I'd like to begin with a voyage round my grandfather. Captain Robert Owen was a native of Liverpool. He lived for most of his life not five miles from where we're gathered now. He was a sea captain and he worked for the Harrison Line, a cargo firm trading out of Liverpool to West Africa and America. One of his early commands, from 1899 to 1906, was the cargo vessel Logician. He rose eventually to be commodore captain of the line - and this wasn't because of what he could do, but because of what he knew.

The Eversheds Communities project's aim is to put together an integrated online mix of Eversheds’ internal commentary and know-how, combin-ed with leading external commercial information content, and to make this combined service available to the firm's clients for an agreed fee.

The ancient clusters of barristers’ chambers situated in and around London's Inns of Court are home to a growing number of law librarians. I first joined their ranks in December 1996, when I was offered a few hours work per week for a leading civil set on a freelance basis, performing mainly loose leafing. I accepted out of curiosity to learn exactly what went on in the enigmatic world of counsel's chambers, which was so often referred to in solicitors firms where I had previously worked.

“I am an indexer” as the answer to the usual occupation enquiry is pretty much guaranteed to stop a conversation stone dead. It is much easier to say ‘librarian’, which was on my passport for 20 years, or even ‘information scientist’, which I was trained to be. Sometimes I get quite defiant. I am an indexer, and yes a human actually does prepare those pages at the back of books, and no, it is not all done by computer.

Libraries in the Bahamas date back to the early nineteenth century and were initially set up through the activities of the Reading Society, the Bahamas Institute and the Bahamas Society for Diffusion of Knowledge. By the end of the nineteenth century there were five public libraries and reading rooms in the islands of the Bahamas namely: Nassau, Dunmore Town, Matthew Town, New Plymouth and Governor's Harbour. Readers had to pay a subscription to use these libraries and their founding was considerably influenced by the colonial presence on the islands. There are also many school libraries in the Bahamas and the Department of Archives has a very rich and highly patronized library.

A brief, but very informative, summary of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) is contained in Legal Information Management in the Summer 2001 issue. This article doesn't attempt to replicate that summary but will examine some of the key decisions that need to be made in developing a policy that will enable the University of Birmingham to conform to the Act, its eight data protection principles, and the University's Data Protection policy when processing personal data and the practical procedures needed to deal with personal data processing in an information service.

In the United Kingdom the electoral roll or register is one of the most fundamental resources for accessing information about adult UK residents. Apart from the register itself, third parties have traditionally made use of the raw name and address data to provide members of the public or certain professions access to derived databases, data sets or re-packaged raw data.

Where can I locate in the UK the most extensive collection of the current legislation for the Cayman Islands? Which library has a comprehensive set of the World Trade Organisation International Trade Law Reports? Where can I find verbatim debates on bills as they pass through the New Zealand House of Representatives? Where are good collections of international environmental or commercial law? What are the opening hours and access conditions for a visiting researcher wishing to use the official publications collection of a particular major UK university?

“Seen one library, seen the lot. Drive on!”

Reputedly, this command was uttered by the President of an emerging African nation to his chauffeur, when his official visit to the campus of the state university was running behind schedule. After visiting over fifty university and three national libraries in the last 18 months as part of the data collection phase of the FLAG project, I am able to report that, in the UK at least, the generalisation is not valid.

IFLA is the leading international body representing the interests of library and information services and their users. This global voice of the library and information profession, provides librarians around the world with a forum for exchanging ideas, promoting international cooperation, and research and development in all fields of library activity. As a legal information professional I achieved a number of significant personal and professional objectives in attending the conference.

I arrived in Glasgow on the Sunday afternoon with a week ahead of me discovering more about librarianship. How interesting was this likely to be?

One of the perks awarded to the BIALL Chair is the opportunity to attend the AALL Annual meeting in the summer. I had been once before, as a BIALL bursary recipient, to Washington DC in 1999 and knew that there would be a great deal to observe and learn apart from the main conference programme. The scale of the American conference is, of course, very different to ours: nearly 1800 delegates compared to the 400 we had in Liverpool in June; 74 scheduled conference sessions and several hundred business meetings, a conference centre over a mile long (!), and of course the whole “larger than life” experience of being in Orlando. I knew the heat would be a problem for me, so I opted to stay in the Peabody Hotel just across the road from the conference centre, with its twice-daily “Duck Walk” to the fountain in the hotel lobby.

Having worked in law librarianship in the United Kingpdom for almost five years and known colleagues who had attended overseas conferences, I always thought what a wonderful opportunity it is to attend an overseas conference. Where else would you be able to meet like-minded folk from a completely different part of the world and possibly also a different culture? When I saw that the 2002 ALLG symposium was being held in Brisbane I decided this was the year I should apply to attend. Of course the fact that I have friends who live near Brisbane did not influence my thought process or affect my enthusiasm to attend!

New Zealand's national museum, Te Papa, in the windy city of Wellington in the Southern Hemisphere spring of early September was the venue for 2002's conference “Visible Justice - evolving access to the law”. This was my first overseas conference as a BIALL delegate and one I approached with trepidation, not really knowing what to expect, but my overall impression was without doubt a positive one. I was able to obtain a network of valuable contacts and gain an important insight into legal librarianship in the Country.

This Current Awareness column, and previous Current Awareness columns, are now fully searchable in the new caLIM database (Current Awareness for Legal Information Managers). The caLIM database is available on the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies website at: http://ials.sas.ac.uk/library/caware/caware.htm

Westlaw UK announced content enhancements at the end of October. European content is now updated each afternoon meaning that the Official Journal of the European Communities is now available within 24 hours of publication. Articles from the Scots Law Times from 1997 and case summaries from 2000 are now accessible on Westlaw UK, Westlaw UK Scots Law and Westlaw UK Scots Crime. The Westlaw UK Crime Service now includes Criminal Appeal Reports back to 1967 and The Criminal Appeal Reports (Sentencing) back to 1979. This additional content has been added directly to all Westlaw UK and Westlaw UK Crime practice area services. Finally, ICLR cases are now available on Westlaw UK Civil Procedure adding 7,000 full text law reports, and providing a case archive to complement the Civil Procedure Reports.