This is the latest report analysing the results of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL Academic Law Library Survey.

This article by Shaikh Mohamed Noordin gives a comprehensive overview of the types of law library in Malaysia, plus details of the various electronic sources of legal information available to information professionals and the general public.

I begin this article with some trepidation in that I am the first “international correspondent” to try his hand at informing BIALL members as to developments of note in another country and hope that readers will find the information which follows to be of interest as it is instructive and often helpful to learn of the issues and problems confronting our colleagues from other jurisdictions.

hazel hewison, biall chair, reports on her experiences at the carall conference workshop on disaster planning, following the disastrous 2004 atlantic hurricane season and the devastating asian tsunami tragedy in december 2004.

Tim Williams explains that the use of modern digital data formats such as Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and the Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) enables the on-line searching and publishing of data held in data repositories where the ownership rights over the intellectual property are controlled. Understanding the security and quality of the content of the documents emanating from such data repositories is vital for good business strategies to be defined. As the larger publishers move increasingly towards global trading, they will control and distribute their assets globally via the internet.

Candy Jannetta presented a training session at the BIALL Newcastle Weekend Study Conference which was specifically directed towards teaching legal information professionals how to improve their relationship building, marketing, influencing and negotiating skills, by using a combination of teaching and practical exercises.

On 1 October 2004 the Government introduced a new set of statutory dispute resolution procedures which apply to all employers. The new rules set out a series of basic procedural steps that an employer must follow when dealing with disciplinary hearings, dismissals and grievances. The Government's stated aim was to encourage employers and employees to resolve their disputes internally and thus reduce the number of claims being brought in the Employment Tribunal.

as part of a drive to deliver better government, ireland's unfair dismissals acts 1977–2001 are about to be extended to civil servants. the civil service (regulation) bill 2004 when enacted will apply the statutory code of unfair dismissal to thousands of officers whose remedies previously lay exclusively in public law. while preserving the principle that civil servants hold office at the will and pleasure of the government, the bill provides for the delegation of power in this respect from the government to ministers and to secretaries general. mary redmond, consultant solicitor at arthur cox considers the practical and, above all the legal implications of this stepchange.

Paul Bartelings and Elizabeth Bok from the Het Overleg (Dutch Law Firm Librarians Foundation) explain the theories and practices they have developed in co-operation with the Holland Consulting Group to produce a tool which will help us to compare similar legal resources offered by competing legal publishers and other providers.

Lesley Robinson presented a workshop session at the BIALL Bristol Study Weekend covering using report writing to build business cases for dealing with reductions in library budgets, non-replacement of staff and introducing new service initiatives.

Andrea Naylor supplies an explanation behind the row of figures which the sharp-eyed amongst you will have noticed now appear above each article in the Journal.

it was in an e-mail from christine miskin discussing what i could write about in this article that i learnt of the death of gillian sands. i was saddened by this news as although i never met her in person, we did “meet” via e-mail. only a couple of weeks before her death she responded to a request we had sent out on the listserve for an obscure english case. her friendliness and willingness to assist a colleague were immediately apparent. her name was also familiar to me from articles she had written for legal information management and i know that the librarian in our london office had contact with her when she worked at the institute of advanced legal studies. to gillian's family, friends and colleagues we extend our deepest sympathy.

my hypothesis on the thinking behind this list is that libraries are organisations which are dynamic self evolving complex systems and so i have applied the simple systems theory template to how to merge two libraries. i think the key thing to remember is that systems cannot change radically or quickly and that they depend on feed-back to adjust their equilibrium. that said it follows that any merger, with its implications of big rapid change, will be difficult for any library system. it will be essential to keep open channels of communication and feed-back both within the immediate environment (the law firms themselves) and the external environment (publishers, service providers, journal subscriptions)

Alison Johnson reviews Eversheds' approach to delivering legal research training and the development of an effective training module which was first delivered in 2002 and has recently had its first cohort moving into qualification and the workplace as fully trained lawyers.

So, a trip to Boston, one of the first cities of the USA, brimming with history, and, for a week in July, brimming with law librarians. Worn out by 15 of my nephew's friends at his birthday party the day before, I got a lift into Boston early Sunday, managed to meet up with a fellow Brit at our hotel, and found myself registered and sitting in my first programme session by quarter past ten. To follow were four very full days of lectures, exhibition-visiting, library tours and social events which were almost as tiring as the toddlers.

Jennifer Barrow, Head of Knowledge Management at Baker & McKenzie, presented a paper to the BIALL Annual Conference in Edinburgh in June 2004 which discussed effective strategies for managing the sometimes difficult relationship that can exist between legal information professionals and professional support lawyers in large law firms.