The Colour of Money; The New Financial Services Regulations

Two of the best things about being in law librarianship for decades are 1. seeing the changes in colours of institutions’ rule books; 2. the learning and relearning of industry acronyms. London Stock Exchange Listing Rules went from being the ‘yellow’ book to ‘that weird aubergine colour’ and the SFA, SIB, FIMBRA, PIA rule books all had their own coloured binders which had to be painstakingly updated by hand. I vaguely remember one of them being green, though the Bank of England reports tended to be a very elegant expensive looking white and gold. However when the FSA overturned these organisations in 2000-01 all their rules were subsumed into the multiple FSA Handbooks (white, purple and pale turquoise green), horrible new binders which would take your thumb off if you let them. 

Generic Widgets: Musings on a library budget

It has been said that ‘information is the lifeblood of law and the legal profession’. And to this I would like to add, law firms continue to be the flesh and muscle of the body of knowledge which they make available to clients; good lawyers turn that information into business knowhow. Anatomical analogies are a personal favourite and perhaps to stretch this one, everyone is trying to extract a pound of flesh from the legal corpus as a whole. From clients expecting discounts, lawyers squeezing suppliers and suppliers driving hard bargains, everyone is at it.

Flexible Working = Business as Usual

At home not eating cheese

I wanted to write a short personal piece on whether my Olympic contingency plan had worked or not. Quite simply, it had. Over those two weeks I started thinking about the implications of library and information professionals working from home, such things as flexible hours, home working technologies and wondering if it would work longer term. 

As background, I am solo professional librarian in a medium sized central London law firm. My contracted hours are 9.30-5.30, 5 days a week. My firm is average in its attitude to flexible working and was happy to look at alternative ways of working during this time.

Although the Olympics was necessarily a one off event and the government were ‘"relying on businesses to plan" to keep London functioning’, my firm felt it was a good opportunity to review various other HR policies, IT back up, disaster recovery plans as a side effect. As it happens we could not have anticipated the success of the apparently indestructible London infrastructure – from transport to telecoms. The firm also stressed that this period was not a ‘license to skive’, which was reflected in our ‘business as usual’ Olympic Plan. Indeed my productivity has improved and I’ve already taken examples of improved working practices to the Partnership Director. 

Unlocking the Universe: Off prints and scientific publishing

I’ve been following the arguments surrounding the publishing of scientific research with interest; what the Guardian are calling an ‘Academic Spring’. Since the Wellcome Trust, in conjunction with The Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Max Planck Society ‘announced they are to support a new, top-tier, open access journal for biomedical and life sciences research’, various academics have come out very much in favour of freely accessible research papers. Recently mathematicians have taken matters into their own hands and thrown down the gauntlet in front of Elsevier publishing. This has major implications for academic libraries and the renegotiation of journals contracts. I will continue to monitor this from a professional stand point.

City Business Library: Can you afford not to know them?

You may recall that I spent a happy evening in the London Metropolitan Archives looking at their photographs. So when I had the opportunity to go to an ASLIB event at the City Business Library (CBL), one of their sister organisations, I couldn't resist putting a few notes down about them.

© City of London

Since 2010 the CBL has been part of the Guildhall complex, sharing the refurbished space with the Guildhall Library, Art Gallery and the general administration of the Corporation of London (CofL). It is hard to believe that it was once housed in a separate building, though the nine ways of accessing the Guildhall can make the entrance to the library quite hard to find (opposite the public loo and Boris bike rack...).

About the CBL

The CBL is a publically funded free library service which has been open to all individuals and companies in the area for the past 30 years. As the name implies, its focus is provision of information on all aspects of business - whether you are global conglomerate or small and medium enterprise (SME), start up or sole trader. This information could be economic statistics, market research reports, law, tax, international markets, director/company information or business2business marketing opportunities. Though a large amount of information is available online, they also keep a small collection of books, journals, newspapers available to browse. They also run seminars, clinics, and organise network events which I shall come on to shortly.