The IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management

Citation

Calvert, P. (2011), "The IALL International Handbook of Legal Information Management", The Electronic Library, Vol. 29 No. 6, pp. 855-856. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471111188105

Around the world there are many information managers with a deep knowledge of legal information whose speciality is in assisting lawyers, scholars and students. The work of legal information managers is a vital cog in the wheel of justice and the rule of law. Globalisation and the impact of international agreements (or the failure to agree) only serves to emphasise the international nature of some legal work. This handbook covers issues in policy and strategic issues which legal information managers and law librarians must engage with on a regular basis in a variety of diverse legal environments.

The resources, especially the bibliographies, will be very useful tools for law librarians around the world. The analyses of different problems will surely be of interest to those who wish to be part of the discourse. The two chapters that especially interested me were on the education and training of law librarians by Hazelton, and global legal education by Crommelin & Hinchcliff. Both covered the nature of university and professional education for law librarians, and legal information managers, and I appreciated the mention of several documents that will assist me investigate the matter further. As the authors make plain, the urgency of finding solutions to some of the problems is recognised but no clear answers are available.

An interesting chapter by Bird is on legal information literacy, an often‐overlooked topic. This is much new here, so this chapter deserves to be read by many information managers, even those not associated by legal work. In this case the training is aimed at the lawyers, not the librarians, with the intention of improving research skills. There are chapters on law librarianship in different countries including, it is good to see, unexpected ones such as Turkey and Vietnam. There is a chapter that many will turn to on copyright, plus others on free access to legal information, commercial legal publishing and much more. This is an essential addition to law libraries, and it will be needed by all those teaching law librarianship.