Hobby metal detecting in Norway has grown since 2014. In the Norwegian recording system, all finds are catalogued by professionals at five regional museums. The examination of the dataset thus created allows the authors to look at regional and national patterns and discuss the inherently messy and ‘human’ nature of a seemingly quantitative material. Their study suggests that both archaeologists and detectorists influence the quality of the evidence and how representative the data are. They argue that metal detecting patterns are primarily the result of modern activities, such as management practices and the endeavours of a few very prolific detectorists in certain areas. Understanding these biases and systematically recording the activities of the actors involved is crucial if we are to make full use of the metal-detected material.

More than twenty-five years after the first signs of potential harm, the US remains locked in the grip of an opioid epidemic, with more Americans dying from overdoses than ever before.1 Diversion of prescription opioids plays an important role in opioid-related harms. Much of the scientific and public health focus on diversion has been on end-users, given how commonly non-medical prescription opioid use occurs, as well as the proportion of individuals who report that their source of non-medical opioids was friends or family. However, diversion of opioids, as well as their rampant oversupply, can be discerned higher up the supply chain, including among wholesalers, pharmacies and rogue prescribers whose behavior may trigger well-described “flags” warranting further evaluation and action.

Much thought has been accorded to the evolving nature of business history. It is only relatively recently, however, that attempts have been made to articulate methodological issues in a more epistemologically explicit and reflexive fashion. This article contributes to this burgeoning agenda by examining the methodology underpinning an intensive archival study of the British interwar management movement (1918–1939), a major force in British management education between the wars. We explicate the methodology employed and question what this material tells us about the interwar management movement, in terms of its determination to modernize management, encourage openness between firms, and extend a new spirit of partnership. We show that the interwar management movement was characterized by organized cooperation and methodological openness. Our main contribution is to demonstrate that interpretations themselves can become entrenched and prone to inertia, inviting us to revisit these periodically and, if appropriate, recast them.

This short piece makes reference to an event that was held in May 2019 at the London School of Economics. The occasion was entitled ‘Oral History Research: Illuminating the Past’. There were three speakers and the session was chaired by Professor Michael Lobban. One of the speakers that evening was Lesley Dingle and, following this introduction, her talk is featured in this issue of Legal Information Management.

The Eminent Scholars Archive (ESA) was established to record aspects of the history of the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University. It is based on 28 interviews with scholars and, currently, has 66 hours of audio recordings and transcripts, but also includes over 800 photographs and numerous associated items including biographies, bibliographies, obituaries and eulogies. Entries for faculty members cover the period from WWII to the present, while 13 entries focus on the incumbent Goodhart Visiting Professor of Legal Science. The archive is a rich source of information for researching aspects of legal communities, and in this contribution I focus on three aspects: personal histories of scholars, faculty history, and more socially-broad topics. In the first category I seek to show how the ESA identifies crossroads in the personal legal journeys of professors Higgins, Baker, Smith and Crawford, while I use their common remembrances to record an institutional landmark. For the latter, I selected the 1995 Faculty move from the Old Schools to the Foster building on the Sidgwick site. Finally, I show how ESA illustrates components of legal life writing in a broader societal context. Here I compare the experiences of curators of family histories at the British Library, and ‘group biographies’ of court officials as researched at LSE, with aspects of documenting careers of senior legal academics at Cambridge.

In 1996 ‘Internet Archaeology’, the first peer-reviewed e-journal for Archaeology, published its first edition (Heyworth et al. 1997). Later the same year the Archaeology Data Service, the first digital archive for archaeology, was established (Richards 1997). Ten years on, this paper examines the rapid changes which have taken place in electronic publication and looks forward to the next ten years. It examines the pressures on traditional journal publication, and discusses the potential impact on Archaeology of the next Internet revolution, the Semantic Web.