Technology and law library administration

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

We should also be looking very carefully at the satisfaction of our users through surveys which are designed by us or in cooperation with those users, or in a variety of focus groups that provide information needed on particular issues. In addition, we must address law library technical and accreditation standards. Presently, this is an extremely problematic issue because the ABA Committee's proposed standards36 are not those that were recommended by the ABA Section On Legal Education's Library Committee.37 The incentives provided by the ABA either to build electronically, cooperatively, or to take advantage of technology by moving in the direction of access rather than ownership are very slight indeed.38

These standards continue an unfortunate past practice of the ABA, in which they measured things that are countable. The problem is that those things that are countable are not necessarily the type of outputs in which faculties and librarians of our institutions are actually interested. We want to know how good our law students are, how prepared they are for practice, and how effective they are at legal research. That output, that effectiveness, needs to be combined with the various input of books, staff, and computerization that turn faculty and students into effective researchers. Librarians are the people in law schools who know best how to deal with those issues and how to press for those standards that truly reflect the kind of work that we do. Unfortunately, the retreat from faculty status and tenure in the proposed revision weakens our voices among our law school colleagues. That is especially dangerous as we cope with increased non-librarian faculty frustration with what they perceive as the cataclysmic process of computerization. The non-librarian faculty has not evolved through computerization as we have, and it is very likely that the frustration they feel will be directed at us. In order to protect against this, we must be proactive in dealing with our faculties. We have to deal with them one on one, in their offices holding their hands on the mice, and if necessary, making sure that they can use all of the programs available to them. We must deal with them in small groups, if possible. We must provide them with a variety of research guides, addresses of list servs, and design segments of their classes which will help them to be more effective teachers. We must make ourselves central to the programs of our law schools.

There was a time when we could rest upon our comprehensive card catalogs as the ultimate source in providing the kind of service necessary to be successful and effective. Those days, however, are over. Not only are our catalogs available to users, but so are the catalogs of libraries all over the world. We must now go beyond the information about information that is reflected in all of those catalogs, whether they are manual or electronic, and actually deliver the information described therein to our patrons.

One challenge I would like to emphasize is to envision how we can move toward building an electronic library without walls. It is not going to happen, regardless of what the New York Times says,39 by digitizing the Library of Congress. It is going to happen because each one of us chooses a project that is within the scope of our resources and our own individual libraries. All of those projects will add up to a greater whole than any one of us has access to right now. Administrators must identify the contributions that individual librarians can make to that whole and commit the resources necessary to build slowly, cautiously, and cooperatively.