Academic Law Librarianship
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Jacob Sayward
Academic law libraries have much in common with their non-law counterparts. Many of the elements of collection development, including the systems, the tools, and the skills are shared. Yet there are enough distinctions between the mission of a law school and the mission of a college or university to affect how their respective libraries go about doing the work of building their collections.
This chapter focuses on those distinctions, assuming the reader either has some background on collection development in other academic libraries or can fill in any gaps through other sources.
- Academic law library collection development models differ from the collection development models of non-law libraries.
- Accreditation requirements for law schools and specific characteristics of legal materials collected affect collection development.
- A collection development policy drafted by a law school today might differ from traditional collection development policies for non-law libraries.
Traditional Collection Development Models
To develop a collection, a library needs to make decisions about what to acquire. The decision might come down to an individual evaluating the specific details of a particular title to acquire. Alternatively, it could result from the establishment of parameters to be used for the automated acquisition of a large number of items (as in an approval plan). Either way, a library needs some criteria for making the acquisition decision. Traditional criteria have included subject, cost, and format of the material being acquired, and within the field of law we may consider jurisdiction to be separate criteria from subject. The individual authors or publishers behind a specific title may affect an acquisition decision, acting as a proxy for the title’s authoritative value or appeal to researchers. The criteria have grown more complicated with the development of online collections. In the past, the cost decision may have simply come down to a single list price for a book (or annual subscription price for a serial publication). Now there may be multiple prices to consider for print versus electronic format, or for the cost of a yearly subscription to a database versus a perpetual license (with annual maintenance fees) for the same online content. Formats have also become more complicated and taken on new meaning with the development of online resources. Online materials may be favored over print for reasons related to declining library space, convenience of management, and preference of researchers. There are a lot of criteria to consider, and libraries need someone to evaluate and balance them to make an acquisition decision.
Traditionally, if an academic library had enough resources, these decisions were made by a number of subject experts known as “selectors .” These selectors reviewed potential acquisitions and selected those they wanted purchased. Having multiple selectors allowed the library to d