CLIG’s Companies Act Seminar

Last night Chris Sollars, HR & Training Director from 7Side, led 30 CLIG members through the implications of the recent changes to the UK company filing regime. Around 30 people heard how the apparently subtle changes will have consequences: directors’ service addresses, permissable names, reduced shareholder information. On an operational level Chris also provided a list of the known issues with Companies House information (like random insertion of middle names into officers details… the mind boggles!). And I can see myself becoming familiar with IN01s before long.  A fuller review of the event will be on the CLIG website in due course. But for now, I’d like to say thanks again to Chris for accepting our invitation to speak, to James  and Jas, other CLIG committee members who helped run the event and especially to Jas for hosting us at Morrison & Foerster.

Filed under: Committee, Event report, 7Side, Companies House

Always Cited In Preference

The ICLR (Incorporated Council of Law Reporting) have launched a series of short films promoting their Official Series of law reports. You can find them on YouTube.

If you’ve ever tried to explain to a trainee or a student why it matters where they find their case reports from, these are going to help. A Tale of Two Citations  illustrates the consequences of using the internet for case research and not checking the sources properly; although it feature extreme examples of disorganised v organised Counsel, the point is made. A second film features a number of practitioners discussing the various routes they would take through online and hard copy sources to carry out their research.  Making Legal History  explains the history of the ICLR and the way a law report is compiled.

The ICLR have published this work and said that it’s freely available to use. Obviously, they’re advertisements for the ICLR’s series of reports, but the films’ content is not hidden under layers of intrusive promotion. The short format would make them ideal for adding to a session on law libraries. The three mentioned will be useful to show to work experience or summer students; enough of  a flavour of the way lawyers research without being too technical for non-lawyer or pre-LPC students. 

So whilst the ICLR are promoting their product, they have also helped fill a gap in my toolkit for training.  The one pity is that there is no discussion of the way that neutral citation works. Of course given the nature of the films, it is to be expected that they would focus on their reports; but adding in even a brief mention of the citations would have made these videos even more useful.

Filed under: Training, ICLR, Law Reports, Practice Direction, summer students

Internet Librarian International 2009

Update: the final draft of my report is here. This is the unedited version that will appear alongside Emma and Laura’s reports in the next edition of the SLA Europe newsletter.

I was fortunate enough to be able to attend Internet Librarian International last week, here in London, courtesy of SLA Europe.

I will be adding a ‘proper’ report here in due course, as well as the Official writeup that will feature on the SLA Europe newsletter blog.

Suffice it to say that I had a thoroughly interesting time. Many thoughts were provoked, and will be mulled over and reported on in due course.

It was the second conference I was at where real-time blogging and tweeting were going on. This can and does give an event a real buzz. But I couldn’t help smiling to myself at one point when, prior to a session starting, the person sitting next to me was too engrossed in their iPhone to have a bit of a chat. Too much online social networking and not enough social social networking?

Filed under: Event report

Association of Strategic Knowledge Professionals…

…is the proposed new name for the SLA, and I have been mightily distracted from the Things to Do This Evening list by following debate on Twitter.

Bearing in mind I am the kind of person that always tiptoes past Alarmed Doors, lest I scare them further, my first thought is that I don’t know whether it’s the knowledge or the professionals that is strategic. If it’s the latter, I can see the logic behind it – we add value to organisations, we plan, we look ahead. Although – and this may be a US English vs British English thing – ‘strategic’ to me implies a more senior level post; it sounds more Director level than applying to a junior post. So will that put people off?

I am going to have to think about this and go and do my homework on the FAQs. I am not keen on the short title – ASKPro – I’ve never been entirely comfortable with ‘pro’ as a short for professional because in my world it has seedier connotations.

Filed under: Uncategorized

Forthcoming event

City Legal Information Group (CLIG) is running a seminar on 28 October looking at the final stages of implementation of the Companies Act 2006. One of 7Side’s directors, Chris Sollars, will be discussing the changes to the filing regime that came into force on 1 October 2009. These changes to the content and numbering of the documents that can be downloaded from CH will have an effect on the way that we check details of directors, for example.

If seminars aren’t your thing, there is guidance from Companies House here.

Filed under: Committee, 7Side, Companies House, seminar

SLA Europe – Google-isation of [Re]Search

SLA Europe hosted a fun and thought-provoking seminar on Wednesday 7 October. The speakers were Kathy Jacobs, Library and Information Manager at Pinsent Masons, Professor David Nicholas — Director of the Department of Information Studies at University College London and Professor Roger James, Director of Information Services at University of Westminster.

I found this evening particularly interesting because the talks were relevant to both the worlds I inhabit – that of information professional and that of postgraduate research student. I see very different sorts of research in these two worlds and the application of Google-like search in both. Roger James was a late stand-in, and his willingness to do so very welcome. His late participation is probably why I felt he did not quite understood his audience; some of his questions and underlying assumptions seemed to arise from believing we were all throwing our hands up in horror at the sight of someone using Google, or that we furtively use it ourselves – but only when no-one’s looking, as if it’s a guilty secret.

I was not sure whether comparing the academic environment with the professional library is a useful comparison: particularly when legal information is highly structured. Roger talked about the trade off between content creation: the cheap and easy user-created information; and curating costly content: managing the quality, expensive information. He suggested that part of our jobs as librarians is to ask when we should use the cheap information and why we should curate the expensive stuff.

Roger and David both suggested that we could use our systems more intelligently to find user data, to look at the search logs and see what users were doing in order to decide how best to meet their needs in the future. This gave me some ideas, it is true our last library survey was akin to getting blood from a stone.

Kathy Jacobs described Pinsent Masons’ implementation of a federated search platform from Solcara with a Google-esque interface. This does not require extensive training and is intuitive – but, by Kathy’s own admission, it is good for ‘quick and dirty’ searches only. What if one needs more in-depth research? We are, it seems, happy to accept complicated systems for room booking or cheque requests or time recording that ensure we enter and receive quality information, but as soon as we get near the internet we want it simple? No-one mentioned the words ‘dumbing down’ last night – and I think it is a simplistic explanation in itself – but I suspect there is a possibility that babies are being lobbed out with bathwater along the way. Bloomberg is fiendishly complicated and counter-intuitive (for example, different data sets require different actions to start a search) – but its ‘quirks’ seem to be accepted. Pinsents refused to work with any vendor that wouldn’t allow integration with their federated search system. Pragmatic, definitely, but what about the services they miss out on? Would they have replaced, for example, a hard copy set of law reports that had been binned in favour of online access if that online access was removed? Lots of questions I would like to ask Kathy another time.

One of the points Dave Nicholas made was that users had described academic search databases as empty, unfriendly, because one is not welcomed with the ‘people who read this, also enjoyed this…’ recommendations carried by Amazon and other commercial enterprises. His illustration was that in his early library experience the returned books trolley was rarely full, because the books on it are popular by the virtue of being read. I follow his logic, and I can see instances where trainee lawyers or undergraduates would find that kind of user-determined research trail helpful. However, with my PGR hat on I wonder whether going from recommendation to recommendation would be useful or whether one would ultimately fail to mine the depths of the information within a publication database? If one is undertaking a novel piece of research, would that not suggest that there would by definition not be a valid user-generated path to relevant research publications? We are all aware that although serendipity is our friend, often what is interesting is not be relevant and the further one gets away from one’s initial search intention, the more likely it seems that the interesting overtakes the relevant. I have not read the research in detail as published by David, so I will endeavour to find an answer to this question within it when I have a chance as I do have some of the unit’s work in my PhD library already. But rather than just accepting that libraries ought to follow this model because it works for Google, ought we to seek intelligent alternatives too?

The other question I found myself asking was how different groups of people, with different bodies of knowledge to investigate, may approach searching in different ways – because their ultimate needs are different. Legal information is formal and structured and there are right and wrong answers and there are what Kathy described  as ‘career limiting’ implications for those who do not understand this. What is good enough for an undergraduate is not sufficient for a trainee; nor is it for a PhD-level literature search. For some of these groups a Google search is a starting point not an end. This train of thought does lead to the argument about access points that was recently discussed over at Organising Chaos – if it is a starting point, maybe linking to some of a university’s online collection, what isn’t linked to won’t be found if students bypass the more formal systems. David quoted a figure of a 40% increase in use of physics journals once their content became visible to Google scholar.

Talking through these issues with new and old friends over a glass of wine was a good end to the evening. i suspect this blog entry has asked more questions about the event than described the event itself – check out other blogs: In Through the Outfield & TFPL) if you want to know more. Thank you to the speakers and the SLA events committee for such an enjoyable evening.

Filed under: Event report, Google, literature review, research, serendipity, SLA Europe

Westlaw’s Annotated Statutes & Legislative Drafting

On Wednesday 16 September I went to Westlaw’s launch of their annotated statutes service.

This looks to be an interesting addition content on Westlaw; giving interpretations, guidance on new and recent laws. It is interesting to note the emphasis that content is written specifically for the online environment -  a  reference to the fact the service is being developed in light of Lexis Library’s hosting of Halsbury’s Laws.

The launch centred on an entertaining talk from Daniel Greenberg, Parliamentary Counsel. He is leading the team, currently around 40 freelancers, who are adding the new content to Westlaw.

Daniel’s talk was arranged around three difficulties with legislation: it is complex, technical and obscure. He illustrated the need for legislation to be adequately available to the man in the street using several major cases including ZL & VL v Secretary Of State For The Home Department And Lord Chancellor’s Department [2003] EWCA Civ 25 which hinged on whether a delay between an Act receiving Royal Assent and its publication meant the legislation was not enforceable – a real example of how the process of producing legislation can have consequences.

He noted that, in the face of criticism of lengthy legislation, it was not wise to ‘sacrifice certainty for simplicity.’ The explanation of why legislation is often referential was helpful too. Using insolvency as an example, Daniel explained that SI 2009/356 was drafted to enable speedy and accurate comparisons to be made with the existing insolvency Acts. If the information had been subsumed within other legislation, this process would have been more complicated. It is claimed to be easier to see which parts of existing legislation have been amended or apply in certain situations if one is referred to an SI.

My notes here say ‘poodles and building societies’ which I believe is in part a reference to s84 of the Banking Act 2009, which illusrates this approach. This section sets out in table form where the provisions of the Banking Act apply to building societies, and where they do not. So in many cases, it is not the amount of information included in an Act, but the presentation of that information and the ability of the draftsman to lead his reader in a logical fashion through the legislation.

Two articles on the reading list, alongside the cases referred to, helped to illustrate this point and are worth a quick read if one is interested:

Greenberg, D. (2006). All trains stop at Crewe: The rise and rise of contextual drafting. European Journal of Law Reform. 7(1/2), p31.

Greenberg, D. (2008). Hansard, the whole Hansard and nothing but the Hansard. Law Quarterly Review. 124 (April) p181.

Filed under: Event report, drafting, legislation, Westlaw

Library Routes, or, an accidental librarian

Contributing to this project collecting stories about how people became librarians, feels like a very appropriate first post.

It may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that I fell accidentally into librarianship. There is history in the family; my aunt and my mother both worked as library assistants – at Brightlingsea library and the University of Hertfordshire, in its Hatfield polytechnic days – but librarianship as a career was never really a hot topic of discussion.

A Potted pre-MSc work history

My first degree was in Psychology, from the University of Nottingham. After graduating in 1995, I worked in the University’s Accident Research Unit, on a project with novice drivers.  Then I moved into administration as the Undergraduate Recruitment Officer, travelling the UK (and a bit of the world) telling potential students about the benefits of higher education and offering advice on how to apply. Moving to London, I worked for a year with student physiotherapists at the CSP before taking on the role of organising the CSP’s conferences. In 2003, rather in need of some cold hard cash after getting divorced, I took a second job working part-time at the library at the Inns of Court School of Law. I enjoyed this work, even though much was fairly basic like processing and shelving books, and looseleafing. Lots and lots of looseleafing (although I do secretly still quite like doing it every now and again).

I was also beginning to think about a career change. I wanted to undertake a Master’s degree, and I wanted a qualification that would be portable and recognised. I was beginning to get a feel for the wider world of legal information; finding out about new areas of work in corporate and special libraries. It therefore felt like a Good Idea to apply for an Information Science MSc. It took a year to save up cash for the fees, and I started at City in September 2005. I also began a Saturday job in the library at University of Westminster. Originally, I had intended to study part-time but then switched to full-time. The following March I left the CSP and a week later started temping at Kirkland & Ellis. That was a major culture shock, going from knowing everyone and everything at the CSP to a state of conscious incompetence.

Qualified posts

In August 2006, just as I finished my dissertation, I started my first full-time professional post at Addleshaw Goddard’s London office. This was a varied role, including dealing with post, book acquisitions, current awareness, general legal and business research. I enjoyed this post (apart from the acquisitions!) but I had set myself a goal that I would not stay in my first job longer than 18 months. Long enough to consolidate what I knew from K&E, ICSL, Westminster and the theory from my MSc, but not so long that I felt over-familiar and perhaps a bit trapped by fear of more change.

In January 2008 I joined the research team at Reed Smith LLP. Here, my role involves co-ordinating training for the trainee solicitors, as well as current awareness and of course lots and lots of research.

Along the way I have acquired a number of committee posts, attended conferences in Brighton, Dublin and Washington DC, met a range of interesting people and hopefully encouraged others.  I’m also studying part-time for a PhD.

I think that there are themes that can be read in all my jobs to date, around research (ARU), organising information (conference proceedings), training (CSP) and facilitating people’s education and development (CSP, University). These are also core themes of the job I do now. Looking back, the path I have taken seems like a natural progression – it just took me a decade to realise that the role that combined the things I value was that of librarian.

Filed under: Personal narrative, Addleshaw Goddard, BIALL, career change, City University, CLIG, ICSL, Library Routes, Reed Smith, SLA, wiki