Technology and law library administration

St. John's Law Review, Winter 1996 by Price, M Kathleen

Library administration has never been more challenging than in the last decade of the 20th Century, as we find ourselves on the threshold of the Information Age.l This should be the era of the information professional; yet librarians are increasingly challenged by the information industry, computer professionals, MIS-trained analysts, and their own faculties and students to justify their status, information budgets, and space. We can either cling to the traditional skills we have always employed or build upon those skills of information organization and instruction to assume a central role in this new era.

Our job is made more difficult by the necessity of maintaining traditional information resources while moving into new formats. No formulas exist to assist law librarians in deciding how many hard copies to retain; whether microform, CD-ROM, or online versions best serve patron needs; or how acquisition budgets should be divided among the various formats. Law library staffs are in flux, although the trend away from technical services towards reference, computer support, and administration seems likely to continue.

Library budgets, which have been flat or shrinking for a decade, seem unlikely to grow dramatically; yet law school programs, which increasingly emphasize interdisciplinary studies, interactive student involvement, and internationalism, place increased demands upon those budgets. Librarians have responded by forging partnerships with their counterparts in other disciplines, by working with clinical faculty to share the teaching of lawyering skills, and by using the Internet to communicate with foreign colleagues as they seek immediate answers to increasingly sophisticated and time sensitive queries.

Even academic librarians, historically immune from the cost justification pressures that predominate in the private sector, are now confronted with the need for resources beyond their budgets. Library administrators are balancing the individual transaction charges involved in document delivery or customized database searching against the administrative costs of providing such value-added services. Only a few law libraries, such as Columbia University and the University of California at Berkeley, have the collection breadth, depth, and sophisticated research capacity to undertake such services. The conversion of high demand collections to electronic format may offer fee-forservice opportunities for individual searches and document delivery to a broader base. Columbia's Pegasus, IIT-ChicagoKent's electronic international relations service, and Cincinnati's Diana human rights database are pioneering projects in digitization.

The vagaries of funding per transaction have led other law library administrators to pursue grant or contract funding to support experiments in technological information delivery. For example, Pace University has received support from the National Center for Automated Information Research (NCAIR)2 for its UN Sale of Goods cooperative international translating, indexing, and abstracting distributed database. New York University contracted with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID)3 to establish an electronic information transfer station to receive inquiries from eleven former Soviet republics engaged in statutory revision. New York University is engaged in a feasibility study to evaluate information on demand delivery as an alternative to anticipatory collection building in developing democracies. Presently, our staff at New York University is committed to the demand approach for providing legal information to institutions engaged in new fields of research. This approach does not carry the baggage of existing collections requiring simultaneous maintenance. We plan to evaluate the same approach as our faculty moves into new area studies and disciplines.

The identification, implementation, and evaluation of opportunities have become increasingly cooperative. Regardless of the formal organization chart, law libraries are utilizing parallel, problem-oriented work groups which utilize the theoretical knowledge and practical skills of all employees. As responsibility shifts down the hierarchy, unnecessary layers of middle management are falling out, thus improving vertical and horizontal communication. The Internet revolution, following on the heels of the LAN/Network and PC revolutions, facilitated these changes. Work can now be spread to any part of the world whose research networks are linked to the Internet.4

I. THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF LEGAL INFORMATION

Dean Rudolph C. Hasl5 has spoken about the possibilities for international resource sharing that come from technology.6 The opportunity to communicate electronically with our colleagues around the world has provided U.S. law libraries with legal information in a more timely manner than when libraries were entirely paper-driven. The primary concern of the participants from Australia, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States at the International Association of Law Libraries (IALL) meeting in Amsterdam was the pressure to keep a step ahead of the demands of technology in our own libraries.