Welcome to Legal Information Management for summer 2014.
FEATURE ARTICLE
In this issue we begin with a ‘feature article’. Jonathan Zittrain, Kendra Albert and Lawrence Lessig explore the pervasiveness of ‘linkrot’, otherwise referred to as ‘reference rot’, in academic and legal citation which, as they explain, “has arisen from the disconnect between the transience of online materials and the permanence of legal citation, and will become more prevalent as scholarly materials move online” (page 88). The editor is enormously grateful to the editors of the Harvard Law Review Forum for allowing this article to be re-published in LIM where I hope it will receive the relevant amount of interest and attention given the seriousness of the problem in our academic legal world.
GERMAN LAW AND LEGAL INFORMATION
The theme for this issue is German legal information, libraries and the legal system. The six articles that appear in this section begin with Christian Wolf's description of the law library profession in Germany. Ivo Vogel and Elisabeth Schrecklinger look at the way German libraries are retrospectively digitising historical legal sources. Two articles from the German law firm sector are written by Margarethe Sannino and Martina Kuth respectively. The latter piece is formed from an interview that took place during which she talks about the challenges of a user-oriented library collection in a large commercial law firm. Katherine Read provides an overview of the German law resources that are available at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies library in London. Finally, Martin Vorberg, a regular visitor to the UK and to the BIALL Conference, writes about the law library system at the private law school, the Bucerious Law School in Hamburg.
INTERNATIONAL PERSPECTIVES
Under the International Perspectives banner, we welcome an article by Xiaomeng (Alex) Zhang on the subject of public access to primary legal information in China. This piece follows an earlier issue of LIM that had a theme devoted to Chinese law and legal information and was published in spring 2013 (LIM 13(1)).
CURRENT ISSUES
Three articles make up the Current Issues element of this LIM beginning with Professor John Bell providing an update to his article that was published in LIM in 2012 (12(4)) relating to the future of legal research and the developments in open access publishing. His latest contribution is provocatively entitled, “Open Access – the Journal is Not Dead!” Renae Satterley writes on the trialling of eBooks and iPads at the Middle Temple library. Finally, Jackie Fishleigh offers a non-technical journey through the world of Big Data.
CONFERENCE REPORT
The editor is grateful to Vola Walker who contributes a piece describing the annual conference of the Australian Law Librarians Association (ALLA) that was held in Sydney in 2013.
CURRENT AWARENESS
The Current Awareness section has been compiled by Katherine Read and Laura Griffiths at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Particular thanks go to Hannah Patrick and Sue Perkins of Cambridge University Press and the members of the LIM Editorial Board, especially the proof-readers.
