Yemisi Dina, the President of the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/ Association Canadienne des Bibliothèques de Droit (CALL/ACBD), talks to LIM co-editors Mike and Jas Breslin about her globetrotting career, the challenges facing the profession both in Canada and the rest of the world, strengthening the links between CALL/ACBD and BIALL, and why we should treat new technology such as AI as an opportunity rather than a threat.

In this article Dunstan Speight, Librarian of Lincoln's Inn, and Carolyn Rampling, Assistant Librarian, discuss the Inn's project to digitise Library manuscripts and documents from the Archives, explaining how the project has evolved over time and offering guidance based on their experience. Although not the bread and butter of law librarianship, digitisation projects are a feature of life for law librarians working with historic collections. The website and the documents digitised so far can be viewed at https://archives.lincolnsinn.org.uk/

In this article David Percik, Information Resources Manager at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, reports on a project at IALS to plan out and curate a series of book displays focusing on historically disadvantaged groups. He discusses how the themes of the displays were selected, the consequences of having two differing available spaces, and the work done by the library team to expand the displays beyond books on shelves.

For many years apprenticeships were associated with heavy industry and skilled manual work, but in more recent times the focus has shifted towards other fields and professions, including librarianship. In 2017 CILIP – the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals – began working with employers across sectors designing apprenticeships specific to library, information, knowledge and archives work. The Level 3 Library, Information and Archive Services Assistant Apprenticeship was the first to be developed and came online in 2019 and to date over 100 apprentices have been through the apprenticeship, while other apprenticeships to do with the profession are now up and running. Here Claire Laybats, Professional Services Development Manager for CILIP, gives LIM the full story.

Taxonomies are key to creating certainty in language across the legal landscape. In this article Alice Laird and Katy Snell of Howard Kennedy examine why taxonomies are still important in the age of AI. They also discuss how they have built on their expertise on taxonomies for the benefit of their firm, and how they have become involved with a cross firm project called noslegal.

If there are any two letters that represent the zeitgeist of our profession, and indeed the world at large, they are A and I. AI, of course, stands for artificial intelligence, a subject that we've covered quite extensively in LIM, and are sure to continue to do so. One such article was in our Volume 22 Number 2 (Summer, 2022) issue and was penned by Jake Hearn, the assistant librarian at the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple and a member of the LIM Editorial Board. In this article Jordan Murphy, the Chair of the City Legal Information Group, reports from a presentation Jake gave to CLIG in April 2023 in which the views expressed in his original piece were updated and expanded.

With another highly successful BIALL Annual Conference behind us, LIM co-editors Jas and Mike Breslin – the latter a first-time attendee this year, the former a veteran of 18 conferences – explain why this really is an unmissable event.

Legal information professionals can play a vital role when it comes to patents, whether that's through undertaking research to assist in infringement cases or by assisting in providing due diligence information by conducting searches to identify a company's patent portfolio. But those doing patent research need to know how to identify patents, how to determine their status and how to investigate the litigation history of patents. Niamh Hanratty, of Bird & Bird, explains how all this is done.

TRG Screen's Global Director of Marketing Roel Mels talks LIM through ResearchMonitor, a tool that allows legal information professionals and lawyers to keep track of and manage their subscriptions.

The escalating adoption of wearable technology for health data monitoring has led to the real-time aggregation of personal information. This phenomenon has fuelled heightened apprehensions about data security and privacy, given the storage, processing, and sharing of personal health data by corporations. Regulatory frameworks have been enacted to safeguard individual privacy rights, as exemplified by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). This research paper, by Ms Varda Mone and Ms Fayazullaeva Shakhlo, offers an overview of extant literature on privacy apprehensions concerning wearable devices, conducting an exhaustive review to discern pivotal privacy issues and proffer prospective remedies. Specifically, the paper delineates the ensuing privacy concerns associated with wearables. Predominantly, wearables introduce security vulnerabilities that may facilitate the misappropriation, compromise, or revelation of delicate health data. The copious health information amassed by wearables can be potentially sold or divulged to external parties’ sans user cognisance or consent. Furthermore, the deployment of wearable technology harbours the potential for discriminatory practices against those with disabilities or chronic ailments. Additionally, apprehensions pertaining to privacy and surveillance stem from the capacity of wearable devices to monitor and trace an individual's movements and activities. To conclude, the paper deliberates on plausible measures to address privacy concerns pertaining to wearable devices, encompassing: a) Fortifying the security apparatus of wearable devices, b) Amplifying user autonomy over their health data, and c) Regulating the collection and utilisation of user health data by wearables. The paper asserts that the amelioration of these privacy concerns is indispensable for leveraging wearable technology's potential to enhance human well-being while ensuring the preservation of personal privacy.

The advancement of technology has drastically changed the way information is being stored in the law library. With current technology, many have found that legal information is easy to retrieve from federal or state government websites in Malaysia. But while federal legislation can be accessed via the internet, some of the law cannot be accessed for the public to review or download. Also, older law is unavailable from the federal gazette website, and it is crucial for the lawyer or law librarian to publicly access it. This paper, by Qudri Ali Abu Bakar, discusses the restriction of access to legal information and looks at some alternative ways of gaining full access to federal and state law in Malaysia.

In the third in our series of regular articles reviewing archived issues of Legal Information Management and The Law Librarian – as the journal was once known – the LIM editors leaf through the issues of 1993.