Malcolm Kendall offers guidance on how to establish whether a work is in fact an orphan work and examines efforts being made here and overseas in devising systems to make the search easier.

Tony Simmonds explains the six types of Open Access licences which are available to academic users to preserve rights in their publications.

This article by Jane Secker and Maria Bell presents an overview of the challenges of providing copyright training for staff at LSE. The institution does not employ a dedicated copyright officer, but uses a range of tactics to ensure academic, administrative and Library staff are made aware of copyright issues. Several training sessions are run throughout the year. LSE have also developed an online course and produce a range of online and printed guides to brief staff. Advice and queries are also dealt with by a number of individuals who have specialist knowledge in areas such as copyright and the internet and copying archival materials.

Chris Holland analyses the provisions of the new Digital Economy Act 2010 and considers its potential effect on the work of information professionals.

Europeana is the focus of a number of IPR issues. The portal provides access to three sets of assets: the Open Source code base, the authority-controlled metadata and the digitised content. Europeana has integrated metadata standards across the heritage domains and will now licence the metadata as a resource for the development of linked data and semantic web applications. The main rights issues concern the digitisation of public domain content and orphan works. Digitisation of out-of-copyright analogue material does not create new rights and the Europeana Public Domain Charter provides guidelines for the sector. An inhibitor to digitisation is the problem of orphan works, now under review by the European Commission.

Google's plan to digitise huge numbers of books from over 40 libraries has been controversial from the start with court actions still taking place in the United States. Chris Holland traces the history of the project and discusses its potential impact on copyright issues.

A new Law Licence was agreed between the legal profession and the CLA in late 2008 and Paul Rollins of the The Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, describes its main features and the role of the CLA in enforcing copyright law in the UK.

The team responsible for Legal Journals Index explain how journal articles are selected, indexed and loaded to this online legal information service provided by Sweet & Maxwell. They outline the history of LJI and discuss the criteria for determining which journals are included in the service; how the Articles team decides which articles will be indexed; the content of an LJI index entry; how an abstract is written; the use of the taxonomy; the full text journals service on Westlaw; and the work of the Document Delivery team.

This article by Steven Whittle gives a comprehensive picture of not only how metadata has been used at the Institute but also the technical details and scope of the very impressive range of digitisation projects and other resources developed to help fellow legal information professionals access a wide array of information which was previously very hard to find.

The index has been a key feature of the International Law Reports (ILR) since their inception in 1919. Apart from the individual volume indexes there have been five consolidated versions, each helping, by bringing related material together, to cast the jurisprudence in a new light. A sixth consolidation is in progress, running from Volumes 1–150. Maureen McGlashan, the indexer, describes the principles underlying the ILR indexing process and asks whether, with the Reports now available online at Justis, the index is any longer necessary. She also considers the role of the ancillary apparatus such as the Tables of Cases and Treaties.

The introduction of the Resource Description and Access cataloguing code to replace the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules is considered by Ann Chapman, the Research Officer at UKOLN. She explains why the latter was becoming unsuitable for the digital age whilst the former has been specifically developed to deal with all types of media.

Ruth Bird, Bodleian Law Librarian, explains how the original home-grown classification scheme became unfit for purpose, due to the enormous expansion of international legal materials held, and the reasons for implementing the Moys scheme. She outlines the progress and the problems encountered to date in this huge project.

Mark Scott and Nigel Smith provide the background to the development of Sweet & Maxwell's Legal Taxonomy before outlining its structure and explaining how it is used by Sweet & Maxwell and other Thomson Reuters companies.

The definition of mashing in the context of content is different depending on where you look. In this example from Fiona Fogden of Baker Tilly, mashing refers to the blending of content from a variety of sources into a single location. It is a process librarians have been undertaking for years in bulletins and abstracts, but new technology brings with it new terminology as well as new opportunities.

Claire Fox presents a case study to show how information services at a London law firm were improved by developing good working relationships between the library and the rest of the firm.

Allie Lustigman from Linklaters updates the information collated from a survey of the internal use made by law firms of social software tools and provides an insight into how blogs, RSS feeds and wikis are also being implemented for external use for clients.

Gerry Power of the IALS writes about the benefits of compiling a portfolio which records and reflects on the skills he has aquired through work and which he can apply in his work as a mentor.

Ben Beljaars and René Winter contribute a thoroughly well-researched article on the profile of current users of academic libraries in Holland. They discuss their information requirements and usage; the relationship between the library and the law faculty; the use of digital resources in legal education and developments in legal information literacy.

Employment is one of the five main departments at City law firm Fox Williams LLP. In the following article, Julie Keys considers the resources needed to support an employment practice and how these relate to the research requirements of employment lawyers.