Current debates about decolonisation and diversification raise practical issues for librarians. The Bodleian Law Library is engaging with these challenges, in co-operation with the Oxford Law Faculty, the wider Bodleian Library and the collegiate university. This article by Margaret Watson describes how the Library is taking a fresh look at its collections and their organisation, with a view to acquiring, revealing and collocating material that might otherwise by overlooked.

In this article Harpreet Dhillon recounts the experience and impact of Middle Temple Library's transition from an alphabetical organisation of textbooks to a subject order using the Moys Classification Scheme.

The McCann FitzGerald library provides a library and information service to one of Ireland's premier law firms. As Megan Guthrie explains, it was decided to reclassify the library collection using the Moys Classification Scheme for Legal Materials1 to enhance and improve the flow of the collection. It also provided an opportunity to conduct a stocktake of library material. The project was broken down into three main steps: assigning a Moys number, relabelling the physical material and updating the library management system. There were a number of challenges including the need to modify or add to the Moys numbers and finding the optimal process for relabelling and accounting for the material. It was necessary to adapt the initial plan throughout the project to account for any obstacles or restrictions that were encountered.

This article, written by Helen Garner, reviews the progress of the Moys Reclassification Project at the Bodleian Law Library and covers the issues relating to the lessons learnt and the benefits of changing to a different classification scheme. The Bodleian Law Library started work on the Moys Reclassification Project in 2006 and work is still on-going to complete the project.

Over the past few years the cataloguing community has seen radical changes in cataloguing standards, changes which appear to have been largely ignored by legal information professionals. This is a mistake according to Helen Doyle; the new cataloguing model can have enormous implications for the legal community, particularly in the spheres of information and knowledge management, and the profession is missing a huge opportunity by ignoring it. A new cataloguing standard (RDA) has been developed based on an alternative theoretical approach, known as “Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records” (FRBR). FRBR seeks to change the way we approach the bibliographic universe: from stand-alone, individual repositories of information to networks of linked data built on a structured hierarchy. Commercial law firms are constantly trying to make connections between their traditional resources, online repositories, internal know-how, etc, but struggle to achieve complete synchronicity. FRBR provides a solution to this knowledge management problem: all resources (including people, events and subjects) become searchable, and because everything is linked, users can access information by navigating to it, establishing their own pathway through the data. Moreover, the major legal databases are already utilising linked data in this way – it is time for law firms to catch up.

In 2008, BIALL held a pre-conference workshop in Dublin entitled “Back to Basics: Cataloguing and Classification”. The workshop raised some interesting questions about the quality of cataloguing training provided by library schools and law libraries. Although cataloguing in British law libraries has been the subject of research, no study has yet explored cataloguing in Irish law libraries. This study by Clare O'Dwyer redresses this lack of information by focusing exclusively on the Irish context. The perceptions and expectations of cataloguers are examined using a multiple case study design combining interviews and questionnaires. The libraries selected for case study are representative of the three main types of law libraries in Ireland: a professional society law library, a government law library and a law firm library. Following analysis and discussion of the research findings, the study concludes with a series of recommendations regarding the curriculum for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) and further training of cataloguers in Irish law libraries.

Ruth Bird, Bodleian Law Librarian, explains how the original home-grown classification scheme became unfit for purpose, due to the enormous expansion of international legal materials held, and the reasons for implementing the Moys scheme. She outlines the progress and the problems encountered to date in this huge project.

The introduction of the Resource Description and Access cataloguing code to replace the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules is considered by Ann Chapman, the Research Officer at UKOLN. She explains why the latter was becoming unsuitable for the digital age whilst the former has been specifically developed to deal with all types of media.

This article by Steven Whittle gives a comprehensive picture of not only how metadata has been used at the Institute but also the technical details and scope of the very impressive range of digitisation projects and other resources developed to help fellow legal information professionals access a wide array of information which was previously very hard to find.

Guy Holborn, Librarian of Gray's Inn, gives some very practical help on how to catalogue the law collection whilst ensuring compliance with cataloguing standards

Martin Jones of Advice Services Alliance describes a specialist classification scheme and thesaurus devised for use by the general public when searching for legal advice on free websites, and explains how it is implemented and maintained.

The internet provides access to a huge amount of information, and most people experience problems with information overload rather than scarcity. Glenda Browne explains how indexing provides a way of increasing retrieval of relevant information from the content available. Manual, book-style indexes can be created for websites and individual web documents such as online books. Keyword metadata is a crucial behind the scenes aid to improved search engine functioning, and categorisation, social bookmarking and automated indexing also play a part.

Peter Jordan and Helen Lippell describe the role of metadata, including taxonomies, in re-designing the flagship government website, Directgov.

Catherine O'Sullivan of Norton Rose outlines the benefits of using the Moys scheme in a large law firm library. She also briefly discusses how the firm has tailored it to their specific requirements and she finishes by pointing out the potential disadvantages of the scheme.

Vanda Broughton describes the methodology of constructing a thesaurus from a faceted classification for law (Bliss Bibliographic Classification 2nd ed. Class S). The structure of the classification is described, and the way in which the thesaural relationships are derived from this is demonstrated. Recent work to automate the process, using the encoded classification data used for the schedule display and alphabetical index, is explained. Examples of the way in which this functions are included, and an analysis of the output shows where editorial work will help to improve the resulting thesaurus.

Derek Sturdy explains the importance of search engine optimisation for the legal information professional involved in the organisation's website in the Google era and suggests that the most important pieces of information are the title and the abstract. He also discusses the rise in automatic classification in the enterprise search context.

Katherine Dawson, from Citizens Advice Information Team, explains how they have developed and maintain two separate databases of information, using various metadata and classification tools. Adviceguide is a free site for the general public to access information on the legal and societal issues of daily living. Advisernet is a more detailed site giving in-depth information to advisers working in Bureaux.

Elizabeth Marley describes the addition of subject and other indexing metadata at the UK Parliament, contributing to the internal databases and to services to the public on the Parliamentary website, and the operation of the thesauri and controlled vocabularies used in enriching Parliamentary content.

This article by Rachel Brett of Lovells reports on the results of a survey into classification practice in law libraries carried out through the BIALL and LIS-Law mailing lists in March 2007. Major findings were that only three respondents did not use any form of subject classification. The most frequently used classification scheme was Moys, and the single largest grouping was the 40 respondents (40.8%) who used their own in-house classification schemes.

The word “taxonomy” is widely used these days in discussions about organising knowledge or information, especially information in electronic form such as that on the Internet. There is no generally accepted definition of what taxonomies are, though the word is usually used to refer to alphabetico-classed schemes of subject headings. These are built on fundamental principles, which have been more fully developed in their application to thesauri and classifications. By recognising that all these kinds of “controlled vocabularies” are just variations on a theme, built from the same components, it is possible to create consistent and complementary tools to provide for the different approaches which users may need.