Welcome: FAQs

General

The Institute welcomes visiting legal researchers from any university worldwide (MPhil or PhD students or academic staff). 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).

See our Opening hours page for the most up-to-date information.

THe Library Enquiry desk is located on the second floor of the library. The Enquiry Desk opening hours are Monday-Friday 9am to 7.45pm. A more limited Enquiry Desk service is available on Saturdays between 10am and 5.15pm. The Enquiry Desk is closed on Sundays.

All IALS Library academic members will receive a regular email roundup of Library news. News and details of forthcoming events are also available on the IALS Website. Our termly newsletter is available on the Newsletter page of our website. You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on X.

Facilities

The library has self-service photocopying and scanning facilities. You will need to register for a PaperCut account. For help doing this, speak to staff at the Enquiry Desk, or pick up a leaflet from the rack opposite the desk. Black and white printing/photocopying and scanning for academic use costs 5 pence per page. Please be aware of copyright law; see the posters in the photocopying area for further details. If your photocopying is for commercial purposes please speak to staff at the Enquiry Desk who can advise you on the cost of commercial photocopying.

 

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. More information about accessibility is available on our website or our accessibility LibGuide. To speak to a librarian about your needs, get in touch with us at ials@sas.ac.uk.

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.

No hot or cold food is allowed in the library. Bottled water and hot drinks in sealed, reusable cups are permitted.

 

Borrowing

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.

 

Books borrowed from the main collection can be renewed online via Library Search. You will need to sign in to your account using the email address you used to register for the library. Short loan books cannot be renewed, but, so long as another reader has not requested the book, we can reissue it to you in person at the Enquiry Desk.

 

If you have any problems renewing books please contact the Library Reference desk at ials@sas.ac.uk

 

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 the maximum number of 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 Library Search, or you can ask a librarian to do it for you.

 

Please report a missing book to the Enquiries Desk where you may 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 trolleys 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.

 

Support and Training

In the autumn term, we provide introductions to the IALS Library, training sessions on the use of Lexis+ and Westlaw, training sessions on finding legal journal artilces, an introduction to finding electronic sources public international law and introductory lectures on 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 Formatting with MS Word classes to help you with the formatting of your dissertation or 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 contact the Reference Desk by email at ials@sas.ac.uk, speak to us via the live chat on our website, or book a one-to-one appointment with a librarian.

 

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 to use Library Search and the online databases we provide access to from our Law Databases page, so that you can find the material you need. Please contact us ials@sas.ac.uk to make an appointment.

 

Requesting photocopies and inter-library loans

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.During the Covid-19 pandemic the photocopying service is only availabel to School of Advanced Study students.

 

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

 

Collections

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.

 

Our electronic collections can be split into four broad categories:

 

Subscription databases

 

All of the electronic resources we subscribe to are listed on our A-Z Law Databases page 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. Use the filter option on the Law Database 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 range of online legal research tools as part of its mission to serve the legal research community across the United Kingdom. See the Digital Resources 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 Digisation Projects 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.

Finding what you need

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

Run a Title search on Library Search for the journal 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 Library Search to see if a link is provided to the electronic version.

 

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 Library Search you can sort the list of results by date using the 'Sort by' option in the 'Tweak my results' menu on the left-hand side of the screen.

All items on Library Search 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 the same subject heading.

 

You could also try our Subject 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.

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