Welcome to 2013 and welcome to a new issue of Legal Information Management. This time around there is an international flavour to the content for Spring. The main theme is concerned with Chinese Law and Legal information. The section on International Perspectives brings with it two extensive pieces, one from Uganda, the other from the University of Delhi. Beyond that there are pieces written and included under the headings, Current Issues, Practical Matters and Conference Report.
However, before this issue of LIM gets fully under way, there is a tribute to John Jeffries, a former Chairman and a Life Member of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians. Whilst John and this editor never had the opportunity to meet face to face, he was very well known to other colleagues including Christine Miskin, the previous editor of LIM, and it is to her that we turned for this In Memoriam piece. Upon hearing of John's death, Barbara Tearle, former Hon. President of BIALL, wrote, “John worked indefatigably for BIALL, taking the association from strength to strength. He was immensely important in BIALL for a good number of years”.
CHINESE LAW AND LEGAL INFORMATION
The main theme for this issue centres around the People's Republic of China. Czarina Poon of Morrison & Foerster LLP sets the scene by providing an overview of the key political and economic developments giving a context to the country's governmental structure. Wenhua Shan, of the University of Singapore, follows with a detailed, expert analysis of legal education in China. John Bahrij and Lily Ko, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, offer an in-depth and enlightening article relating to information sources for Chinese law. The final piece, shorter in length, is a view from a lawyer in China, Li Zheng, on practical litigation matters and management of information.
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
In this section Joseph Semugabi, Head of the Law Library at the Law Development in Kampala, Uganda, discusses the political-legal developments since 1986 which resulted in the restoration of the rule of law and the liberalisation of university education in Uganda. He continues by explaining the impact on the country's only institution of practical legal training and its law library. Raj Kumar Bhardwaj and Shikha Kaushik jointly author a piece relating to the development of an institutional repository for undergraduate students at St. Stephen's College and the University of Delhi in India.
CURRENT ISSUES, PRACTICAL MATTERS AND CONFERENCE REPORT
Three interesting articles make up these sections. Jasmin Hollingum writes on the subject of collection development policies in law firm libraries, and Jackie Fishleigh, a regular contributor to this journal, writes about ways in which legal information managers can demonstrate their personal value and effectively market their services, especially where promoting an intranet is concerned. Kathryn Hayes gives an interesting account of discussions relating to private law libraries from the PLL Summit at the last conference of the American Association of Law Libraries.
CURRENT AWARENESS
As always, a great gratitude goes to Katherine Read and Laura Griffiths for their Current Awareness section. I am also extremely grateful to Ian Hunter and Gillian Watt for providing two book reviews.
Finally, as ever, my thanks go to Dunstan Speight (Chair of the LIM Editorial Board), all the LIM Board Members, Rebecca O'Rourke (Commissioning Editor for Humanities and Social Science Journals at Cambridge University Press (CUP)) and Susan Perkins (Journals Production Editor at CUP).
