Welcome to the first issue of JILT for 1997 which we hope will improve on the high standards set in 1996!

The ELJ Project

JILT was always intended to be the flagship of the Electronic Law Journals project and at the end of our first year of production we launch the wider ELJ project as a service to the law community. If you are interested in developing electronic publishing of original or existing journals or of conferences, please get in touch with us.

JILT 1997 (1) Content

This issue attests to the range and vigour of developments in information law, with a range of articles and other material encompassing regulation of the internet and telecommunications, intellectual property, computer based learning and legal practice.

Issues surrounding the internet continue to be very significant among the refereed articles whether they involve consideration of intellectual property rights in domain names ( Kenton Yee ) to the much more emotive issue of regulation of pornography ( Yaman Akdeniz ) or to general policy relating to the regulation of the telecoms infrastructure ( Huntley et al ). Brudenall , in dealing with the nature of fair dealing in digital information addresses both internet and more general digital material. Peter Moodie's comprehensive review of the IOLIS computer based learning materials produced by the Law Courseware Consortium represents the applications related brief of JILT.

An innovation for this issue of JILT is our inclusion of substantive excerpts from two key books reviewed in the last issue. The flexibility of the electronic medium for journals compared with paper ones enables readers not merely to read reviews of Perritt's Law and the Information Superhighway and Susskind's The Future of Law , but also read substantial excerpts. We believe that this can be developed into a valuable service to both the reader community and to the authors and publishers.

We also continue with our policy of publishing work in progress by including pieces by Peter Duncan on Scots solicitors' use of IT and Alastair Kelman on civil procedure. The authors will welcome comments to improve the quality of the finished product.

Among the shorter articles and reviews should be noted Ian Church , the Hansard Editor's account of the very popular Hansard Web Service, and Alastair Kelman's account of the LSE Distance Learning Experiment.

The news section has been updated no less than 17 times since our last issue. Those wishing to keep up to date with new material in JILT should check our 'What's New' page.

Technical issues

JILT's interface continues to improve. Our experiment with Frames last issue has now been consolidated. Users with Frames compatible browsers will automatically access Frames, those without will get a non-Frames version.

JILT attempts to ensure that links to web sites are kept uptodate when the site moves, as is the case with HMSO material since its privatisation. Another experiment is with the use of different coloured links to denote whether the link is to an external site or is integral to the ELJ environment. Those with Netscape 2 and above have access to this facility, but not as yet other browsers such as Internet Explorer. By popular demand, there is now a complete listing of all articles appearing in one issue as well as the abstracts on a single page of all the refereed articles. The Applications section has been renamed IT Reviews to reflect the diversity of IT based material.

We would like to thank all those who took pains to complete the JILT questionnaire. As an experimental project, we depend very much on readers' comments on the website as a whole and to individual articles. We would also like to thank the participants in the two focus groups organised to assist our evaluation strategy. We have improved our discussion facilities by including direct access to the elj mailing list in addition to our normal comment facility. We hope you make full use of it!