It took just a simple e-mail in the Autumn of 2000 to set the ball rolling towards one of the most informative, enjoyable and interesting professional experiences I've ever had. The e-mail in question was a request to fill in a questionnaire from the Foreign Comparative and International Law Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries. The questionnaire concerned participation in AALL's Clearinghouse for Internships & International Personnel Exchanges. This is a program used to promote exchanges and visits between law librarians in the US and abroad in order to develop both personal and professional relationships, and also to give librarians the chance to work with legal information sources pertaining to other jurisdictions. Library and Information Services (LIS) management here at the University of Wales Swansea (UWS) kindly agreed to explore both the avenues of hosting and that of ‘sending forth’ a law librarian within the program.

IFLA is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. This global voice of the library and information profession, provides librarians around the world with a forum for exchanging ideas, promoting international cooperation, and research and development in all fields of library activity. As a legal information professional I achieved a number of significant personal and professional objectives in attending the conference.

Helen Young, the information Librarian (Law & Official Publications) at the University of Leicester, reports on the results of one extra element in the BIALL/SPTL Survey, designed to acquire further information about academic law librarians.

E-learning – is it all it's made out to be? Does it deliver what it promises? In this article, I hope to convince you that it does? I'll explain why, as Head of Resource Development for the Retail Branch Networks for the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, I believe it has proved successful. The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and National Westminster (NW) Branch Networks consist of over 2,300 branches employing approximately 30,000 people throughout the U.K. My team are responsible for the design, development and implementation of training and development for these staff. We consider that in today's climate of accelerated change, high performance depends critically on the extent to which our intellectual capital is built, refreshed and leveraged – why?

Our customers expect that, as a minimum, our people are appropriately trained and can handle all their enquiries efficiently and effectively. Competent staff and the delivery of excellent customer service are not an option for the Group, but a necessity if we are to sustain our competitive advantage in the financial market place.

One thing I learned is when an old friend [Carswell's Bonnie Preece] calls inviting you to be the rapporteur of an event that will take place months in the future, particularly when she importunes you with the carrot that you will not have to prepare anything in advance of the conference, DO NOT SUCCUMB. I subsequently discovered that the task of marshalling the substance of more than a dozen hours of outstanding presentations is a challenge indeed. I had to actually attend every session; I had to furiously take notes for hours; I had to work late into the night to consolidate these woefully inadequate notes. Whatever their limitations, however, I offer them here as some record of this marvellously well executed and educational programme.

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 Web site at: http://iala.sas.ac.uk/library/caware/caware.htm

I arrived in Glasgow on the Sunday afternoon with a week ahead of me discovering more about librarianship. How interesting was this likely to be?

One of the perks awarded to the BIALL Chair is the opportunity to attend the AALL Annual meeting in the summer. I had been once before, as a BIALL bursary recipient, to Washington DC in 1999 and knew that there would be a great deal to observe and learn apart from the main conference programme. The scale of the American conference is, of course, very different to ours: nearly 1800 delegates compared to the 400 we had in Liverpool in June; 74 scheduled conference sessions and several hundred business meetings, a conference centre over a mile long (!), and of course the whole “larger than life” experience of being in Orlando. I knew the heat would be a problem for me, so I opted to stay in the Peabody Hotel just across the road from the conference centre, with its twice-daily “Duck Walk” to the fountain in the hotel lobby.

My trip to British Columbia to attend the Third Joint Study Institute in May this year has definitely been one of the highlights of my career so far! After applying for and successfully receiving a BIALL overseas bursary I had the most fantastic opportunity to hop across the globe and embark on a fascinating and challenging journey into Canadian law and history! I thought I would share a selection of the most memorable moments of the trip with you.

Legal IT 2002, sponsored by Legal Week, took place on 6th and 7th February. A number of interesting keynote events were organised. Andrew Terrett spoke on the application of content management strategies to secure effective and efficient control over multi-system distributed content and Gerald Newman, the creator of the Law Society's Solicitors' Online site, reviewed online Web site marketing. Reviewing the event in Legal IT Kieren Flatt commented on the ‘rather uncertain future of dedicated IT trade shows for law firms’ but also noted that ‘the pace of innovation in the legal sector is, if anything, still accelerating’.

Having worked in law librarianship in the United Kingpdom for almost five years and known colleagues who had attended overseas conferences, I always thought what a wonderful opportunity it is to attend an overseas conference. Where else would you be able to meet like-minded folk from a completely different part of the world and possibly also a different culture? When I saw that the 2002 ALLG symposium was being held in Brisbane I decided this was the year I should apply to attend. Of course the fact that I have friends who live near Brisbane did not influence my thought process or affect my enthusiasm to attend!

Wow! when I opened the letter to find I had won another bursary I could not believe my luck. Five years ago I had gone to the Canadian Law Librarians' Conference in New Brunswick and had had a brilliant time. On this occasion it was the Joint Study Institute of the three law library associations, held at Victoria, Vancouver, British Columbia. Aynsley's report has outlined the highlights of the lectures. I am approaching it from a slightly different and more personal angle.

Murdoch's Irish Legal Companion is a CD-ROM and Web-based product from Topaz Publications and Lendac Data Systems. It incorporates a new edition of A Dictionary of Irish Law as well as the full text of cited Acts and statutory instruments from 1922 to 2000. I reviewed the Dictionary on CD-ROM.

The coverage of the Dictionary is fairly extensive, providing definitions of approximately 6,500 thousand legal definitions with cross references and hyperlinks to related terms, legislation and relevant Web sites.

New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa, in the windy city of Wellington in the Southern Hemisphere spring of early September was the venue for 2002's conference “Visible Justice - evolving access to the law”. This was my first overseas conference as a BIALL delegate and one I approached with trepidation, not really knowing what to expect, but my overall impression was without doubt a positive one. I was able to obtain a network of valuable contacts and gain an important insight into legal librarianship in the Country.

On 18th April 2002, I found myself on a flight to Chicago. My ultimate destination was Madison, Wisconsin, and I would be spending the next month at the University of Wisconsin's Law Library. This article gives me the opportunity to share some of my experiences, as well as outlining the benefits of this type of professional development opportunity.