In May 2003, I had the task of distributing the notice of Willi Steiner's death to colleagues, which is reproduced below. On 27 May an obituary appeared in the Times written by Willi's brother Francis. This article is an opportunity to mark Willi's passing with a substantial account of his career and contribution to the profession of law librarianship and to the process of research and scholarship in law. I would like to thank David Wills, Squire Law Librarian, and Paul Norman of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library for their assistance.

I first met Willi Steiner in 1960 when I joined the library staff of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, where he was a frequent visitor in his capacity as Assistant Editor of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals. He was extremely short-sighted and my first view of him was in the slightly undignified posture he had to adopt to read titles on the bottom shelves. But one of his many endearing attributes was that he never stood on his dignity and he would have been highly amused if he had caught his reflection in a mirror. Nor did he ever complain about his handicap beyond the very occasional rueful comment when he sometimes had to guess who had spoken to him. He did not allow it to deflect him from his many scholarly pursuits and personal interests and, happily, towards the end of his career, his sight was so much improved by an operation to his eyes that he only required spectacles for reading.

William A.F.P. Steiner, one of the founding editors of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals has died after a long illness. Willi (always Willi, never William or Dr. Steiner) had received his diplomate from Vienna shortly before he emigrated to England in 1938; he received a Masters degree from Cambridge and a Master of Laws degree from the University of London. He was a barrister of Gray's Inn, but his primary interests were bibliography and the organization of knowledge and information, and he almost immediately embarked on endeavours as a librarian and editor. His first positions were as assistant librarian at the London School of Economics, 1946–1958, and then the Squire Law Library at Cambridge, 1959–1968. In 1968 he returned to London as the Librarian of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, also serving as the Secretary of the Institute from 1968 to 1971. In 1984 he returned to Cambridge, where he had continued to live since 1959, but only to a semi-retirement of consulting, teaching and writing.

Bore da. Diolch am fy nghyflwyno mewn ffordd mon garrdeig. A gai hefyd ddiolch i ch Cymdeithias am fy nghwahodd i chwarae rhan yn eich cenhadledd blynyddol yma ym mrhif ddinas Cymru. Ar ran y Cynulliad Cenedlaethol, Croes i Gymru.

Good morning. Thank you for your introduction Madam Chairman. On behalf of the national Assembly for Wales, it is my considerable pleasure to welcome your annual conference to Wales and to its capital city, Cardiff.

In Northern Ireland there has been a lot of interesting experience of devolution (although rather less of lawmaking, especially recently). Indeed, the experience of devolution in Northern Ireland is greater than elsewhere in the United Kingdom as this present (interrupted) phase is the third version that has taken place. Such a history, involving as it does not just various failures but also a fifty year record of relative stability might suggest that Northern Ireland has particular lessons to offer to the devolution process that the UK has experienced since 1998.

The closest thing we in the United States have to what the British and Canadians call devolution is federalism: the sharing of power between the states and the federal government.

There is little sense in launching into a discussion of the nature of Canadian federalism to a non-Canadian audience without first providing a thumbnail sketch of Canadian history to provide some context for that discussion.

I was a very fortunate law librarian in June this year – as the Chair of OSALL (the Organisation of South African Law Libraries), I was the only South African able to attend the 34th Annual BIALL conference, thanks to the generosity of BIALL who sponsored me as an Official Delegate. As a small token of my appreciation, I have written some memoirs spanning those five fabulous days, and I hope you enjoy reading them.

The UK Centre for Legal Education (UKCLE) is the LTSN subject centre for law. LTSN, the Learning and Teaching Support Network, was set up by the Joint Funding Councils in January 2000 to promote high quality learning and teaching and transfer good practice across disciplines. It is made up a generic centre and 24 subject centres.

The months of August and September 2003 have seen an unprecedented release of information about the internal workings of the UK government during the Hutton enquiry; thousands of documents have been placed on the enquiry website, including key emails and memos. These documents have not been released under the UK Freedom of Information Act (2000), because they are part of a judicial enquiry into the death of Dr David Kelly. However this has served as an important reminder to the UK public of the importance of information in holding public authorities to account.

This article will be a Rogue's Gallery of some of the most off-putting jargon in our trade: unfriendly “metadata”, “taxonomy” and “thesaurus” as well as the infamous “interoperability”. We have to learn to live with these tricky characters, however. So why not learn to love them I will try to bring out what is useful about them, as well as facing up to the discomforts.

Few legal practitioners in the UK can be unaware of the introduction of the Competition Act 1998 (which came into force on 1 March 2000) and its impact upon commercial agreements/practices generally. Substantively, it prohibits agreements between undertakings, concerted practices and decisions by associations of undertakings i.e. decisions made by trade associations, which appreciably prevent, restrict or distort competition in the UK. Of course, this piece of national legislation is limited to the activities of businesses whose activities impact upon the competitiveness of the UK marketplace. The wider picture is provided by the European competition rules as embodied in Articles 81 and 82 of the EC Treaty. However, both regimes essentially prevent the same range of activities save that the UK system only looks for adverse impact in the UK, whereas the European rules are concerned with adverse effects upon interstate trade and hence the competitiveness of the European marketplace.

I work for the Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC), a cooperative with some 900 participating members. Most are in the US, with a fair number in Canada and some in Australia, the UK and sixteen other countries. For over a quarter of a century LLMC has provided its member libraries with a wide range of legal titles, including much Commonwealth material, on microfiche. We grew hoary in that task, but have been rejuvenated in a new role. We've just launched an on-line digital library, LLMC-Digital, which will provide vastly enhanced access to our materials. The foundation for this endeavour is our backfile of 92,000 volumes (some 49-million page images) filmed during the past 27 years. To that base will be added every new title acquired in LLMC's future filming or scanning.

Legal libraries, by their very nature, have highly specialised requirements when it comes to library automation. A traditional library management system, which will simply catalogue books and provide the means to issue them to borrowers for a defined period, will not provide the flexibility required by a modern legal information centre. Serials management, direct links to web resources and the selective dissemination of information are of far more importance to a legal library than whether a loan is overdue. Access to information is crucial – the library catalogue needs to be available to researchers wherever they are, whether sitting at their desks or accessing the data via the internet.

Mandy Webster continues her series of surveys of materials available on the internet, concentrating on useful sites for the legal information professional.

In October 2002 I was lucky enough to spend three stimulating days at the New York University Law School Library participating in the annual Legal Information Transfer Network workshop. The Legal Information Transfer Network (ITN) is funded by a generous grant from The Starr Foundation (established in 1955 by insurance entrepreneur Cornelius Van der Starr) and is headed by the dynamic Director of the NYU Law School Library, Professor Kathie Price. ITN aims to establish a global network of prestigious law libraries which ultimately can offer a 24/7 virtual reference service, both to its own partner libraries in the developed world and to academic legal communities in less developed countries. Previous annual workshops in such cities as Lausanne in Switzerland have given senior librarians from ITN partner libraries the opportunity to meet and make progress on issues such as providing a global virtual reference desk, sharing database access across the libraries, developing interactive legal research guides, and creating imaginative training programmes for local law librarians in China and Southern Africa (http://www.law.nyu.edu/library/itn). Between workshops the exchange of ideas is continued by email discussion. Currently the list of law library partners includes New York University, Washington University in Seattle, Toronto University in Canada, IALS Library in the UK, the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, Tilburg University in the Netherlands, Konstanz University in Germany, Cape Town University in South Africa, Melbourne University in Australia, Yerevan State University in Armenia, and Tsinghua University in China.

The programme is a twinning arrangement between the University of Tirana Faculty of Law and a Middlesex University Consortium, consisting of the Institute of Social and Health Research, Middlesex University, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the London Metropolitan University Department of Law, Governance and International Relations, the European Public Law Center, Education for Change Ltd and Cavendish Publishing, and has three main aims:

• to help train and thus produce better qualified staff

• to improve the institutional management of the Law Faculty

• to prepare teaching, learning and research material that meets the needs of students entering the legal profession.

Within the main programme there is a library strand. This aims to develop the range of services provided by the faculty law library in order to support academics and students to the highest possible level given available resources. It was to help facilitate this development that the visit to Hendon took place.

Legal abbreviations can be a puzzle to both new students and experienced professionals. Traditionally, paper-based or electronic lists have been devised to help users identify to which legal publication an abbreviation refers. This web-based service, launched in June 2003, harnesses a relational database to the power of the internet to provide sophisticated searching, ease of updating and world-wide access. The Index is at http://www.legalabbrevs.cardiff.ac.uk/