Technology and law library administration

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

As traditional library work becomes more efficiently performed, library staff are becoming more involved in the substance of faculty and student research.22 This greater involvement creates additional pressure for more subject specialists and reference librarians who are experts in search strategies and multiple formats. As experts, these professionals must anticipate faculty needs through collection development, monitor available publications, and support faculty research requests from the project design stage through publication.23

With the opening of computer labs, the teaching of legal research methods, and the introduction of WESTLAW and LEXIS into the curriculum, libraries have become much more student centered. These developments are indicative of the need felt by librarians to provide increased and improved services to the students.

III. NEW COOPERATIVE ALLIANCES

In the 1990's, there has been a movement away from faculty and student centered libraries towards administration oriented facilities. Librarians are interacting, by either talking or fighting, with the people who manage the computers in their law schools, on their campuses, and in their university and peer libraries. Together, these administrators are engaged in cooperative collection development.

It has often been said that the glory of the electronic library is that it allows for effective resource sharing.4 The deans who used to talk about their libraries as the bottomless pits into which they threw money are now asking how many staff members can be retrenched because of the ability to build collections together. I would suggest, however, to anyone faced with a newly hired faculty member who wants a Japanese collection built within your premises, that it is futile to tell him to try Columbia or to find comprehensive databases on Japanese law at any price for U.S. computers! Realistic cooperative collection development faces many challenges, including communication problems. Although we now have access to each other's files at the point of making collection development decisions, it is still a challenge to meet the demands of both our home institutions and those institutions with which we cooperate.

Furthermore, flat law library budgets are likely to continue into the future,25 making cooperation even more difficult. Although it is easy to be a good neighbor when there is plenty of money to go around, it becomes increasingly problematic when resources are limited.

Although traditional problems of cooperation continue, interlibrary loan and other document delivery programs are improving. Electronic scanning programs such as The Research Library Group's (RLG) Ariel" make it much more simple to share collections on demand. The question remains, however, can I share with a library in Japan, a collection for my Japanese law professor, or do I still have to consider a way to find the resources to build a core in-house collection? This situation provides an example of the types of problems faced by administrators today.