Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture 2024

Abstract The 9th Willi Steiner Memorial Lecture took place during the BIALL Annual Conference at the Queens Hotel, Leeds on Thursday 13 June 2024. David Wills delivered the lecture and looked back over the last three decades and reflected on the many changes and challenges, especially with regard to technological developments, that have impacted on the law library and legal information world. His focus then shifted to more recent times and developments in law at a global level and the associated challenges of curating resources and collections to match the wide variety of interests across legal scholarship. The lecture touched on the demands in legal education, changes to publishing models, the financial challenges facing higher education and, most recently, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic that altered research and study patterns, and which accelerated the demand for digital resources. Finally, the lecture looked to the next 30 years and the unstoppable rise of artificial intelligence (AI), in order to determine what AI would mean for the future of law librarianship. The lecture identified the part law librarians and legal information professionals could play concerning AI and how they could help to protect academic integrity.