Dumpling in a Hanky

Phew, it's been a long time between blog posts here, huh? Mainly, this has been because I've been super busy at work, between settling in to my role, and working hard with our intake of summer students. Settling in, and having people get to know me (made much easier now by the fact that the Information Services team and our Library have been located on one of the main office floors since mid April, so we're far more visible to staff) means that the fee earners have become more comfortable with asking me for research help, and passing research tasks to me to deal with, so my day-to-day workload has been picking up. Plus I've been checking over and altering the training materials I inherited from my predecessor...and testing them out on the Summer Law School students! The Summer Law School at my current workplace is partially similar to the one which was run by my old employer, but it's also substantially more involved. Unlike the previous 2-sets-of-students, 4-we...

If you're an American prisoner unhappy with your sentence, you might want to start brushing up on your IT skills. This story of an inmate who objected that giving limited Westlaw access wasn't the same as providing a legal library turned up in my RSS feeds via  Library Stuff . I can understand his problems with Westlaw, although it's actually one of the less painful legal databases to use (Lexis - why? WHY?!?!). As the story says though, he's not likely to win his case, so the books will be going, and occasional Westlaw access will be staying. Which ain't fun if you're not confident on a computer, and have restricted access. Do we have a similar sort of requirement for prisoners to have access to law libraries and legal materials? Do UK prisoners have any sort of ability to do legal research on their own behalf?