As discussions over the price increases levied by LexisNexis (formerly Butterworths – I suppose we will eventually get used to the new branding and stop pining for our old friend!) on certain of their electronic products continues, it is perhaps fitting that our leading article in this issue is a comparihson of the online services offered by LexisNexis and Westlaw UK. Paul Norman is particularly well-suited to writing it, as he has many years experience of using and teaching both services within the academic environment, from which perspective his article is written. He has comprehensively covered all aspects of the services from coverage, through searching and documentation, to customer support. His article also ties in nicely with the imminent launch of the Online Register of Electronic Resources by the Association.

Lexis and Westlaw are the biggest names in subscription legal database provision, and have been settled here in the UK long enough to be the subject of a little comparative critical examination. I hope to provide this in what follows, with the caveat that my experience is of academic subscriptions, which may vary in content from their commercial counterparts. I do have the advantage of access to the respective American academic versions, so that some comparisons can also be made in that direction.

This article presents the key findings of the research I carried out in the summer of 2002 for the final year dissertation project of the MSc in Information and Library Management at Bristol University

Before 1905 there were no immigration laws in the UK. The first system of appeals in immigration cases was introduced by the Immigration Appeals Act 1969. Since then it has been subject to numerous changes. A full right of appeal to an adjudicator in asylum cases was first created by the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993. Immigration law is governed by the Immigration Act 1971, with changes made by Immigration Acts in 1993, 1996, 1999, and most recently with the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002.

The journal PLC was a worthy winner of the BIALL Serials Award for 2003. PLC, which has been regularly nominated for the award by BIALL members, was in competition with almost a dozen other journals. The adjudication panel agreed that PLC is a journal which has attained excellence in quality, innovation and originality, especially in its presentation of information, as a print journal. It has also successfully meshed print with online to produce a truly new era product.

I am always at something of a loss when a new acquaintance asks, “So, what do you do?” Should I go for the straightforward, “I am Executive Director of the American Association of Law Libraries”? Should I go for the more general, “I am the CEO of a national professional association”? Or, more general still, “I am an association executive”?

Back in late 1998 I was appointed to head up the Knowledge Management and Development Team in Nat West Bank and given responsibility for devising the strategy and implementing a knowledge management capability in The New Learning Organisation, the bank's centralised learning and development function. No mean feat when supporting 60,000 staff with their training and development needs!

In September 2003, Nottingham Law School launched its innovative Postgraduate Diploma in Know-How Management for Legal Practice, the first course of its kind in the UK providing professional development and training for those engaged in knowledge management in legal organisations. Now nearing completion of a successful first year, with students from both private practice and in-house legal departments, and from a range of backgrounds in knowledge management, including librarians, professional support lawyers, heads of knowledge management, managing partners and in-house counsel, the Law School is currently in the process of recruiting intake for the second running of the course commencing in September 2004.

The word “taxonomy” is widely used these days in discussions about organising knowledge or information, especially information in electronic form such as that on the Internet. There is no generally accepted definition of what taxonomies are, though the word is usually used to refer to alphabetico-classed schemes of subject headings. These are built on fundamental principles, which have been more fully developed in their application to thesauri and classifications. By recognising that all these kinds of “controlled vocabularies” are just variations on a theme, built from the same components, it is possible to create consistent and complementary tools to provide for the different approaches which users may need.

This article is an extended version of my previous article “Information Literacy in a corporate environment” which was published on the FreePint website last year. http//:www.freepint.com/issues/060303.htm. The opinions in this article are solely those of the author. Feedback or discussion is welcomed.

Having agreed to talk about the challenges involved in providing the Court Service with a library and information service, I started to think about this year's conference theme – knowledge without frontiers – and how it applies to that service. The more I reflected on this role, the clearer it became to me that the service's challenges are also its opportunities. By sharing with you some of the challenges that face Library and Information Services (LIS) staff based in Regional libraries and offices throughout England and Wales, I hope to highlight the opportunities that are also afforded.

The UK's national library today serves a wider range of users than ever before. The British Library is the world's largest supplier of vital information to science, technology, business, engineering and academia, either at the walk-in reading rooms at St Pancras, London or remotely from the Document Supply Service in Yorkshire. It has also become an advocate for the implementation of a national collection of foreign, comparative and international legal research materials. Additionally, the Library is a well-used resource for professionals such as social workers and clinicians requiring information about the legal framework within which they operate.

Equifax has launched Findout, a comprehensive business and information reporting service. This new service provides detailed information on companies via a free search facility. Information held on the database includes business profiles and all information deposited since 1995 at Companies House. Findout also contains a free business information knowledge base. Reports may be purchased once registration is complete.

This Current Awareness column, and previous Current Awareness columns, are now fully searchable in the new caLIM database (Current Awareness for Legal Information Managers). The caLIM database is available on the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies website at: http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/caware/caware.htm