harsh reality of legal research in a real life situation. The problem is that the nature of the research skills they need in law school is quite different to the skills that will be required of them as lawyers.

For law schools, trying to change what they do to meet the needs of firms is not practical. They need to prepare freshers for a whole new world of legal literature. The timing of the teaching in law school is geared heavily to the first year – how much will a third year remember of her first year training? The way legal research is taught is often still outside the ‘real’ curriculum, and the connection between theory and practice isn’t easily made.

There is also the issue that academics are not always that great at legal research methodology themselves, having developed their own methods for their discipline, and rarely refreshing their own skills. Often they think their e-research skills are less accomplished than their students, and can erroneously defer to student self-confidence with technology without really questioning the depth or accuracy of how the student is applying the technology.

Most new solicitors are asked to undertake research of a nature that is of little relevance in a law school, such as egislative research. In law schools students are handed a copy of an act, or a section of it. Law academics do not rate the currency of an act as relevant to their teaching the principles involved in the legislation. One academic recently insisted that his students only use the relevant Legal Information Institute’s copies of acts for research, even when he was told they are always months out of date. With academic gatekeepers like that, what hope do law librarians have of thorough training in a law school setting?

The reality is that most law firms of any size undertake some induction training of their new graduates, not only because they want the graduates to know how to research, but they also want them to know what that particular firm’s values are in research and house style. In England, between a third and a half of new graduates come from disciplines other than law, and bring with them a different, definitely non-legal, research skill set in any case. So the firms are well geared for training, and do not take it as a given that the new graduates will have well rounded, applicable research abilities.

A firm can, in this way, put its own stamp on the graduate’s approach, and guide the nature of the research experience. If the partners care passionately for the quality of their research so they can ensure excellent advice to a client, they will impress on the new lawyer that ‘perfect’ research is crucial to the firm’s reputation, and their own future in the firm. 

It is time for law firm librarians to accept that the research skills that new solicitors/barristers bring from university may not be specifically relevant to the workplace, because they were learned in a different environment and for a different purpose. Training new law firm graduates is vital not only for the new trainees, but it also provides librarians the chance to become a core part of their life in a firm. It’s hard to get young lawyers to move away from their desktops to the library, and for librarians to know how they are going about their research. If firm librarians spend time with them early on, and help them to learn the right way of going about their research, this will have improved their confidence and contributed to their success and that of the firm. How fortunate law firm librarians are to have this opportunity to enhance the crucial nature of their own teaching role within a firm! 

I am spending a month on an academic exchange at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law in Hamburg. This is a researcher's heaven. There is a library of nearly 500,000 volumes covering about 200 (yes, 200!!) jurisdictions, with legislation, caselaw, journals, and monographs available for use in the library. The major databases, including key European West databases, are available to researchers. Every researcher has an allocated desk or office.

There are perhaps 100 users of the facilities at any one time, from all around the world. They are not here to undertake a specific degree, although many come here for some part of their studies elsewhere, to use the resources, or meet with the academics based here. There are doctorate students who research here, but they are supervised by and awarded their degrees by their supervisor's home institution.

The library has recently been extended, and is in immaculate condition, well cared for, totally a reference-only library, and, once identified on the catalogue, the materials are easy to locate, with a classification scheme that is based on jurisdictions, is easy to understand and use. Many researchers are given after-hours access to the library, and the honour system seems to work well.

The library director is Prof. Dr Holger Knudson, and among other things, he is currently Chair of the Law Libraries section of IFLA, after years of involvement with IALL, including some years as President. You can see him speaking about the Library on Youtube.

The Max Planck Society comprises some 80 institutes, mainly scientific, but including the following areas of law:

Collective Goods, Bonn
Intellectual Property, Munich
European Legal History, Frankfurt/Main
Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg
Foreign and International Criminal Law, Freiburg
Comparative Public Law and International Law, Heidelberg
Foreign and International Social Law, Munich

Holger tells me that the Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg has a larger collection, but it operates on a stack request system, which in my opinion is not as user friendly as the ability to wander the stacks in person!

The Max Planck Society is a registered association, independent of, but largely funded by the federal and state governments. Its role is to perform research in the interest of the general public in the natural sciences, life sciences, social sciences, and the humanities. "In particular, the Max Planck Society takes up new and innovative research areas that German universities are not in a position to accommodate or deal with adequately. These interdisciplinary research areas often do not fit into the university organization, or they require more funds for personnel and equipment than those available at universities."

The MPI Society was formerly known as the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (KWG, Kaiser Wilhelm Society) and was founded in 1911, its purpose being to promote the sciences in Germany, specifically by founding and maintaining research institutions independent from the state. It was renamed to Max Planck Society in 1946.

We sometimes overlook the great law libraries in Europe, and the wealth of their resources. There is much to learn from them, and a little tour just of their websites should whet a law librarian's appetite for a cook's tour of Europe!

*Max Planck was famous German physicist, Nobel Laureate and founder of the quantum theory

The recently elected Australian Government yesterday made a long awaited apology to the Stolen Generation of the Australian Aboriginal people. The broadcast can be heard here

By way of background, the apology was recommended by the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families in 1997, also known as 'Bringing them Home', which can be found on Austlii. For many Australians this apology is long overdue.

An article today in the Times Online provides quite a library friendly overview of many book digitisation projects underway. It also makes me realise I've been here too long, because I can understand why we have such a reader un-friendly non- lending rule here – only at the Bodleian libraries, not the majority of Oxford libraries, I hasten to add. The idea was/is that you can come from anywhere at any time, and the book you want should be available for consultation somehwere on the premises. It's possibly a result of not allowing books to be borrowed that there is still such an amazing, huge, and intact collection which can be digitised…
The material that is being digitised here at Oxford is from the 19th century, pre 1870; it has included some 15,000 volumes from the law collection. The project has also led the digitisers to realise they need some form of metadata if people are going to be able to identify material easily. This came home to them when they started on runs of legislative and caselaw material, and seems to have led to a more methodical approach to the process.

There is a lot of information on the Google website about the digitisation project, and here is a link to one of the law library's volumes that has been digitised. Oxford has been very cautious, and only allows 'snippet' views; however if you are lucky the volume has also been digitised elsewhere, and you can browse the full text of the copy.

It is with great pleasure that I can finally write to let you know that this monumental project has gone live before Christmas, as was indicated some months back. It is still hard to believe – but here is the proof! And as promised, it is free of charge.

Best wishes to all Slawyers for the festive season….

The Research Information Network has released an interesting study aimed at assessing 'the perceptions of resource discovery services by academic researchers in the UK'.The report is lengthy, but the executive summary makes for interesting reading, especially the varying perceptions by librarians of what the researchers need, and the views of the researchers themselves.

This is a little late in coming to SLAW, as I have been in at a conference the antipodes, and did not get a chance to post the good news when it came through. The following messahge was posted by a colleague (and came from the Statutory Publications Office) on 21 September:

"We are also pleased to announce that the website as it stands will be launched free of charge to the public once piloting has been completed.
A commercial strategy will still be developed next year, but will primarily be looking at options that concern the commercial reuse of the data and the development of functionality that will serve the needs of the specialist user."

So the database will be free for the public. Hooray for that!

Although it's not quite grey literature, the announcement by the UK's OPSI (Office of Public Sector Information) that it has has started providing RSS feeds for Acts and Statutory Instruments for UK, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales is a case of nice timing for this week's theme on SLAW. It is some consolation for not having official UK statutes online yet! The link from the feed takes you to the full text of the act, the S.I., draft S.I. or Explanatory Notes – a good new resource for those tracking current UK legislation.

An article entitled Developments in Legal Education:
Are Blogs Transforming Legal Scholarship? in the latest ALL-SIS newsletter reviews the recent symposium 'Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship'. held in April. I thought it was worth a read, and might stir up some discussion…

The long awaited Legal Services Bill is to be introduced into Parliament today and the draft bill is summarised in the latest edition of The Lawyer . There are big changes proposed for the way the profession operates here, many of which are already in place in other countries, but some are quite adventurous.

The news is that there is no news. but there is an article in The Times today which reviews progress, and explains the copyright issues specific to the UK. With luck the database will be available in the new academic year. But don't hold your breath!

The role of the Lord Chancellor in the UK is undergoing changes, and there is a good summary of this on the BBC News website. Lord Phillips is now head of the judiciary, and soon the House of Lords will elect its own speaker for the first time. The title remains, but the role changes!

Hello everyone – my first post, well overdue.

At last I have some news in response to Nick's email some time ago querying the status of UK online legislation. An internal pilot of the Statute Law Database has recently been completed and is being evaluated.

The database is expected to be made available to Government departments in April. A pilot of the public service will follow in May, with the service expected to go live by the end of this year. The publicly-accessible database is intended to be freely available.

However our English colleagues are a little wary of these promised deadlines. I recall the first excitement over 10 years ago when the Statute Law Database was promised by the then Conservative government. Blair has now been in power for 8 years. Things don't move very quickly in the civil service…

I will keep an eye on developments.