Technology and law library administration

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

The challenge of providing sophisticated legal information service has become international. Presently, European law schools are facing similar demands from faculty and students for E-MAIL hook-ups, which have U.S. law school administrations scurrying for fiscal, human, and space resources. Librarians complained of the physical problems of installing LANs in buildings much like the New York University Law Library, where millions were spent on mahogany but nothing was spent on cabling for computers.

Reactions to that technology, and the percentage of faculty, staff, and patrons who are becoming very pro-active in using it are similar in Europe and in the United States. A colleague from the Research Service of the European Parliament reports that he learned more about using the EPOCH Database of his own institution from subscribing to Renata Weidiger's course on that subject, taught on EUROLEX, than he had from all of the manuals, paper materials, and live instructional sources available within his institution's library. In Europe, just as in the United States, most of the activity in the area of technology is occurring outside of the library. Librarians, as administrators, must be aware that in the future their ability to control important resources may be lost forever.

II. TRANSITIONAL MODELS

It is very important for us to look at where we have come from and where we are going during this very stressful, challenging, and exciting time. I am reminded of the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."7

In Redesigning Library Services: A Manifesto, Michael Buckland traces the evolution of libraries from paper, to automated, to electronic.8 In the 1970's, most of us worked in primarily paper libraries. Paper records controlled paper collections. Because the paper record on which we all relied, the card catalog, was located in one place, libraries were highly centralized organizations. A hierarchical management structure was apparently the most suitable for dealing with this system. Information traveled up and down the management line, and very little information passed horizontally from department to department.

In the 1980's, either to facilitate the advent of technology, or as a result of it, a flattening out of library organizations emerged. Peter Drucker has postulated that as the use of electronics expands into new areas, the hierarchies found in institutions such as libraries will disappear.9 In today's automated library, where internal automation is used to control paper and other format materials, parallel structures exist. These structures consist of a formal bureaucracy that has traditional hierarchical patterns coexisting with informal problem-oriented groups. These groups are established to examine a particular issue and to promote extensive discussion between specialists who perform similar work in a variety of different departments of the library.10

All of this is possible because of the decentralization of the basic card catalog into the online public access catalog (OPAC). Information is now freely available throughout and beyond the library, enriching formerly repetitive and tedious jobs.ll The resulting decrease in the number of professionals in technical services departments necessitated a reorganization of the highly skilled and educated people who staff those departments.