Lawbore is a subject-orientated gateway to legal resources developed at City University, which has been created as a community site for the law department. Lawbore's features include regular polls, articles written by City staff and students, legal news and useful legal quotes. It aims to attract students with its time based structure, snappy resource descriptions, direct links into articles within databases, interactive qualities, relevance to module content and easy navigation. Although launched at the end of April, it is expected that usage will be low-key at a time when most students are frantically revising. The real test will not come until the new academic year.

This is a revised version of a paper given by John Sibbald at Glasgow University Library on 19 august 2002 at the inaugural meeting of the International Federation of Library Associations' (IFLA) Law Libraries Discussion Group held in conjuction with the 68th IFLA General Conference 18–24 August. The Paper argues the case for Scotland, as a distinct jurisdiction within the UK, having its own seperate, identifiable, and official gateway to legal information.

There is little sense in launching into a discussion of the nature of Canadian federalism to a non-Canadian audience without first providing a thumbnail sketch of Canadian history to provide some context for that discussion.

This is not intended to be a “how to do it” article as I am sure there are plenty of you out there who could do that, rather it is intended to be a description of the problems I ran into when attempting to complete a copyright audit form and to give you food for thought.

Over the past decade, there has been a remarkable growth in the availability and use of Irish legal materials in electronic form (principally through the internet). There has been a transformation in the ease of access to legal materials – from a jurisdiction in which legal practitioners obtained up-to-date paper materials with difficulty to one where up-to-the-minute information is freely available online. It is now possible to access online the full text of Irish legislation, judgments, explanatory codes and memoranda, details of administrative procedures, parliamentary debates, certain secondary legislation, guidance notes and statements of practice. What has led to this remarkable transformation? What are the principal factors which have encouraged the continuing free flow of official legal materials onto the internet?

I was a very fortunate law librarian in June this year – as the Chair of OSALL (the Organisation of South African Law Libraries), I was the only South African able to attend the 34th Annual BIALL conference, thanks to the generosity of BIALL who sponsored me as an Official Delegate. As a small token of my appreciation, I have written some memoirs spanning those five fabulous days, and I hope you enjoy reading them.

This site contains information on copyright, designs, patents and trademarks. The legal decisions page includes selected decisions issued by the Patent Office since the beginning of 1998 and links through to the Patents Court website, European Patent Office website and Copyright Tribunal. News and press releases on aspects of intellectual property and the Trade Mark, Patent and Design Journal notices can also be viewed here with all pages including a note of when they were last updated. A page with information on patent and trademark searches and a search facility for the whole site is available. A list of forms can be accessed and viewed along with guidance notes and fees information. Progress on implementation of the EU Copyright Directive is brief but helpful. The glossary of terms covers very few terms and some pages would benefit from hyperlinks being added such as the information about international treaties. URL: http://www.patent.gov.uk/copy/index.htm

The UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE) is the LTSN subject centre for law. LTSN, the Learning and Teaching Support Network, was set up by the Joint Funding Councils in January 2000 to promote high quality learning and teaching and transfer good practice across disciplines. It is made up a generic centre and 24 subject centres.

On joining Browne Jacobson just over six years ago I inherited a paper based catalogue and notebook of items taken from the library which were then crossed out on return. Quickly finding this was impractical and cumbersome to use, to the point where it very often was not used, one of the main priorities was to automate the catalogue and circulation system as quickly as possible. Calm 2000 was purchased as a stand-alone system in the library with capacity for up to 10,000 records and worked well initially but as fee earners gained increasing access to a wide variety of resources and other local library catalogues from their own PCs demand grew for access to in-house library holdings and the cataloguing of websites, online journals and internally generated documents. Difficulties arose in using a stand-alone system when I ceased to be a solo, particularly for receipt of journals and loose leafs. The firm had also expanded significantly in size and opened an additional office. Libraries in the London and Birmingham offices being smaller than the main library at the Nottingham office created demand for holdings information to facilitate loans between offices.

Every night for ten nights last May, I returned to room 128 in the Westside YMCA (West 63rd Street, New York City – just off Central Park) armed with more behind the scenes insights, professional secrets and first hand accounts of US law library operation and management than one slim A5 notebook could hope to hold. I was fortunate to be in the United States on a two-week placement at Columbia University, visiting some of America's great law libraries – the law school libraries of Columbia itself, New York University and Yale University. Each morning, after orange juice, coffee and a toasted cream cheese bagel, I would head out with the commuters to join the subway at Columbus Circle – uptown for Columbia or downtown for NYU. Every evening I would admire the energy of the mostly silver-haired athletes in brightly coloured lycra returning to the Westside “Y” after numerous circuits of the Jackie “O” reservoir on the upper east side of Central Park. The park is 843 acres of creative space bounded by impressive hotels, apartment blocks and the streets of Harlem. In May it is in perpetual motion from dawn to dusk with joggers, roller-bladers and cyclists weaving their way around the trees, fountains and numerous statues. Indeed it appears to be a huge magic garden, complete with beautiful street lamps that seem to come from C.S. Lewis's Narnia – another world, like the City itself, at once familiar and fascinatingly different.

The months of August and September 2003 have seen an unprecedented release of information about the internal workings of the UK government during the Hutton enquiry; thousands of documents have been placed on the enquiry website, including key emails and memos. These documents have not been released under the UK Freedom of Information Act (2000), because they are part of a judicial enquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. However this has served as an important reminder to the UK public of the importance of information in holding public authorities to account.

In recent years BIALL has informally addressed the question of a Code of Ethics for its members. Discussions have taken place in the Professional Standards and Development Committee, and the issue has been raised cursorily by Council in its occasional meetings. Hitherto, however, there has been no attempt at formally addressing the question of ethics specifically for law librarians in the UK or the Republic of Ireland.

The following report outlines the activities and funding of academic law libraries in the UK and Ireland in the academic year 2001/2002. The figures have been taken from the results of a postal questionnaire undertaken by Information Services staff at Cardiff University on behalf of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS).

This article will be a Rogue's Gallery of some of the most off-putting jargon in our trade: unfriendly “metadata”, “taxonomy” and “thesaurus” as well as the infamous “interoperability”. We have to learn to live with these tricky characters, however. So why not learn to love them I will try to bring out what is useful about them, as well as facing up to the discomforts.

From the 1960s to the late 1980s, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library produced an annual List of Current Legal Research Topics. The most recent annual issue was published in 1988 and listed the subjects of research currently being pursued (i.e. provisional dissertation titles) by students registered for research degrees in law (e.g. PhD, MPhil) at higher education institutions in the UK.

“If the Information Society is to be both open and universal it should develop along the principles embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are, among others, the right to freedom of expression, free access to information, the right to education and the right to participate in cultural life.’ (UNESCO 2000)

Few legal practitioners in the UK can be unaware of the introduction of the Competition Act 1998 (which came into force on 1 March 2000) and its impact upon commercial agreements/practices generally. Substantively, it prohibits agreements between undertakings, concerted practices and decisions by associations of undertakings i.e. decisions made by trade associations, which appreciably prevent, restrict or distort competition in the UK. Of course, this piece of national legislation is limited to the activities of businesses whose activities impact upon the competitiveness of the UK marketplace. The wider picture is provided by the European competition rules as embodied in Articles 81 and 82 of the EC Treaty. However, both regimes essentially prevent the same range of activities save that the UK system only looks for adverse impact in the UK, whereas the European rules are concerned with adverse effects upon interstate trade and hence the competitiveness of the European marketplace.

A new ethics resource was launched at the end of January; Cardiff Centre for Ethics, Law and Society (CCELS). The web site was officially launched by Dr Michael Wilks, Chairman of the BMA Ethics Committee, and the event was attended by some 90 people who listened to talks by Professor Richard Gardner, FRS, Professor Bob Lee, Professor Peter Whittaker and Professor Ruud ter Meulen. Full details of the occasion and of the papers given are on the web site at www.ccels.cardiff.ac.uk