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Your law library – supporting you through a difficult year

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As the year draws to a close, we thank the Queensland Law Society and its members for your continued support and patronage of the library over the last 12 months.

2020 will be remembered above all for the COVID-19 pandemic that swept the world with devastating health and economic consequences. Its impacts on your law library, while relatively mild, were still significant.

From late March, most of our face-to-face services were suspended, including the majority of our public engagement programs, with most staff members working from home for a few months mid-year.

Pleasingly however, we were able to continue to deliver all our essential library services to QLS members remotely, without reduction or interruption.

As part of our response to the hardships experienced by legal practitioners during the pandemic restrictions, we successfully negotiated with major legal publishers to temporarily extend our ground-breaking Virtual Legal Library (VLL) service to a wider range of legal practitioners from May to the end of September.

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VLL provides free online access to a large number of key legal publications from leading publishers, including LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters, Oxford University Press, Federation Press and CCH. Available publications span civil, criminal and family law, and include core commentary services, law reports, textbooks and journals. VLL is available to QLS full members who are either sole practitioners or in Queensland firms with five or less practising certificates. If you are eligible for VLL and not taking advantage of this great free service, you can register online at sclqld.org.au/vll.

Your law library: 2020 highlights

  • Responded to more than 4000 information and research requests from QLS members.
  • Made it easier to search, browse and access our expanded collection of publicly available sentencing remarks transcripts of the Supreme and District Courts.
  • Digitised and published 30 years of historical unreported judgments of the Land Court and the Land Appeal Court.
  • Took our education program online with remote legal research talks and training.
  • Opened two major exhibitions:
    Graphic justice: pictures worth 1000 words examines how leaders in the emerging ‘graphic justice’ field have used comics and illustrations to increase engagement and understanding of the law. The exhibition opened online in May during COVID-19 restrictions and later opened to the public after restrictions eased.
    The many hats of Sir Samuel Griffith exhibition commemorates the 100th anniversary of Griffith’s death by exploring his personal and professional life, and celebrating his legacy to the legal and political systems of Queensland and Australia.
  • Hosted the Celebrating Samuel Griffith webinar with speakers including Chief Justice Catherine Holmes AC and Professor Carolyn Evans, Vice Chancellor and President of Griffith University.
  • Made significant progress with major projects to replace our library management system and redevelop the library websites.

We hope you have a successful end to the year and look forward to working with you again in 2021. From everyone at your law library, we wish you a safe, relaxing and enjoyable festive season.

ALLA Legal Information Service of the Year Award 2020

We were honoured to win the 2020 Australian Law Librarians’ Association (ALLA) Legal Information Service of the Year award.

This award acknowledged our COVID-19 response, our significant ongoing contribution to the Queensland Judgments service, and our legal heritage and community engagement programs including lectures, exhibitions and the Queensland Legal Yearbook.

Christmas closure: The library will be closed for the duration of the Christmas court closure, from Monday 21 December to Friday 1 January 2021 inclusive.
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