IALS Collaboration

As part of its role in supporting and promoting national and international legal research in the UK and overseas, IALS is active in a number of partnerships with other libraries and organisations, both specialist and multi-disciplinary. These take the form of collaborative acquisitions of print and electronic resources and also taking the lead in various web-based initiatives such as the Eagle-i Internet Portal for Law, the Current legal research topics database and hosting the British and Irish Legal Information Institute.

BAILII and WORLDLII - British & Irish Legal Information Institute and World Legal Information Institute
The library is playing a major part in the development of both these web sites. It is hosting BAILII, providing free access to full text British and Irish primary materials and it is providing the British content for WORLDLII. WORLDLII provides a single search facility for databases created by 7 Legal Information Institute around the world, including BAILII, as well as various of its own databases which include international court and tribunal decisions and links to a large number of law-related web-sites around the world.

BIALL - British and Irish Association of Law Librarians
IALS Library staff often contribute to the Associations journal "Legal Information Management" and compile a monthly current awareness column of recently published books and articles on topics of interest to legal information professionals. The library developed and hosts the Current Awareness for Legal Information Managers web database .

British Council
Professor Sherr was invited by the British Council to assist in advising them, the British Embassy and Judicial Authorities in Bulgaria in relation to issues of training regarding judicial decision-making on a prosecutorial and judicatory basis. Principal among the objectives was the avoidance of corruption within a system under close scrutiny from the European Union in relation to the possible accession of Bulgaria in the next few years.

British Library
The Institute library has been co-operating with the British Library for a number of years in the collaborative acquisitions of foreign legal materials. This has led to a concordat being signed. Initially the 2 libraries have concentrated on European official gazettes and have mapped their respective holdings in some detail and made the information available on the FLARE website enabling researchers easily to identify holdings and locations. Ultimately the intention is to create a national collection of foreign official gazettes by amalgamating incomplete holdings. The two libraries are also co-operating in the acquisitions of legal journals, initially by comparing holdings and again, with the intention of providing access to journal articles for their respective readers.

British Library and Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Concordat

Columbia Law School - IALS Research Centre
A workshop on "Policing, Community and the Rule of Law" was held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, March 16-17 2006. The workshop was convened jointly by Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University and Ben Bowling of King's College London. The workshop explored four overlapping topics - 'police accountability', 'police-citizen interactions', 'policing strategies' and 'policing & national security.' The participants in the workshop, all leaders in their field in the UK and USA, were the following: William Stuntz, (Harvard), Maurice Punch (LSE), Robert Reiner (LSE), David Sklansky (University of California at Berkeley), Mike Hough (KCL), Betsy Stanko (Metropolitan Police), Jeffrey Fagan (Columbia Law School), Nigel Fielding and Martin Innes (Surrey), Janet Foster (LSE), Debra Livingston (Columbia), Hal Edgar (Columbia), Tim Newburn (LSE), Ben Bowling (KCL) and David Bailey (SUNY Albany). The papers were of a very high quality and the discussion enabled a transatlantic exchange of knowledge and cross-fertilization of ideas about the theory and practice of policing. The workshop also developed a network of scholars in the field of law and policing which, creating the basis for future collaboration. The conveners are working towards publication of the papers presented at the workshop.

FLAG - Foreign law research guide
With RSLP funding the library developed, along with four library partners, and continues to update a web database called FLAG , providing a gateway to foreign, international and comparative law collections within about 50 academic, national and specialist law libraries in the UK. The aim is to improve access to the material and to assist in the creation of a national collection development policy.

FLARE - Foreign law research
The relationship with the British Library and the development of the FLAG database have led to continued co-operation among the libraries concerned (IALS, The British Library, the Bodleian Law Library, the Squire Law Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies) and to the formation of FLARE . The aim of FLARE is to continue the aims of the earlier projects to develop collaborative collection policies, improve access to foreign, comparative and international law and to increase the expertise of library staff by providing information and training courses in the collection, management and exploitation of these materials. The website includes the union list of European official gazettes, course materials and documents produced by both FLAG and FLARE in furthering their aims.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office
The FCO deposited a large collection of Commonwealth legislation with the Institute Library under a trust deed in 1992. It contained much historic material and also current legislation for many countries. The FCO continues to assist the library in keeping the collection up to date using its contacts with governments throughout the Commonwealth. A JISC grant was awarded in recognition of the importance of the collection to enable the library to catalogue and integrate the material with its existing Commonwealth collections.

Free Access to Law Movement
In June 2011 the Institute - through "IALS Information Projects" and IALS Digital Collections http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/digital/digital.htm became a member of the worldwide Free Access to Law Movement (FALM). FALM is a loose alliance of over 30 institutes and organisations which subscribe to the Declaration on Free Access to Law and collaborate in the free provision of legal information and on global policy issues. The Declaration appears at http://www.worldlii.org/worldlii/declaration/ which also lists the member organisations based in countries and regions such as Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Pacific Islands, Philippines, Southern Africa, Uganda, and the USA.

Intute: Social Sciences information gateway
For more than 10 years IALS collaborated with the University of Bristol to create the law section of Intute - identifying, describing and evaluating free legal resources on the web. Such resources include primary and secondary materials, professional organisations, regulatory bodies, current legal news and teaching resources. JISC funding cuts mean that the Intute service is closing in July 2011 and no new resources are being added to the Intute Internet catalogue since July 2010.

Under our agreement with Intute, as section editors for law, IALS has harvested and enhanced the records we created for Intute: Law - effectively rescuing them for further academic and legal research purposes - making them avaialble through our Eagle-i Internet Portal for Law www.ials.sas.ac.uk/eagle-i.htm. The Eagle-i Internet Portal for Law features a freely available web database which will help ensure that evaluative records of quality web resources (including important new additions) continue to be available to support legal studies and research for the UK.

Legal Services Complaints Commissioner
Professor Sherr was invited to join the Legal Services Complaints Commissioner's Consumer Advisory Board during this year. This is a highly important period for the future of regulation of lawyers and legal services as the Legal Services Bill begins to proceed through Parliament. It has therefore been an important time to be involved in understanding, consulting on, and advising in relation to issues of discipline and conduct of lawyers.

LLMC-digital
The library is a charter member of LLMC-digital , a US-based cooperative of libraries formed with the aim of preserving legal titles and government documents in microform and digital formats and making these available to legal research libraries at cost, and the Librarian has served on the Board of Directors and is currently a Councilor.

NELLCO New England Law Library Consortium
IALS library is one of the first international affiliates of the New England Law Library Consortium based in the US.

UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE)
Professor Sherr has continued his work with the United Kingdom Centre for Legal Education , which is housed at Warwick University, and began work on the Strategy Committee of the UKCLE this year. The work of the UKCLE in further professionalising the approach and status of law teachers in the UK has been important in an era of change in benchmarking standards and training frameworks for qualified lawyers. The UKCLE has an important representative function with other agencies in education and in registering what is special about legal education on the broader education scene.