Sexuality and Law scholarship is a new and developing field but, like most legal scholarship, it is dominated by masculine concerns and methodologies. This article, by Rosemary Auchmuty, explains why research that ignores feminist concerns and methodologies will be incomplete and inaccurate, and suggests questions that should be asked of resources to ensure a complete and accurate coverage of the topic.

This article, by Rosemary Hunter, is based on a presentation given at the national training day on ‘Law, Gender and Sexuality: Sources and Methods in Socio-Legal Research’ in May 2014, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the British Library. She begins by describing the uses of judgments as sources within feminist research on judging, and then outlines three different methods of analysis employed within this research: quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis, and the newest method, that of rewriting judgments.

Wills are an overlooked source. Alongside birth, death and marriage certificates they are official legal texts that provide a record of families, kinship and personal life. They have a particular significance for research about gender and sexuality. This paper, by Daniel Monk, highlights some of the insights that they can provide and discusses the methods (and associated pitfalls) for accessing and reading them.

Visual materials are often neglected by legal researchers. However, as Dominic Janes explains, attitudes to appearances played an important role in the way in which many criminal investigations were undertaken, notably in the years prior to the Sexual Offences Act (1967). Analysis of aspects of visual culture played a role in the detection of many forms of illegal behaviour and the resulting materials provide a valuable resource for the contemporary researcher. These issues are explored through a case study that involves reading between a painting by the British expressionist Francis Bacon (1909–92) and a photograph in the National Archives taken during a police raid on a London flat in 1927.

This paper, by Richard Collier, reviews the dominant methodological and theoretical approaches that have shaped socio-legal scholarship on masculinities and law to date. It presents a flavour of contemporary work in the field and, looking specifically to the concerns of the ALS/British Library/SLSA socio-legal training day on sources and methods in Law, Gender and Sexuality, considers selected issues around methods and sources involved in analysing masculinities and law. The paper suggests work in this area has drawn on a diverse range of archives and content and that there is considerable variation in how legal scholarship has sought to approach the topic of masculinity.

In this short article Professor Fiona Cownie provides a brief note to accompany Elizabeth Dawson's guide to the archival sources at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London.

The article, by Elizabeth Dawson, provides a brief guide to some potential archival sources at IALS for gender based research, focussing particularly on the admission of women to the legal profession after the First World War and beyond. Sources will include the records of legal education, academic and membership organisations and material relating to professional practice. The article also provides guidance to researchers on using the IALS Archive.

This paper, by Polly Russell, offers an introduction to the material available to researchers in the recently launched ‘Sisterhood & After: an Oral History of the Women's Liberation Movement’ archive at the British Library. Drawing from the archive's oral history recordings, the author demonstrates how they can be used to examine the ways that legislative changes are experienced and raise questions about the relation between legislative change, cultural change and the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM). The paper argues that these oral history recordings provide a unique opportunity to reflect on the ways that legislative and structural change were experienced by WLM activists in their everyday lives.

This article, by Jonathan Sims, is based on a presentation given at the national training day on Law, Gender and Sexuality: Sources and Methods in Socio-Legal Research in May 2014, jointly sponsored by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the Socio-Legal Studies Association and the British Library. The article identifies library collections and resources which, beyond the scope of typical law collections, might be useful for broadly socio-legal academic research on intersections between law, gender and sexuality.

This article, by Heather Dawson, outlines primary and secondary source materials relevant to the academic study of law, gender and sexuality which are available in the LSE library. It includes coverage of the content of the Hall-Carpenter Archive as well as books, journals and archival materials accessible via the Women's Library@LSE. Practical guidance is provided to researchers in using the Library and searching its catalogues effectively.

Scientific scholarly communication is subject to selection rules. In recent years, the issues around the assessment of research results has assumed a central role in academia. Despite recent efforts, by several initiatives both at national and international level, and the adoption of guidelines that emerged from the evaluation of research programs at European level, the measurement and evaluation of the quality of research still faces strong opposition from all bibliometric areas, in which the instruments available (amount of citations identified, the impact factor, and so on) are not appropriate to the humanities and social sciences. In particular, specific attention is paid today to the role of the book, which is a fundamental resource in the processes of scientific scholarly communication. In this regard this paper, written by Ginevra Peruginelli, analyses the missing link between the indicators and legal scholars' notions of quality, with reference to the role of the monograph in legal science.

This article by Allie Lustigman argues that information professionals should have a significant involvement in their firm's intranets or portals and discusses how our skills can be used in this area. It outlines, with clear examples, the different spheres that we can become involved with in relation to intranets, which include; information organisation and search, taking ownership of intranet pages and spaces, allowing current awareness and news to flow through intranets, and training.

In this piece Jackie Fishleigh offers her views on the rather edgy and menacing world of data privacy and protection, focusing on developments during the last year. Her article provides a summary of the key issues that are currently being discussed and debated, including at BIALL's own annual conference which took place last year in Harrogate.