Welcome: FAQs

The Institute welcomes visiting legal researchers from any university worldwide. To apply for membership you just need to complete and submit one of our application forms and supply proof of your current academic status and registration. Please see the Joining the Library page for full details of who may be admitted and how to apply.

The Institute of Advanced Legal Studies is at 17 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5DR. This is on the north side of Russell Square, on the corner of Bedford Way. The nearest underground station is Russell Square (Piccadilly Line).

IALS Library is open at the following times:

 

Monday to Friday: 09:00 to 23:00

 

Saturday: 10:00 to 20:30

 

Sunday: 12:30 to 20:30

 

 

The exception to this is during summer vacation when we close at 20:00 on weekdays and all day on Sunday. We also close for bank holidays, occasional university holidays and during a two-week stock-taking period in September. Please check the Opening Hours page on our website before visiting us.

The Enquiry Desk is open at the following times:

 

Monday to Friday: 09:00 to 19:45

 

Saturday: 10:00 to 17:15

 

Sunday: Closed

 

 

Please note that there is no access to the Short Loan collection or items kept in the Depository when the Enquiry Desk is closed. Books from the main collection can be issued at the Self-Issue Machine on the 2nd Floor.

The IALS Website is the best place to look for details of all news and events. You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. We publish a newsletter 3 times a year, which is emailed to all members and available on the Newsletter page of our website. Everyone registered at the Library will also receive a monthly email of Library news.

The library has self-service photocopying and scanning facilities. Photocopying and scanning for academic use costs 5 pence per page. Please be aware of copyright law; see the posters in the photocopying room for further details. If your photocopying is for commercial purposes please contact the Issue & Enquiry Desk who can advise you on the cost of commercial photocopying.

 

Refer to our guide to Printing, Copying and Scanning for more detailed advice.

Top up your printing account using the terminal in the photocopying room. Printing costs 5 pence per page. Once you have credited your account just send your job to print from one of our networked PCs and follow the instructions.

 

Refer to our guide to Printing, Copying and Scanning for more detailed advice.

The library can offer support to any users with a disability or a specific learning difficulty and is committed to reviewing and improving these services. For instance, we can offer extended loans, help with book fetching, and help with databases.

Carrels are reservable study spaces comprising a desk, shelves and drawers. Carrels can be reserved by PhD and MPhil students, visiting academic and other senior readers. For more information, and to reserve a carrel, please refer to the Research Carrels page of our website.

We encourage all readers to open and close the windows in the reading rooms, and adjust the blinds, as they see fit. Poles are dotted around each floor for the purposes of opening the windows, but if you can’t find one, or need assistance, please ask at the Issue & Enquiry Desk.

 

The librarians monitor the temperature in the reading rooms throughout the day. You will see us opening and closing windows to try to get the balance right for our readers.

 

The heating in the whole IALS building is managed and controlled by the Central University Estates Division which heats the IALS building via the main boiler at SOAS. There is no machinery in place for cooling the IALS building. The IALS Library is continuing to press the strong case for a properly regulated heating and cooling system for the whole IALS building.

 

Eating and drinking is not permitted in the library. The exception to this is small bottles of water.

 

The IALS Library is essentially a reference library, but we do offer limited lending for most of our readers. To find out what your borrowing rights are, please refer to the Borrowing, Renewing and Returning page of our website.

 

Short Loan books can only be renewed in person at the Issue & Enquiry Desk.

 

Normal Loan books from the main collection can be renewed online via the Library Catalogue. Simply log in with your library card barcode number.

 

If you have any problems please contact the Issue & Enquiry Desk (020 7862 5834) during its open hours or send us an email.

 

For further information please refer to the Borrowing, Renewing and Returning page of our website.

 

If the system fails to renew your book, this may be because another reader has reserved it, you have already had three offsite renewals, or you have a fine of £3.00 or more on your record. You will need to return the book to the library.

 

If another reader has borrowed a book that you need, the best thing to do is to place a hold on that book, which will stop the person who has it from being able to renew it. You can do this by logging in to the Library Catalogue, or you can ask a librarian to do it for you.

 

Please report a missing book to the Issue & Enquiry Desk where you will be asked to complete a missing book slip. If you put your contact details on the slip, a member of library staff will let you know if the book is found.

 

When a book is reported missing, there are a number of places it might be. First we will check the reshelving shelves and the academic carrels. If the book is not found there will be check to see if it has been incorrectly shelved within the library or hidden.

 

In the Autumn term, we provide introductions to the Electronic Law Library, hands-on sessions on the use of Lexis Library and Westlaw, introductions to electronic sources of EU and public international law as well as the use of OSCOLA. Please refer to the Training at IALS Library guide for the full programme. In the Spring and Summer terms we offer refresher training on these topics and run Word for Dissertation classes to help you with the formatting of your thesis.

 

If you need any assistance at any other time, or on a different topic, you can make a one-to-one appointment with a librarian. Please contact us ials@sas.ac.uk to make an appointment.

If you need help you can ask at the Issue & Enquiry Desk on the 2nd Floor of the Library or email your question to ials@sas.ac.uk.

 

If you need assistance searching and accessing the resources at IALS Library, please make an appointment for a one-to-one session with a librarian for reference advice. We can help you search the Library Catalogue and the electronic databases we provide access to in our Electronic Law Library, so that you can find the material you need. Please contact us ials@sas.ac.uk to make an appointment.

 

The library participates in the British Library document supply service and handles requests for loans and photocopies of items. Because we are essentially a reference library with limited lending, we do not lend books from our open shelves, but it may be possible to lend older materials or previous editions. See the Inter-library Loans Service page on our website for further details.

 

The IALS Library can make inter-library loan requests on behalf of Institute staff, Institute research students and visiting academics. University of London LLM students and academic staff are advised to contact their college library if they wish to request inter-library loans.

 

The library provides a photocopying service for currently registered academic staff and students in the UK or overseas. See the Document Delivery Services for Academic Researchers page of our website for more information.

 

Commercial organizations should refer to our Information Services for the Legal Profession page of our website.

 

IALS Library is the national research library for law, with particular strengths in the law of the UK, Commonwealth countries, the European Union, individual European jurisdictions and the United States. Public international law and comparative law are also very well covered. We work closely with other major law libraries to ensure that, across all sites, we have all the materials necessary for in-depth research, and also with the University of London to ensure that we hold complementary materials for LLM research.

 

To help identify which libraries hold material for different jurisdictions, please consult the FLAG database, which contains collection descriptions of primary materials in print format for foreign jurisdictions held in UK libraries.

 

Please see our Foreign & International Law Collections Guide for more information about our foreign and international law holdings.

 

Please do let us know if there is a book you need which we haven’t got by filling in our online book recommendation form. If we decide to buy it for our collection we can let you know when it arrives. Otherwise, we can help you locate the book in another library.

 

The IALS has a complete set of intercollegiate LLM examination papers stretching back to our foundation in 1947. As well as this complete hardcopy set, papers since 1995 have been digitised and made accessible through a database, which can be found in our Electronic Law Library. These papers relate to the previous, intercollegiate system in place at the University of London. Since 2006, when the individual colleges withdrew from the intercollegiate system to offer their own LLM programmes, IALS Library has not received examination papers. As IALS is open to all University of London LLM students, there would be no effective means of ensuring that only students of a particular college could access the exam papers of that college. For recent examination papers, please contact your college.

Our electronic collections can be split into four broad categories:

 

Subscription databases

 

All of the electronic resources we subscribe to are listed in the Electronic Law Library and are available onsite for academic research. See our Databases Guide for further details. Remote access to electronic resources (from outside the Library) is made available on the basis of your type of IALS institutional membership in compliance with each service supplier's licence. Please see the table on the Offsite Access page of our website to check which resources you are entitled to access remotely. Contact us if you need more assistance with offsite access or experience problems accessing our electronic resources.

 

Digital collections

 

IALS is committed to digital content creation and provision from its own collections and through co-ordination of content-building with other law libraries and subject specialists. The IALS Library Catalogue gives direct access to digital copies as PDF files as well as the details of the print originals. You can learn more on the Digital Collections page of our website.

 

Open access collections

 

The IALS Community on the School of Advanced Study’s shared e-repository known as SAS-Space contains work by the Institute’s academic and library staff, students, visiting fellows and associated legal scholars. For example, there are copies of IALS MA and LLM student theses, a collection of articles from our journal Amicus Curiae and its predecessor IALS Bulletin. Much of the material is made available for academic use under an attribution-non-commercial-share alike creative commons licence.

 

Online legal research tools

 

The Institute has developed a wide range of online legal research tools as part of its mission to serve the legal research community across the United Kingdom. See the Projects page of our website for further details.

IALS is committed to digital content creation and provision from its own collections and through co-ordination of content-building with other law libraries and subject specialists. Please see the Digital Collections page of our website for further details.

The IALS Community on the School of Advanced Study’s shared e-repository known as SAS-Space contains work by the Institute’s academic and library staff, students, visiting fellows and associated legal scholars. For example, there are copies of IALS MA and LLM student theses, a collection of articles from our journal Amicus Curiae and its predecessor IALS Bulletin. Much of the material is made available for academic use under an attribution-non-commercial-share alike creative commons licence.

 

If you want to search across international scholarly electronic repositories use OpenDOAR, a freely available Directory of Open Access Repositories, which has international coverage. A search on this service includes materials help in the IALS Community on the SAS-Space electronic repository.

You can search the Library Catalogue in many different ways. If you know exactly what you are looking for you can run a Title search or an Author search.

 

You also check journals and law reports on the List of Serials on our website.

Run a Title search on the Library Catalogue for the journal title (not the article title). The catalogue record will tell you the location of the print version in the library, and will also give you a link to the online version, if available.

 

For further information, and guidance on how to search for journal articles on particular subjects, please refer to our Journals Guide.

The easiest way to find out if IALS has electronic access to a journal is to check the record on the Library Catalogue to see if a link is provided to the electronic version.

 

Another place to check is the List of Serials on our website, which allows you to browse through journal titles alphabetically and to link straight through to the journal.

 

If you still can't find it, you might want to search some of the databases directly. Please refer to our Journals Guide for further assistance. Don't forget that not all journals are available in an electronic format.

When you have run a search on the Library Catalogue you can organize the list of results by date. Just click on the “system sorted” box on the top right hand side of the screen and choose “newest first”.

All items on the Library Catalogue have been assigned subject headings by our cataloguers, which are not necessarily the words in the title. If you search for a broad subject heading, for example “Environmental Law”, the catalogue will offer you a list of all of the narrower subject headings beneath it, including “Environmental Law Great Britain”.

 

A really useful tip is, if you come across a book you find particularly useful look for the subject heading applied to it on the catalogue record. You can click through to all other items on the catalogue which have this subject heading.

 

You could also try the our Subjects Guides which list the major books and journals we have on that topic.

For information on understanding the catalogue record and classmarks please refer to our guide on Classmarks and the Location of Resources in the Library.

It is easy to see what IALS Library has acquired in the last few months. Go to the New Additions page on our website and click on “Latest acquisitions”. This will give you a list of all of the titles which the library has put on the shelves recently.

Here are some good starting points for looking up legal abbreviations:

 

• Cardiff Index to Legal Abbreviations

• Raistrick: Index to legal citations and abbreviations located in the library at shelf RF73 RAI

• The List of Selected Abbreviations at the front of the IALS list of serials on every floor in the library.