IALS Library News Headlines - November 2004

IALS Library hosted the second SAS/SHL Joint Seminar on Wednesday 21st July 2004. 17 people attended. The Joint Seminar gave an introduction to the extensive research collections and customer-focused services of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library, highlighting in particular its national role in the provision of library and information services to legal researchers, its co-operative agreements with other libraries, and its recent collaborative electronic projects.

LLM Induction. As usual, in late September IALS library staff visited UCL, LSE, KCL, SOAS and QM to give talks about our library support services to newly-registered University of London LLM students. In addition IALS Library hosted a welcoming Induction Day for these students on Friday 1st October. In total over 550 students were registered with the library and provided with library tours on this very busy but successful day.

During the Autumn term IALS is offering an improved and extended programme of electronic resources training for researchers: http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/llm/training.htm . A successful pilot training seminar on electronic resources available at and through IALS for university law faculty staff was also conducted.

John Huggett (Project Manager - Series Book Automation) and Robert Turner (Project Assistant - Series Book Automation) joined the IALS Library staff in November to work on the project to automate the Library's extensive detailed serial holdings records. Information currently only available onsite in manual records is being added to the library online catalogue using the Millennium Innopac system.

Throughout the last few months the IALS Academic Services team has successfully updated and expanded the range of country research guides. These are available for free to UK researchers on our website at: http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/guides/research_guides.htm . Comments or suggestions are welcomed.

The British and Irish Legal Information Institute http://www.bailii.org based at IALS celebrated its five year anniversary on 1st November with an event to mark five years of free law on the Internet chaired by Lord Justice Brooke and speakers including the Mr Justice Keane former Chief Justice of Ireland, Professor Richard Susskind Chair of the Advisory Panel on Public Sector Information, and Professor Graham Greenleaf of UNSW.

IALS concluded an agreement in the Summer with the Copyright Licensing Agency to licence copies made as part of the IALS document supply service to commercial clients of the IALS Library, after 20 months of negotiation.

The new Graduate Trainee Library Assistants at IALS (Kevin Dewhirst, Stephanie Roberts, Lucy Rosser-Davies and Frances Warrell) started their year's pre-library school training year on 1st September 2004. They will gain experience and skills in the Academic Services and Information Resources departments as well working on our busy Issue & Enquiry Desk. On Wednesday afternoons they will follow our in-house training programme of workshops on legal bibliography and library visits as well as participating in the new SAS Libraries Graduate Trainee training programme on Tuesday afternoons. John Greenhead, senior library assistant in the Cataloguing/Monograph acquisitions section, has begun his Route A training year leading to chartership. Most IALS library staff attended a training day on services to readers with special needs.

A secure semi-current records store has been created at IALS by the reorganisation and reshelving of a storage room, thanks to the work of Elizabeth Dawson, Archivist and Records Manager of IALS.

The catalogues of two Associate members of the School, the Bibliographical Society and the Wallace Collection, are now included on SASCAT which is based at IALS. Links in the catalogue give information of contact details and access arrangements for these collections.