A law librarian from University of Birmingham attended a LNB (UK) presentation earlier this week and posted what she learnt on UK LIS LAW.
As she says - what was said seemed quite instructive .. so we thought a quick look at her post might be of help to others.
This is what she had to say...
I attended the Lexis Nexis Academic User Group meeting yesterday and Simon, who is in charge of Halsbury’s Laws of England, was presenting.
I asked about having some labelling on the volumes that would indicate where one of the titles (there are 180 titles, some vols contain more than one title) in the volume had been replaced by a 5th edition volume. Simon said that spine labelling wouldn’t be possible, as there would be too much information needed on the label that could easily fit onto a spine. I suggested that we could have labels that would fit, on the larger space, of the front cover of each volume. Simon seemed to think that this was a good idea and during the lunch he came over and thanked me for this suggestion and said that he was going to seriously consider it to ensure that is was scalable. If it is scalable they will look into producing front cover labels with full details of the changes, and a small spine label to indicate that something had changed.
Other interesting things that I learnt:
The 5th ed. will be 102 vols instead of the current 100 vols.
The 5th ed will be labelled 1-102 rather than 1-52 (so no parts 1 and 2).
It is best to shelve the 5th ed either before or after the 4th ed, but not intermixed.
We no longer need the ring bound looseleaf volumes.
It will take approximately 7 years to complete the transition from 4th ed to 5th ed.
Most of the European information (which is currently in the two, very old, last vols) will instead be included in the subject areas, but there will be about 1/3 of a vol dedicated to pure European information.
They are trying to ensure that the mix of 4th and 5th ed that we will need to have on our shelves at any one time will not exceed 110 volumes, but they couldn’t promise this.
The consolidated index is soon to be added to the online version.
