Welcome to Week One!

Hello, and if you’re a new student joining us for the 2023/24 academic year we look forward to meeting you in the Law Library soon!

We are Anna Richards and SarahLouise McDonald, and we are your Law Librarians. Anna works the first half of the week, SarahLouise the second, and you can reach us both by email on law.librarian@ed.ac.uk at any time.

Photos of Anna and SarahLouise (L-R). The background is formed of a white space with black and blue geometric shapes behind the photos.

You may have already met us at one of the several induction sessions we’ve been running over the past week or two. If you missed them you can find recordings on the Law Librarian Media Hopper Channel:

The slides for each session are added as ‘attachments’ to the videos above. Please note that captions are automatically generated and we’ll endeavour to get them corrected over the coming month.

One session which wasn’t recorded was the Diploma Welcome to the Library session which was delivered face-to-face. If you’re a Diploma student you should already have access to the slides via your Learn pages, but if not you can find them here: Law – Diploma induction 2023.

If you’re looking for information on using the physical library, we recommend you check out the Law Library webpages and take a look at our Virtual Orientation Guide (Microsoft Sway document – other formats are available by request). We hope that you’ll get in touch with either ourselves or our colleagues on the library helpdesk by contacting EdHelp if you have any queries. See you in the library!

Referencing, research: one-to-one appointments

Do you need help with your research? Have you got yourself into a muddle using legal resources online? Do you just need to know what you need to know?

Book a one-to-one meeting with our Law Librarian team to discuss your research issues or library problems. In previous one-to-ones we’ve helped students with:

  • search strategies
  • using our subscription databases
  • finding international case law
  • finding historical Scots material online (specifically the Institutional Writers)
  • referencing (specifically using OSCOLA)
  • setting up news alerts for cases or legislation

We arrange appointments once a fortnight using the MyEd booking system. Search for “Literature search clinic” and select the Law specific event, or search for “Law” and select provider group “IS Library and University Collections” to find all our Law related training. Future dates include:

  • 19th January
  • 9th February
  • 23rd February
  • 1st March
  • 15th March
  • 30th March
  • 13th April
  • 4th May

Please note: due to our current staffing situation these appointments are all on Wednesdays and Thursdays. If you require a different day please get in touch.

We release appointments approximately three weeks before each scheduled date. This semester we’re trialling a combination of online and in-person appointments so when you book feel free to contact us to discuss how you would prefer to meet. If you cannot see an available meeting slot that suits you please email law.librarian@ed.ac.uk and we will find a suitable time.

Information skills throughout the year

If you read our last post, you’ll have heard all about the top information we like our students to have early in the semester; about inductions and key resources we want to make sure you can access. Now we’re a few weeks in we’ve had some more questions about what we have coming up next.

We have made up two documents here (one for undergraduate students, one for postgraduate students) which outlines the key training events we’ll be offering during 2022/23. This includes some law specific materials and some training that is open to all UoE students. Click on the documents below to download the PDF you need:

Information Skills sessions for Law (UG)

Information Skills sessions for Law (PG) 

We’ll write more about specific training sessions nearer each event but in the mean time we hope this is useful. If you want to get in touch to discuss any library or research related questions, you can always reach us via law.librarian@ed.ac.uk.