I work for the Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC), a cooperative with some 900 participating members. Most are in the US, with a fair number in Canada and some in Australia, the UK and sixteen other countries. For over a quarter of a century LLMC has provided its member libraries with a wide range of legal titles, including much Commonwealth material, on microfiche. We grew hoary in that task, but have been rejuvenated in a new role. We've just launched an on-line digital library, LLMC-Digital, which will provide vastly enhanced access to our materials. The foundation for this endeavour is our backfile of 92,000 volumes (some 49-million page images) filmed during the past 27 years. To that base will be added every new title acquired in LLMC's future filming or scanning.

Legal libraries, by their very nature, have highly specialised requirements when it comes to library automation. A traditional library management system, which will simply catalogue books and provide the means to issue them to borrowers for a defined period, will not provide the flexibility required by a modern legal information centre. Serials management, direct links to web resources and the selective dissemination of information are of far more importance to a legal library than whether a loan is overdue. Access to information is crucial – the library catalogue needs to be available to researchers wherever they are, whether sitting at their desks or accessing the data via the internet.

Editor's note: this review unfortunately had to be held over from the previous issue of LIM due to lack of space and because of the pace of change in electronic publishing it may not be completely up to date in tis description of the various features of the website.

Mandy Webster continues her series of surveys of materials available on the internet, concentrating on useful sites for the legal information professional.

In October 2002 I was lucky enough to spend three stimulating days at the New York University Law School Library participating in the annual Legal Information Transfer Network workshop. The Legal Information Transfer Network (ITN) is funded by a generous grant from The Starr Foundation (established in 1955 by insurance entrepreneur Cornelius Van der Starr) and is headed by the dynamic Director of the NYU Law School Library, Professor Kathie Price. ITN aims to establish a global network of prestigious law libraries which ultimately can offer a 24/7 virtual reference service, both to its own partner libraries in the developed world and to academic legal communities in less developed countries. Previous annual workshops in such cities as Lausanne in Switzerland have given senior librarians from ITN partner libraries the opportunity to meet and make progress on issues such as providing a global virtual reference desk, sharing database access across the libraries, developing interactive legal research guides, and creating imaginative training programmes for local law librarians in China and Southern Africa (http://www.law.nyu.edu/library/itn). Between workshops the exchange of ideas is continued by email discussion. Currently the list of law library partners includes New York University, Washington University in Seattle, Toronto University in Canada, IALS Library in the UK, the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Konstanz University in Germany, Cape Town University in South Africa, Melbourne University in Australia, Yerevan State University in Armenia, and Tsinghua University in China.

The programme is a twinning arrangement between the University of Tirana Faculty of Law and a Middlesex University Consortium, consisting of the Institute of Social and Health Research, Middlesex University, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the London Metropolitan University Department of Law, Governance and International Relations, the European Public Law Center, Education for Change Ltd and Cavendish Publishing, and has three main aims:

• to help train and thus produce better qualified staff

• to improve the institutional management of the Law Faculty

• to prepare teaching, learning and research material that meets the needs of students entering the legal profession.

Within the main programme there is a library strand. This aims to develop the range of services provided by the faculty law library in order to support academics and students to the highest possible level given available resources. It was to help facilitate this development that the visit to Hendon took place.

Legal abbreviations can be a puzzle to both new students and experienced professionals. Traditionally, paper-based or electronic lists have been devised to help users identify to which legal publication an abbreviation refers. This web-based service, launched in June 2003, harnesses a relational database to the power of the internet to provide sophisticated searching, ease of updating and world-wide access. The Index is at http://www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk/