Cath Hancock, Staff Development Officer at Cardiff University, and Alison Clayton of Cameron McKenna have supplied us with two articles addressing aspects of the recruitment and selectiom process. This article from Cath Hancock concentrates on the pre-intervies process but also looks briefly at post-interview issues.

Does the following scenario sound familiar? You have an enormous amount of data that needs putting into some sort of coherent order. Your external Web site and company intranet contain vast numbers of documents and offer links to yet more information sources, all containing yet more data.

Your role in this deluge of information often leaves you feeling as though you are running to stand still. There are thousands of users (company employees as well as external browsers) searching for thousands of different documents and you have the unenviable job of making all of this information available to them in an efficient manner. Too much data, too little data, or data which is inaccurate are all potential problems to a user.

Libraries in the Bahamas date back to the early nineteenth century and were initially set up through the activities of the Reading Society, the Bahamas Institute and the Bahamas Society for Diffusion of Knowledge. By the end of the nineteenth century there were five public libraries and reading rooms in the islands of the Bahamas namely: Nassau, Dunmore Town, Matthew Town, New Plymouth and Governor's Harbour. Readers had to pay a subscription to use these libraries and their founding was considerably influenced by the colonial presence on the islands. There are also many school libraries in the Bahamas and the Department of Archives has a very rich and highly patronized library.

My first contact with the Lawtel service was when we initiated a trial of the database for the Law School at the University of Birmingham in the mid-1990s. Following that trial we decided not to subscribe – a decision which seemed to confound the sales representative at the time. However, about nine to twelve months later we had a second trial. This was largely “encouraged” by new members of staff who had joined the School in the intervening period and by the fact that the service had been revamped and relaunched. Following that trial we took out a subscription. My own continuing inclination was not to subscribe. But there was enough of a feeling in the School at that time for me to accept the wishes of my academic colleagues. I have subsequently moved to the University of Nottingham Law School and although we also subscribe, some of the reasons that influenced my decision not to want to subscribe to the service persist today and they are as follows.

Many organisations, be they publishers or other information rich enterprises, are in possession of large volumes of data to which they are looking to add value in various ways. The motivation behind this might be purely commercial (a desire to publish revenue-generating material, for example) or, if the data is not intended for external consumption, an attempt to facilitate and improve the flow ofinformation within an organisation.

Alison Clayton and Cath Hancock have supplied us with two articles addressing aspects of the recruitment and selection process. This article from Alison Clayton, Training and Development Officer at Cameron McKenna, deals with the skills you need to be an effective interviewer.

Sweet & Maxwell's acquisition of Lawtel has certainly caused librarians some concerns. The legal sector has rarely seen so many mergers and takeovers, having reached almost the point of a true anti-trust duopoly operating. Concerns have been expressed about the concentration of market power between Sweet & Maxwell and Butterworths. This article examines some of the competition law issues which arise.

A brief, but very informative, summary of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) is contained in Legal Information Management in the Summer 2001 issue. This article doesn't attempt to replicate that summary but will examine some of the key decisions that need to be made in developing a policy that will enable the University of Birmingham to conform to the Act, its eight data protection principles, and the University's Data Protection policy when processing personal data and the practical procedures needed to deal with personal data processing in an information service.

This article (from Janice Collino, Academic Manager at ILEX Tutorial College) Reports on a case study looking at the effectiveness of LPC studies.

In the United Kingdom the electoral roll or register is one of the most fundamental resources for accessing information about adult UK residents. Apart from the register itself, third parties have traditionally made use of the raw name and address data to provide members of the public or certain professions access to derived databases, data sets or re-packaged raw data.

Last year in Cork when I added my voice to that of BIALL's incoming chairman to encourage attendance at the 2002 conference at Liverpool, I reminded delegates that Liverpool would be a return to the venue of BIALL's first conference. This announcement met with reactions ranging from “so what”, “not another anniversary” to a fascination with what it was like in the “olden days”. Gradually BIALL's Chair and others (Brian Murray of Legal Library Services in particular) persuaded me to give a session at the conference. Brian was insistent that Liverpool 1970 was part of the heritage of BIALL members and that they ought to be reminded of it from time to time. I should like to acknowledge help in preparing this paper from Mary Blake and Derek Way and the invaluable aide memoire of Mary Blake's history of BIALL (Blake, 2000).

There are currently 18,456 attorneys and Candidate attorneys registered with the Law Society of South Afric and 5,941 registered law firms (CLE 2002). Data is not yet available regarding the size distribution of these law firms but a glance at any of the national legal directories will reveal that the majority of attorneys operate as solo practitioners or in association with a few colleagues. A large city practice will generally be well supplied with information resources and with assistance from a librarian or information professional. In a small practice, the information resources that the attorney has at his or her disposal may be limited to a few textbooks, supplemented in some cases with access to electronic databases and Internet resources. Small practices seldom employ information professionals, although they may make use of the services of information agencies and independent contractors to assist with research and/or information management.

Whilst preparing for my talk at the BIALL Conference and bearing in mind the session during which I was speaking, it struck me how many things had changed since I started out in law librarianship. The foremost of these is definitely the development of information technology, which has had an immediate and prolonged impact on how we provide services to our users in both law firms and in academic libraries. This is something of which we are all aware – the shift from paper, firstly to CD Rom, then online and latterly to internet based services.

Where can I locate in the UK the most extensive collection of the current legislation for the Cayman Islands? Which library has a comprehensive set of the World Trade Organisation International Trade Law Reports? Where can I find verbatim debates on bills as they pass through the New Zealand House of Representatives? Where are good collections of international environmental or commercial law? What are the opening hours and access conditions for a visiting researcher wishing to use the official publications collection of a particular major UK university?

Roderick Munday, Fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge and Editor-in-chief of the Justice of the Peace Reports, shares his invaluable perception and extensive research on the difficulties which arise from the excess of access to judgments.

I never wanted to get involved. I had a feeling it would take longer and be much more work than originally anticipated. I knew it would require an attention to detail which I would have trouble acquiring. I guessed it would take stamina, tact and perseverance. I worried it would put a strain on all sorts of relationships. How right I was!

It all started soon after I joined CMS ameron McKenna in April 1999. As a new PSL I was excited about giving up the relentless search for chargeable work required of all practising solicitors and I savoured the prospect of not having to complete a time sheet. Life was to become academically stimulating again—and above all stress free!

The notion that we are living through times of great change in the communication of information and the transmission of texts is a truism which will bring a weary look to most professionals with any kind of involvement in the area. The digital age, the information age, the electronic age — we've all heard these terms so many times and have sat through innumerable discussions, and seen even more documents, trying to sort out what it all means. There are almost as many views on the likely pace of change and the shape of the landscape 10 or 20 years from now as there are librarians to hold forth on the subject. Perhaps this helps to explain why the library community as a whole seems to be in such a rudderless state regarding the creation of digital content; no shortage of action, but no overall sense of direction. I am talking here about digitisation of our documentary heritage, that vast mass of books, archives and other media which fill our library shelves today.

This is the latest report arising from the SPTL/BIALL Survey. It was prepared by Cathie Jackson of Cardiff University

‘Transactional learning’ at its simplest means learning from doing transactions. When professionals learn they often do so, as Donald Schön reminds us, by learning from within transactions – ‘knowing-in-action’. By this Schön means that professionals solve problems by constructing for themselves a repertoire of precedents, images and remembered actions. Problems are not solved by using rules alone, but are framed or constructed according to the repertoire. Professionals try out solutions for fit, re-frame, feed back to themselves, try out other solutions. The result is what Schön calls ‘;reflection-in-action’. According to him, this is what produces the doctor's “feel’ for a specific diagnosis, or a lawyer's ‘feel’ for a case, (Schon 1983).

“Seen one library, seen the lot. Drive on!”

Reputedly, this command was uttered by the President of an emerging African nation to his chauffeur, when his official visit to the campus of the state university was running behind schedule. After visiting over fifty university and three national libraries in the last 18 months as part of the data collection phase of the FLAG project, I am able to report that, in the UK at least, the generalisation is not valid.