It is apt to start this review about the 2000s by mentioning ‘a project called UKILELI…it aims to create a database of UK full-text legislation and case transcripts; available via the web. More critically it aims to be free.’Footnote 1 It was later renamed to the more easily pronounced BAILII. BIALL had voted to support the project with a donation and to encourage law libraries to do the same.
Technological developments were much of a theme during this decade. Amazon had launched a few years before and was just starting to make an impact, driving down the price of books and encouraging us and our traditional suppliers to look again at how we approached procurement of hardcopy. The move to digital was apace and online news alerting was now the norm. We had got used to certain free services and there was a furore amongst law librarians in late 2000Footnote 2 over the proposed removal of the free Badger Alerter service, it later being discontinued in 2001 despite intervention from BIALL. In the academic sector we had ‘Law in a Box’ that was a set of CD-ROMs as an aid to learning the law.
Peter Clinch developed the Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations and it won a BIALL award in 2004Footnote 3 in recognition of becoming such an important reference tool. Later on in the decade we had a presentation at the 2006 conference of the Statute Law DatabaseFootnote 4, later to become legislation.gov.uk. Many new technologies were among us and BIALL provided a forum for sharing knowledge about how useful this new ‘social media’ might be in our roles.Footnote 5 How many of us remember setting up a Twitter account for the first time after reading James Mullan's article in the February 2009 BIALL Newsletter about Twitter?Footnote 6
The electronic suppliers brought other issues to the table. The suppliers merged, they brought in new concepts like modularisation and integration. There were OFT investigations into legal suppliers, the buyout of Lawtel by Sweet & Maxwell being a prominent one.Footnote 7 Librarians remained able to laugh about the issue as a spoof article on 1st April 2009 told us of a merger of publishers to create ‘SPEW’ which would consume ‘99% of library budgets’.Footnote 8 Practical Law established itself as a leading know-how source during this decade and libraries grappled with budgets and business cases as this and other new services came on stream. As a result of this shift, negotiating and analysis of online contracts were skills that many librarians developed over this decade.
Trying to make sense of law reports having been made ‘available’ but not always truly reflecting the facts of the case and the need to cite these cases resulted in a 2001 Practice Direction from the Lord Chief JusticeFootnote 9 ordering that all judgments of the High Court and Court of Appeal were from January 11, 2001 to have media neutral citations. It was noted by the BIALL Legal Information Group ‘the benefits of these citations were felt to be unclear’.Footnote 10 To this day we law librarians still have to explain neutral citations to lawyers…
BIALL was keen to encourage best practice amongst publishers, both traditional and online, during this decade. As part of this endeavour BIALL introduced the Legal Journals AwardFootnote 11, established named members of the Legal Information Group as liaison with key suppliersFootnote 12, and devised the BIALL Code of Good Practice for Legal Publishers.Footnote 13 We wanted to recognize our own achievements too and the Law Librarian of the Year award was established, the first award being given at the Harrogate conference to Sue Pettit.Footnote 14 Helping us develop our broader skills was the publication in 2006 of the first edition of the BIALL Handbook of Legal Information Management.Footnote 15
BIALL itself was having to adjust and manage its future. Whilst it decided against changing its name (yes I am sure this has come up in most decades), it did decide in 2001 to change the name of its journal from The Law Librarian to Legal Information Management.Footnote 16 In 2004 a review was held into BIALL's membership, the structure, the services it offered its audience, the role of the administrator and how it could make sure it would survive the future. Some tough decisions were made but given the fact that BIALL is about to celebrate 50 years, those decisions have held the Association in good stead.
With thanks to:
Catherine Williams, Archivist and Records Manager at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library who let me spend a delightful morning scanning the BIALL archives.
