There are three main themes in this, the first issue of LIM for 2005. We begin with a series of short articles on the perils, pitfalls and challenges of multi-site working within the legal information environment. I am very grateful to the large number of people who have contributed to this theme by answering a short questionnaire that we put together in an attempt to ascertain what the key issues are. Some of our contributors have elected to answer the questions given as a template and others have adopted a more narrative style. Unfortunately we did not manage to get a contribution from an academic library. We do have articles from a number of our well-known large regional/City law firms, plus contributions from two smaller Scottish firms and the experiences of the College of Law. As a precursor to this theme our topical issues section features an article by Elisabeth Tooms, until recently Global Head of Library Services at Allen & Overy, on the challenges involved in running what must be the ultimate multi-site library with a staff of over 70 information professionals scattered around the world. Elisabeth also traces the history of her involvement in the development of the service from its beginnings in the early 1980's. At the other end of the spectrum Isabel Hood has written a wonderfully down-to-earth account of the stresses and strains of being a one-person library and information service in a multi-site law firm.

Elisabeth Tooms has recently taken early retirement from Allen & Overy, one of our largest law firms, after many years of service there and she has been persuaded to look back and consider the most significant changes which have taken place in law firm information work over the last twenty years.

at the time of her tragic death, gillian sands had already established a successful career in law librarianship. she had trained at city university school of information science and worked in professional posts at two of the most prestigious legal research libraries in the uk. gillian had also made friends at each stage of her career across all sectors of law librarianship and was highly valued by those with whom she had worked. she had played an important role in the social life of her workplace as well as being valued for her dedication, conscientiousness and initiative. as a tribute to gillian, this article traces her career in law librarianship and her various achievements. i record my thanks to her friends and colleagues alison, caroline, christine, emily, wendy, and others who wrote to me in february this year.

As soon as I saw the theme of the Harrogate conference, ‘Gateways, Gatekeepers and Gatecrashers’, I wanted to contribute, although the thought of doing a session unnerved me. I was keen to talk about my gateway, LawBore, and how it had changed since I first wrote an article on it in Legal Information Management back in 2003, but I also wanted to convey how creating LawBore had changed things for me within my workplace.

Don Raistrick, who is nearing the end of a long career in the government service, and who was recently awarded the MBE, writes about the challenges of working in a government department which has changed dramatically over the years. The DCA has to conform to its own change agenda and to that of the government. This has affected the organisation of library services, creating pressures caused by increased responsibilities and a broader customer base but in a climate where project disciplines are used to define and introduce new services and where we are encouraged to share our experience and our services with other departments.

The following articles were written by law librarians employed by a variety of organisations in response to a questionnaire sent out by the Editorial Board. The aim of this brief survey was to try and find out what the key issues are facing librarians who operate in such situations. We were unable to get a contribution from an academic library operating a multi-site system. Some of the articles have followed the format of the questions posed in the survey and others are more discursive, but the Editorial Board hopes that readers will find useful nuggets of information in these different accounts. They certainly offer interesting organisational schemas.

Peter Clinch, Information Specialist – Law, Cardiff University describes the nature of the BVC and the important role played by law librarians in the training of young barristers.

How do you get two solo information professionals in two separate small island jurisdictions to give one presentation, talking as one? Especially two who had never met together until the day before they were due to give the presentation at the 2005 BIALL conference in Harrogate The way this came about neatly sums up what it is like to be an information professional in a small jurisdiction. You spend a long time on the telephone and email, you take the initiative, collaborate, share ideas and bring out the best in each other. In short, you reach out beyond your little island, because not to do so means not to operate effectively.

since the restructuring of the reader services department (now the academic services department) of ials library in 2000 and the subsequent investment in additional staff capacity, ials library has consciously sought to develop and improve both the public training programmes delivered to researchers and the in-house training programmes provided for library staff. this article seeks to explain the key changes that took place and to describe the resulting expansion in both types of training programmes. the department was fortunate in being able to appoint gillian sands as llm services librarian in january 2001 in a move from the library's book acquisitions section and gillian quickly became an integral part of the reader services team. happily gillian's invaluable years at ials coincided with an exciting and rewarding period of expansion and innovation in the library. as in so many other areas of her work, she bought sensible practical ideas, much bubbly enthusiasm, and a great deal of hard work to help the team make these improvements to services a success.

DLA LLP is currently the seventh largest law firm in the UK, with offices throughout the country and many others overseas. We have over 3,600 people working in the firm, which includes 380 partners. This article will explore how we used to provide legal and business information to the lawyers in the UK, and how it compares to what we do now following a recent restructure.

gillian sands started her career by studying the msc in information science at city university in the session 1998–99. among the standard skills, she studied in particular legal aspects of library and information work and also services and documentation about the law in general, in other words, information law and legal information.

This article aims to give an overview of the current position of the legal portal market (primarily law firms) and to offer some predictions for the road ahead. The key areas covered will include:

[bull ] What are portals? Some basic definitions

[bull ] Why might you need a portal?

[bull ] What can you do with a portal?

[bull ] Where we are at present with portals: technologies and usage

[bull ] Key considerations for portal projects

[bull ] Future predictions for legal portals

Michael Chapman, who is a Senior Lecturer at the Inns of Court School of Law, writes about how the BVC is delivered to over 500 full-time students each year, using state of the art technology and e-learning methods which are a far cry from traditional teaching methods. This article is a companion to Peter Clinch's article on the BVC which also appears in this issue.

Victoria Moody of the Information Commissioner's Office considers the regulatory framework of the right to know. It focuses on the public/private interface of information held by public authorities in the outsourcing of their functions.

The objective of any taxonomy deployment must be to ensure that real benefits are delivered to the organisation. But the experience of the last few years has illustrated the risk that law firm taxonomy projects do not deliver real benefits, but instead consume substantial time and effort for little tangible benefit. The classic symptom is that lawyers still continue to use the Googlestyle simple search box, with all its attendant issues, in preference to keyword searching for internal materials; and the taxonomy is ignored in practice by those whom it was supposed to benefit.

We are a law firm with over 4,000 staff, including over 2,000 legal and business advisers, providing services to the private and public sector business and finance community. With a network of over 24 offices throughout Europe and in Asia, including offices in London, Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Doha, Madrid, Milan, Rome, Shanghai, Singapore, Sofia, Valladolid and Vienna, Eversheds' lawyers combine an in-depth knowledge of local markets with the resources and international capability of one of the world's largest law firms.

as ever, it started with an innocent looking email. “idea” stated the subject line, but who could be emailing ideas to me on a sunny wednesday lunchtime in june? jennifer barrow, as it turned out, had not been spending her lunch in the park drinking too much pimms, but had been browsing through mary blake's history of biall (as a good council member does) and discovered that the law for librarians course (as was) had been running for 20 years. the very first course had started in the autumn of 1984, meaning that our 2004/2005 year would be the 21st year of the course, surely reason for celebration! after much deliberating over what would be most suitable for such an esteemed and valuable part of biall's portfolio of courses, a special logo was created for the year's course materials, and a successful evening reunion was held in april. this took place at bpp's new law school at waterloo and was attended by over 30 past and current law librarians, including a brave few who attended that very first year.