For over 100 years colleges of higher and further education have played important roles in the education of library and information professionals. However, the last decade has seen some significant changes in both the structure of teaching departments and the types of courses they deliver. This paper, delivered by Martin De Saulles at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, outlines some of the pressures currently facing the library and information profession and describes how teaching departments have responded in terms of course developments.

This article by Nicola Wakefield looks at the project to build a new academic law library at the University of Salford. It examines the tasks involved, resource planning and communication as well as highlighting successes and issues raised during the construction and design process. The conclusion of the article discusses the lessons learned from undertaking a task of this scale, as well as recommendations for others who may be about to embark on a similar project.

This is another contribution by Lesley Dingle to an expanding audio and photographic archive, which focuses on the careers of prominent academics who have a long affiliation with the Faculty of Law at Cambridge University.

The British Medical Association Library (BMA) has been through some significant changes over the past two years. As part of an organisation-wide refurbishment, Jacky Berry, now its permanent Librarian, has project managed one of these changes, the relocation of the BMA library within the existing building. Her article covers many aspects of a library move, including the design phase and working with architects and internal estates teams; the budgeting phase including negotiating finance; planning for the move and motivating staff through the change period.

Amanda McKenzie presented this Parallel Session at the 38th Annual BIALL Study Conference in Sheffield in June 2007. She looks at the potential methods of identifying current awareness user groups and reviews traditional methods of current awareness delivery. She then discusses the use of third party aggregators, such as Lexis and PLC. She also looks at the potential for Web 2.0 and social networking methodologies, and evaluates alternative delivery methods, such as RDD feeds, in the context of offering comprehensive services to users.

This article by Michael Saporito, Access Services Librarian at the Boston Social Law Library, discusses the new co-operation scheme which has been put together by two leading law libraries to exploit their document delivery schemes for the mutual benefit of their clients.

What are Web 2.0 applications and which ones will you be implementing in your library? Do “Baby Boomers” fear change and rely too much on email? Are “Gen X-ers/Gen Y-ers” more computer savvy in today's rapidly changing environment? Can social networking technologies enhance our productivity, or are they time-wasters in a professional environment? In this article, based on his paper given at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, Stephen Weiter attempts to answer these questions.

Mark Stanley and Tamara Eisenschitz examine the relationship between professional support lawyers and information professionals in law firms of varying sizes. The results broadly support the hypothesis that tensions in larger firms between the two groups are less apparent. More importantly tensions are reduced where each group is doing clearly delineated work, irrespective of the firm's size. Tensions between the two groups are no longer the issue they once were, but these could reignite, especially if information professionals with legal qualifications and PSLs without fee earning experience vye for similar work. This paper recommends that to avoid frictions it is essential for law firm managers to get to grips with the nature and capabilities of these two groups and utilise them appropriately.

In a paper presented at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, Victoria Jannetta, described how her firm implemented a new tool to help better exploit its internal information resources.

The purpose of this article by Peter Clinch and Ruth Bird is to outline the latest findings from the recent review of foreign law holdings in the United Kingdom, and, in Part 4, to raise key questions relating to the future of these potentially endangered resources. The authors invite the legal research community to consider the many issues of concern raised by the results of this latest FLAG survey.

Ivo Vogel brings us news of the latest areas of interest in German legal information, with a report from a recent conference entitled Legal Information in Change, held at the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, including information literacy, the Virtual Law Library, copyright and catalogue enrichment.

This article by Rachel Brett of Lovells reports on the results of a survey into classification practice in law libraries carried out through the BIALL and LIS-Law mailing lists in March 2007. Major findings were that only three respondents did not use any form of subject classification. The most frequently used classification scheme was Moys, and the single largest grouping was the 40 respondents (40.8%) who used their own in-house classification schemes.

This paper, taken from a presentation given by Melanie Farquharson, 3Kites Consulting, to the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, discusses recent developments in the provision of federated search systems and how they can ease the legal research process. It also considers the attitude of legal publishers to such systems.

In a paper presented at the 39th Annual BIALL Conference held in Dublin in June 2008, Janine Miller described the development of CanLII by Canadian law societies from its earliest incarnation to the huge free legal resource that it now comprises.

Distance learning at the graduate law level offers exciting opportunities for non-traditional students to learn not only substantive law but also new skills. One of these skills should be information research. In this paper, which was presented at a Parallel Session at the 38th Annual BIALL Study Conference in Sheffield in June 2007, Edward T. Hart looks back on his experience as a distance learner at Northumbria University, observes what worked and did not work and offers suggestions for law faculty and librarians to consider. The final section is a brief description of the current status of distance learning in American legal education.