Legal Information Management Research Articles

Raiders of the Lost Archive

AbstractIn the latest in our series reviewing archived copies of Legal Information Management and The Law Librarian – as the journal was once known – LIM's co-editors leaf through the issues, and the issues, of 1984.

Raiders of the lost archive

AbstractIn the latest in our series reviewing archived copies of Legal Information Management and The Law Librarian – as the journal was once known – LIM's co-editors leaf through the issues of 1974.

Raiders of the Lost Archive

AbstractIn the latest in our series of 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 2003.

Comprehensive information management system for a medical research cohort biobank based on quality by design

BackgroundWith the development of big health and big data, cohort research has become a medical research hotspot. As an important repository of human genetic resources, biobanks must adapt to the requirements of large-scale and efficient operation. Thus, biobanks urgently need to design and build a legal, convenient, and efficient information management system.MethodsThis study applies the concept of “quality by design” to build a comprehensive biobank information management system based on the analysis of user requirements, legal and regulatory risks, and industry-standard requirements. The system integrates the management of scientific research projects, biological specimens, clinical information, quality control, and multi-dimensional information query and development. After 10 months of its operation, the comprehensive management system was evaluated through statistical analysis of the efficiency of the construction of the pregnancy–birth cohort and the quality of genetic resources.ResultsSince the system’s launch, the statistics on cohort construction efficiency show that the enrollment rate of eligible pregnant women has increased, and the rate of missing volunteers has dropped. The time needed to establish a 1000-person cohort (with complete biological samples and clinical information in early, middle, and late pregnancy) was reduced, and the effective tracking rate of the samples was 77.42%. The error rate of the deep cryogenic refrigerator decreased, with a clinical information integrity rate of 96.47%.ConclusionsThe comprehensive biobank information management system constructed with the “quality by design” concept is well suited to meet the requirements of medical research. This study provides a solution for designing a comprehensive information system for medical institutions’ biobanks.

Raiders of the Lost Archive

AbstractIn 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.

Raiders of the lost archive

AbstractIn the second 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 travel back in time to 1983.

Raiders of the Lost Archive

AbstractIn the first in a series of regular articles reviewing archived issues of Legal Information Management and The Law Librarian – as the journal was once known – the LIM editors examine the issues, and indeed the issues, of 1973.

Raising the Bar: How Chambers Librarianship has Risen to Twenty Years of Challenges

AbstractTwenty years ago the author, Alison Million, submitted an article to Legal Information Management (LIM) entitled ‘Of Barristers and Books’ which recounted her experiences of working as a librarian to barristers’ chambers in the era of print and CDs. The article brought her into contact with the Librarian of Inner Temple Library and together they founded the Bar Librarians’ Group to meet the interests of both Inn and Chambers Librarians. This article in 2022 recounts how the ensuing 20 years have brought very different challenges to Chambers Librarians in the online era and how the Bar Librarians’ Group works hard to resolve difficulties on behalf of LIS professionals serving the Bar.

Design of a Computer-Based Legal Information Retrieval System.

In today's society, people's lives are increasingly inseparable from computer information. Due to the continuous improvement of technology and the rapid development of internet technology, the network environment is becoming more and more complex, which makes it easy to cause loopholes in the information retrieval system when people use the network. Therefore, it is especially important to search for legal knowledge by computer. In order to adapt to this change and demand, we need a retrieval system to provide the corresponding search function, legal information content, and management and other services, so as to achieve the purpose of computer legal information retrieval. The legal information retrieval system is computer based, draws conclusions from the analysis of relevant data, and then applies them to judicial trial cases, criminal investigations, and other fields to provide a reference for relevant legal issues. The system is designed to combine computer technology with a criminal investigation and other fields, and then analyze the data to draw the corresponding conclusions. The retrieval algorithms used are mainly image and content retrieval algorithms, and image retrieval algorithms mainly use image segmentation technology, while content retrieval algorithms mainly use the cuckoo algorithm. At present, the information construction and economic and social development in China have become one of the issues of common concern and need to be solved by all countries in the world. The study of the legal information retrieval system is of great importance in the construction of information technology and the development of economic society.

ViLO — A Core Ontology of Vietnamese Legal Documents

Legal ontologies play a key role in various legal applications and have been broadly used by many stakeholders. Innovative systems and ontologies in the law hold potential to conduct legal research. With the needs for legal information management in smart applications, especially for Vietnamese law, it is vitally important to construct core legal ontologies for knowledge representation. This study proposes a core ontology for Vietnamese legal documents which covers general legal domain called as ViLO. The ViLO ontology mainly consists of related institutions of Vietnamese political system, types and structures of legal documents. The method of the NeOn-based collaborations among domain experts and ontology engineers was conducted to build up the ViLO ontology. Through FOCA-based validation results, the proposed method was shown to be effective and efficient. The resulting ontology was demonstrated to be reliable and enriched. The ViLO ontology is supposed to be a basis for further constructions of domain ontologies and artificial intelligence applications in Vietnamese law.

VGI-based spatial data infrastructure for land administration

The general public and land administration organizations have long recognized the need to establish and record legal ownership of property and land. To create land ownership records, developing countries have recently begun to public participation methods. For this purpose, a move to the Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI) to aggregate heterogeneous geospatial information about the property and create interoperability between organizations and stakeholders is unavoidable. Solutions for public participation must also be provided. Designing and developing a model under the SDI policy, based on an open-source architecture, and based on volunteered geographic information (VGI) and citizen-wide participation in collecting rights-based spatial data is the subject of this study. Volunteered Rights-based Spatial Data Infrastructure (VRSDI) is a framework that was proposed and implemented in this study to help with the low-cost, high-speed voluntary collection of land and property legal information and land management in Iran. VRSDI assists people in defining land and property ownership rights, detecting potential disputes, seizures, or conflicts with neighbors, as well as their limits and obligations for land management through rights-based spatial data. VRSDI was conceptualized and implemented using a Software as a Service (SaaS) approach, including solutions for data and service quality control based on the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards. It benefits from an open-source multi-tier architecture and powerful components, including the AJAX engine, the VGI engine, the service adapter, and the Workflow engine. Also discussed is policymaking for the effective adoption of VGI in a VRSDI and solutions for spatial accuracy measurement and quality control. The findings demonstrated that an approach like this might lead to integrated land management by including citizens and the government.

The future of Alpine pastures – Agricultural or tourism development? Experiences from the German Alps

Alpine pastures are central to tourism in the European Alps. Tourism development in many alpine destinations relies significantly on the work force and products of alpine farmers without considering or integrating them in tourism related processes, assuming that farmers are interested in further economic growth through tourism. The question arises, whether an adequate involvement will support this interest in maintaining or expanding tourism use. The paper at hand used questionnaires and in-depth interviews with alpine farmers in the Achental region of Southern Bavaria, Germany, to examine current experiences with tourism and outdoor recreation. The study concludes that the interest in expanding tourism use is rather limited and financial aspects have little impact on the main motivation to engage in tourism development. In contrast, the study shows many conflicts arising in the clash between agricultural production and tourism use. Therefore, management actions by the local association Eco-model Achental tasked with tourism coordination are essential, including farmers as stakeholders in a participative planning process. New initiatives and support covering legal aspects, visitor management, information, networking, energy and water management are considered key to maintain this sustainable form of rural tourism in the region. In this paper we recognize that certain stakeholder groups have been neglected in tourism planning processes. However, stakeholders who are largely responsible for stewardship of the landscape need to be incorporated in regional tourism development to ensure sustainability. Therefore, the following management actions are identified: -Actively engage crucial stakeholders in participatory planning processes. -Understand that stakeholders' motives are not necessarily based on economic gain. -Identify factors that support landscape maintenance. -Create a network of stakeholders to generate appropriate support for a variety of interests.

A Book Review of The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design by Kearns and Roth; and Thoughts for Legal Information Professionals

AbstractThis article consists of two parts. The first part is a review of the book entitled, ‘The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design’, written by Professors Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth of the Computer and Information Science Department, University of Pennsylvania. The book was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press. The second part consists of thoughts learned from the book and how they could be applied to the work of legal information management professionals when facing tasks related to the ethical algorithms in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. How online privacy continues to be the main concern in the AI and robot era will be discussed, as well as the rise of concerns over AI and robots and how they might make unfair decisions toward vulnerable populations which could then become acts of discrimination. Examples of real-world problems of AI and robotics are also noted in this article.

Artificial Intelligence and Race: a Systematic Review

AbstractThis paper examines peer-reviewed publications to learn about the relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and the human race. For this systematic review, papers were collected from three academic databases: Scopus, Web of Science, and Academic Search Complete. From 1,222 papers reviewed, 36 papers were included. The findings indicate that there are four relationships between AI and race (i). AI causes unequal opportunities for people from certain racial groups, (ii). AI helps to detect racial discrimination, (iii). AI is applied to study health conditions of specific racial population groups, and (iv). AI is used to study demographics and facial images of people from different racial backgrounds. To widen the knowledge related to AI and race, all four finding categories in this review included supplementary studies as lessons learned for legal information management research. The authors, Channarong Intahchomphoo and Odd Erik Gundersen, use these findings to discuss how AI could impact libraries and how legal information management professionals might have to cope with the problem of biased AI.

References to Artificial Intelligence in Canada's Court Cases

AbstractArtificial intelligence (AI) is a widely discussed topic in many fields including law. Legal studies scholars, particularly in the domain of technology and internet law, have expressed their hopes and concerns regarding AI. This project aims to study how Canada's courts have referred to AI, given the importance of the reasonings of justices to the policy makers who determine society's rules for the usage of AI in the future. Decisions from all levels of both Canada's provincial and federal courts are used as the data sources for this research. The findings indicate that there are four legal contexts in which AI has been referred to in the Canadian caselaw including: legal research, investment tax credits, trademarks and access to government records. In this article the authors use these findings to make suggestions for legal information management professionals on how to develop collections and reference services that are in line with the new information needs of their users regarding AI and the rule of law.

Oral History Research: Illuminating the Past: an Introduction

AbstractThis short piece makes reference to an event that was held in May 2019 at the London School of Economics. The occasion was entitled ‘Oral History Research: Illuminating the Past’. There were three speakers and the session was chaired by Professor Michael Lobban. One of the speakers that evening was Lesley Dingle and, following this introduction, her talk is featured in this issue of Legal Information Management.

Editorial and Introduction

Welcome to the summer issue of Legal Information Management (LIM) which celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of the British and Irish Association of Law Librarians (BIALL). Back in 1999, on Friday 16th April 1999 to be precise, a BIALL Council meeting took place that was held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in London. The minutes of that meeting record that, Before the meeting opened, Mary Blake [then President of BIALL] informed those present that the date was a special one in BIALL history, as it was 30 years to the day that BIALL was established. She had marked the occasion by bringing a birthday cake and Michael Maher [then Chair of the Association] provided bottles of Champagne for a toast after lunch.

Re-evaluating Legal Citation in a Digital Landscape

AbstractIncreasing access to digital works and the proliferation of digital genres has changed the way in which we conceive of information, and particularly legal information, including how it is represented within legal citation practice. This article, written by Melissa Castan and Kate Galloway, contributes to the discourse around legal citation in two ways. It first provides a theoretical justification for citation practice as an element of legal information management crucial to effective scholarship, including knowledge creation and dissemination. Secondly, and based on this theoretical foundation, it identifies the challenges facing existing legal citation practice in the face of new media, new representations of legal scholarship, and new objectives for citation practice. Finally, in this article we distil foundation principles for citation to integrate these diverse elements. To illustrate the application of these principles, the article closes with suggested citation practices designed to enhance the existing framework in this digital landscape.

Integrating Legal and Physical Dimensions of Urban Environments

Building Information Models (e.g., IFC) and virtual 3D city models (e.g., CityGML) are revolutionising the way we manage information about our cities. However, the main focus of these models is on the physical and functional characteristics of urban properties and facilities, which neglects the legal and ownership aspects. In contrast, cadastral data models, such as the Land Administration Domain Model (LADM), have been developed for legal information management purposes and model legal objects such as ownership boundaries without providing correspondence to the object’s physical attributes. Integration of legal and physical objects in the virtual 3D city and cadastral models would maximise their utility and flexibility to support different applications that require an integrated resource of both legal and physical information, such as urban space management and land development processes. The aim of this paper is to propose a data model that supports both legal and physical information of urban environments. The methodology to develop this data model is to extend the core cadastral data model and integrate urban features into the data model. The outcome of the research can be utilised to extend the current data models to increases their usability for different applications that require both legal and physical information.

Guest Editorial: Law, Gender and Sexuality

In this Guest Editorial for a special issue of Legal Information Management, Jon Sims (Content Specialist: Law and Socio-Legal Studies, The British Library) summaries the aims and outputs of a national socio-legal training day on legal biography organised by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, the British Library and the Socio-Legal Studies Association and held at IALS in May 2014. The special issue of Legal Information Management features a series of articles on the theme of sources and methods in socio-legal research on law, gender and sexuality. As with last year’s issue on legal biography (LIM Vol.14 No.1) the articles published here are based on talks given at a national training day held at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) in May 2014, and co-organised by IALS, the Socio-Legal Studies Association (SLSA) and the British Library.