The rapid development of reprographic technology, and the explosion of requests for copies of library materials have turned the reproduction by libraries of works protected by copyright into a major problem both from a practical and from the legal point of view. The libraries as the traditional distributors of these works are somehow caught in the middle of the two groups with their conflicting interests which are colliding under their roof: the proprietory interests of authors and publishers in the printed word, and the users’ need for information and free access to it. Both groups expect the library to uphold their interests and to serve their needs.

Since my last report in this Journal (vol. 1, no. 1, March, 1973, pp. 9-15) quite a few things have happened in the law library field in Australia. I shall deal with the more tangible items first.

An outline is given of the various types of law libraries in Australia, a survey of law publications, a review of law library technology, and a brief survey of overseas legal developments which may influence trends in relation to collections, technical innovations and information retrieval in Australia.

Before considering the possible state of law and law library technology in the 1980's, I want to mention briefly some of the trends to be seen in Australia today in legal literature and the organization of legal institutions.

“Library legislation in our century… tends toward the bureaucratization of services rather than to establish scientific procedures for library economy and provide guidelines for administrative action”.

Since the early 1960's there has been a growing interest in Chinese law in this country, much of which has been focused upon Chinese law during the period since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949. This interest has been evidenced both by the introduction of courses in Chinese law into the teaching programs of many of our major universities and by the appearance of numerous scholarly studies of Communist Chinese law.

Surveys and comparisons are always very difficult, if not impossible, when the same criteria cannot be applied to all objects of the survey.

The surveys undertaken by Kurt Schwerin in 1960 and Igor Kavass in 1972 belong to this category of nearly impossible tasks and their results should therefore not be considered as the “absolute” or “pure truth”. Why? Basically, because they attempt to measure and compare collections in libraries which have different rules, policies and practices of classifying and handling them.