NEIGHBOURS AND NO-ZONE

The very start of 1985 saw the creation of the Internet’s Domain Name System, which translates readable domain names into machine readable IP addresses; or to put it another way it takes a name and makes it into a number. DNS is what makes the internet searchable, then, and so this system is at the heart of much of the work information professionals do.

Meanwhile, in other tech news, Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in the US (the European version was launched in 1986). Development of the system began after Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates saw a demo of something similar, Visi On, three years earlier.

Someone else also spotted a gap, in 1985, though this time not in the market but in the ozone layer, the British Antarctic Survey observing reductions of up to 70% during the southern hemisphere springtime on the world’s chilliest continent. This ultimately resulted in the ban of all sorts of chemical nasties, such as CFCs, as soon as 1989, and ozone levels began to stabilise by the 1990s and recover in more recent decades.

This year also saw the launch of Australia’s longest running soap opera, Neighbours, which after a slow start down under – it was actually cancelled after four months because the Melbourne-based drama did not work well in Sydney – it was picked up by another channel and went on to great things. By October 1986 it had arrived in the UK, too, and it was almost instantly successful with us Poms and was soon drawing in close to 16 million viewers – which was more than the population of Australia at that time!

Not quite so popular was a change in the Coca-Cola formula and the introduction of New Coke. The sweeter recipe – which had been very successful in taste tests and with focus groups – was swiftly rejected in the marketplace and the original Coke was back on sale in less than three months, now marketed as ‘Coca-Cola-Classic’. The reintroduction of ‘the real thing’ was very successful, and ever since some have put forward the theory that the company engineered the whole episode, something which Coca-Cola has always denied.

Sticking with iconic American themes, Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1985, mainly because it had been superseded by various sections of the National Interstate System. ‘The Mother Road’, however, was having none of it and, rather like original Coke, it made a comeback. It is now known along many stretches as Historic Route 66 and it is still one of the world’s great road trips, a drive enjoyed by many every year.

Mix tapes for your 1985 road trip might have included the bigger hits of the year, which included charity singles such as Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas, which had been Number 1 over Christmas 1984 and then for the first two weeks of 1985. Also at the start of 1985, We Are the World was released by a similar band of music celebrities called USA for Africa. Both records were in response to the famine that had by then been devastating Ethiopia since 1983 and had affected 7.75 million people, about 20 per cent of the population of the country at the time, leaving up to 2.5 million dead and almost 200,000 children orphaned. Later in the year the Live Aid benefit concerts, in London and Philadelphia, raised £50m for famine relief in Ethiopia. There was a constellation of stars involved in Live Aid, but for most youngsters the best bit was definitely Bob Geldof swearing on live TV …

PAPER WEIGHT

There was no bad language in the first of 1985’s three issues of The Law Librarian, but there was plenty of weighty legal talk in a Spring issue that, for the first time ever, was almost wholly devoted to papers from the BIALL Annual Conference of 1984, which had been held at the University of East Anglia. This was actually the first time this had been done, and it’s now a regular feature of our Winter issues.

The theme of the 1984 Conference had been all about government publications, because, as the LIM Editor at the time explained: “We need a good general knowledge of what, why and how governments and international organisations publish in order to give the best service to our readers when faced with requests for specific publications and information.”

It was certainly wide in scope, with nine papers featured, which looked at the official publications of “Britain, Ireland, the European Communities, Western Europe, the United States of America and the United Nations”.

One of the talks started with the line “tedious it almost certainly will be” when introducing the subject, and some of these papers may well have been hard work on a balmy Norwich afternoon after a good lunch, but we did manage to salvage some nuggets from them, including this concluding passage from ‘The History of British Official Publications, with particular reference to law’: “It seems inconceivable that parliamentary publications will ever be published by any body other than HMSO, but could it be that someone reviewing the history of official publications at the BIALL Conference of 2034 will end up by saying that HMSO eventually lost all non-parliamentary publishing. If indeed there is still any hard copy then and our successors do not spend their time almost solely at computer terminals.”

It wasn’t just government publications, though, and this issue also contained the results of the very first BIALL Salary Survey, which was conducted in 1984. Cutting to the chase, 3.5% of respondents earned more than £15,000, 21.1% over £13,000, 69.3% over £9000, 90.5% over £7000 and everyone earned over £5000. Just for a little perspective, a brand-new Ford Escort was around £6500 at this time.

Route 66 was officially decommissioned in 1985, but road trippers still use it as a highway to adventure and nostalgia to this day

This, or Styal Country Park? Hmmm … tricky one, that …

VIDEO LIBRARY

One of the more intriguing pieces in the second issue of The Law Librarian in 1985 was ‘The American Law School and its Library: A Unique Relationship’. One interesting point raised in the article is how history affected this relationship: “20th Century events forced American states to take greater account of one another and the American nation to deal more with world affairs, pushing research law library collections beyond narrow geographical and topical confines.”

Elsewhere in this issue there’s an article entitled ‘Audio-Visual Materials and the Law Librarian’, written by the then director of the British Universities Film & Video Council, Elizabeth Oliver. This piece championed video training and teaching in particular, and makes the point that: “A profession which depends so much on communications skills needs to be aware of new developments in audio visual and information technologies.” One of these, the Editorial points out, is “the videodiscs of the near future”.

Meanwhile, in the Letters section Wallace Breem, former Indian Army cavalry officer, novelist and at that time the Librarian at Inner Temple, makes a point in relation to the difficulty in finding some data that was mentioned in the Salary Survey piece in the first issue of 1985 (see above). “The law firm library is [ …] the only growth area in our field of interest […] Those who contemplate applying for posts in law firms must realise that the ball game is different. The law firm is a business. Its library is neither subsidised by the state nor by local government […] The salaries it pays are its own concern. Being business minded the firm will wish to recruit the best librarian staff it can afford, on the reasonable grounds that, if the money offered is competitive, it will attract the talent it requires.”

QUESTION TIME

The third issue of 1985 starts off with the news that BIALL’s annual conference, which had been held in Manchester in the September of that year, had been the most successful ever, up to that point. For the first time it had been held in a polytechnic rather than a university, and this led nicely into the opening article, which was all about the work of law libraries in what was often seen as the Cinderella tier of higher education. This wasn’t without its problems, the writer noting that: ‘A distinctive feature of polytechnics and their libraries is the cumulative effect of mergers which has been described as making Waiting for Godot seem like a crisp, clear half day trip to the seaside. Polytechnic librarians have developed a blitz mentality which enables them to cope with removals, stock amalgamation re-classification, staff integration and building renovation.”

But could they cope with the ‘Butterworths/Sweet & Maxwell Competition For Law Librarians – 1985’? This was actually a quiz, and we thought it might be fun to try out some of the questions on our readers in 2025. So, here goes:

1. 1. Charles Dickens is better known as a novelist than a law reformer. Which of his books led to the reform of intellectual property law?

2. 2. Which code formerly available only in Latin, was first published in England in 1983? Who published it?

3. 3. What is the Irish Gaelic equivalent of the Public General Acts?

(Turn to page 132 for the answers).

Elsewhere in this issue there are accounts from a couple of BIALL members who attended two very different conferences, BIALL’s own affair in Manchester, and the AALL bash in New York. The Manchester event included “a visit to Styal Country Park and Quarry Bank Mill which proved to be quite enthralling”. Meanwhile, in the Big Apple: “The highlight of the trip for many of the [BIALL] party was a yacht cruise around Manhattan and the Statue of Liberty, with spectacular views of the New York skyline seen against the setting sun.” Good job that wasn’t an either-or option, it would have been impossible to choose between the two!