visit to IALS
IALS is an academic law library. There is alot of information on their website ttp://ials.sas.ac.uk/about/IALS_mission.htm Gerry Power gave us a very interesting tour around the library. It has a dual purpose it caters for academics and postgraduate law students in London. Its collection includes the most extensive and unique collection within the UK of foreign and international law. Lack of space is an issue. Its academic function means that more is kept than for example in a commercial library. Such as old editions of text books which other libraries may dispose of. In addition to its academic function it also provides an information service for the legal profession who can subscribe to an email delivery service for scanned documents. Lawyers can request copies of cases, articles etc. There are different delivery levels - from within an hour to longer delivery periods. If it is really busy nearly all the library staff can be involved! This service provides a useful income for the library. Heather Memess gave the trainees a very enlightening talk on evaluating websites. She does the legal evaluations for Intute, an academic gateway funded by JISC
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I think intute (www.intute.ac.uk) is very much worth browsing through.. I came accross some interesting links there.
ReplyDeleteHi Sheena,
ReplyDeleteI've fleshed out your visit report as you asked, as follows:
Visit to IALS
The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) is an academic law library, whose website (ttp://ials.sas.ac.uk/about/IALS_mission.htm) contains a lot of useful information about them. The Access Librarian there, Gerry Power, gave us a very interesting tour around the library. It has a dual purpose as it caters for academics and postgraduate law students in London, and its collection includes the most extensive and unique collection within the UK of foreign and international law. As with many libraries, lack of space is an issue. Its academic function as a research library means that much is kept, such as old editions of text books, which other libraries (for example a commercial library) may dispose of.
In addition to its academic function it also provides an information service for the legal profession, who can subscribe to an email delivery service for scanned documents. Lawyers can request copies of cases, articles etc, and pay a fee depending upon the speed of service and the number of articles requested. There are two different delivery levels - within an hour or a longer delivery period. If it is really busy nearly all the library staff can be involved! This service provides a useful income and profile for the library.
Heather Memess then gave the trainees a very enlightening talk on evaluating websites. She does the legal website evaluations for Intute (http://www.intute.ac.uk/socialsciences/law/), an academic gateway funded by JISC which recommends useful law information websites that can be trusted. She took us through the different steps that can be taken to evaluate whether a website is one that can be trusted, such as tracing the source of the website, and pointed out the training guides on the Intute website which offer help on such things as internet search tips. She also talked us through several websites which she recommended as providing useful guides for evaluating other websites.
This was a very useful and interesting visit overall. IALS is a unique law library in the UK, and the talks by the two members of staff (Gerry and Heather) were very helpful – we were all very impressed!