The range of digital sources available to historians has expanded at an enormous rate over the last fifty years; this has enabled all kinds of innovative scholarship to flourish. However, this process has also shaped recent historical work in ways that have not been fully discussed or documented. This article considers how we might reconcile the digitisation of archival sources with their materiality, with a particular focus on the probate records of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC). The article first considers the variety of digital sources available to historians of the United Kingdom, highlighting the particular influence of genealogical companies in shaping what material is available, how it has been digitised and how those sources are accessed. Secondly, we examine the PCC wills’ digitisation, what was gained and what was lost in that process, notably important material aspects of the wills. This article does not seek to champion archival research in opposition to digitally based scholarship; instead, we remind historians of the many ways in which the creation of sources shape their potential use, and call on historians to push for improvements in the United Kingdom’s digital infrastructure to avoid these problems in future.

In this article Dunstan Speight, Librarian of Lincoln's Inn, and Carolyn Rampling, Assistant Librarian, discuss the Inn's project to digitise Library manuscripts and documents from the Archives, explaining how the project has evolved over time and offering guidance based on their experience. Although not the bread and butter of law librarianship, digitisation projects are a feature of life for law librarians working with historic collections. The website and the documents digitised so far can be viewed at https://archives.lincolnsinn.org.uk/

What do regulations in the developing world tell us about the internet economy? In this paper, we argue that the ways in which developing nation states adjust to and legislate the internet depends upon whether they possess a national planning strategy for international data traffic. Focusing our attention on the global trade of intangible goods in Iran, we aim to demonstrate that digital protectionism causes, to varying degrees, suppression, censorship, and the violation of freedom of speech and other civil rights on the internet. Our results show that digital protectionism generated an emergence of domestic start-ups, with companies, such as Facenema and Soroush, operating in the Iranian market in the absence of global rivals such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Yet, digital protectionism and sanction-induced barriers have triggered social problems, besides the emergence of parastatals, securing the economy to an inefficient social and economic path towards digital development.

Since 2012, the ‘Palmyra Portrait Project’ has collected, studied and digitised over 3700 limestone funerary portraits from Palmyra dating to the first three centuries AD. This represents the largest collection of funerary representations from one place in the classical world.

With the progressive digitisation and use, in particular, of the internet of things and artificial intelligence by industries, commerce, financial services, science and education, the public administration, health services as well as individuals, our society and daily life gets more and more dependent on the security of the net: cybersecurity. The new risks are self-made, a threat to almost everybody and new in kind. And they have a global dimension. For the difficulty of attribution of cyber attacks traditional concepts of deterrence and defence are not a solution. Given the new conditions of the ‘digital constellation’ this article aims at exploring instruments and methods of cybersecurity governance in a broad sense, learning from internet governance and taking a constitutional perspective. It is based upon shared responsibility, resilience and citizens’ participation in the making and future application of an inclusive global rule-making system. Multi-stakeholder mechanisms are combined with deliberative processes, standardisation and legislative action. In accordance with the principles of global constitutionalism this new framework of global rule generation would emerge as a common democratic instrument of people to meet common challenges in addition and complementary to action for cybersecurity at the local, regional, national and supranational levels.

During its 70th Anniversary celebrations the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London launched IALS Digital - a new name for established and evolving online services at IALS, bringing together resources, opportunities for new legal information initiatives, research projects and partnerships, and delivering support for digital legal scholarship. This paper written by Steven Whittle, IALS Digitial Manager, developed from presentations at the launch in November 2017, reports on the event and describes what the Institute plans to achieve through IALS Digital, explaining what it is, how it has developed and how it fits well with the IALS national role in the promotion and facilitation of legal research.

In the last 500 years our modern world has oscillated between the belief in “disenchanted” strategies of bureaucratic control and surveillance, and the celebration of iconoclastic ruptures that are supposed to preserve our sense of freedom and dignity. Yet, the equilibrium between these poles has fallen out of balance after the turn of the millennium. While the obsession with control has released concerted efforts to replace our supposedly irrational intelligence by the “artificial intelligence” of digital technologies, the implementation of ICT technologies in our everyday life has undermined the iconoclastic conviction that artefacts are merely tools. Our smartphones have a “magic life” of their own – be it that they afford a life that we appreciate, or that they nudge us into a life that we abhor. This challenge requires us to recover our ability to distinguish between idolatrous attachments and the prudent use of “magic objects” that is consistent with our natural desire to transform our life for the better. The following essay will discuss the question to what extent the basic assumptions of the confessionalized religions of the post‐Reformation era distract us from the task of engaging with this challenge. Moreover it will question the modern inclination to replace the engagement with sacramental objects with an engagement with pious “master signifiers”: authoritative substitutes for the “body of Christ”, like the Eucharistic host, the Bible or secular party books that reduce the attachment to religious traditions to a matter of formal belief and submission to an authoritative system of clerical, bureaucratic, or (today) robotic surveillance.

The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies holds copies of case papers of appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC). Steven Whittle describes the recent open access initiative at the IALS, working with BAILII to provide online access to historic case papers of appeals from over 35 countries from the period 1935 to 1985. These are cases of the highest importance in the legal development of each of the countries and to the development of common law shared by many countries worldwide.

This article, written by Ivo Vogel and Elisabeth Schrecklinger, deals with the efforts of German libraries to digitise historical legal sources and make them publicly available. Although the main focus is on two selected libraries, a general overview is included. Commercial products are not considered since their contents are likely to become increasingly less relevant due to German law libraries' own initiatives. More attention is paid to problems that have been identified during the implementation of digitisation projects such as the recording of full texts is highlighted. The retrieval of digitised legal materials and, eventually, the digitisation of historical legal gazettes or parliamentary literature is also discussed. This contribution focuses exclusively on the retrospective digitisation of historical legal materials.