Reading Time: 3 minutes
My mind wandered in the middle of a presentation—taking a speaker’s comment and turning it in the light, thinking about the facets—at the AALL annual meeting. This is both a common occurrence and also my real purpose of attending. A speaker will sometimes say something in a way that gets behind the words they might have put down on paper, a riff or aside that can act as a prompt. Sparks of inspiration. In this case, it made me think about academic law library print collections and the people who rely on them. There is a tension created when people who are expected to keep materials are struggling to house and afford their upkeep while others are counting on the access. We have digital solutions to this but a print solution seems to escape us. It may be time to return to a private law library.
It is easy to trace the law library’s ancestry back to its membership and subscription library roots. There are still law libraries in North America that are designed around dues-paying members, even if you exclude the fee-paying access that enables academic law libraries. This pay-to-play model has been around for centuries and I am sure it will always be an alternative to public access.
Whose Money
We have devised ways to make information accessible without a fee by inserting a funding scheme into the relationship. Filing fees and traffic fines make a law library free to access, because someone who is not necessarily using the law library is paying for it indirectly. Student tuition dollars and endowments support academic law libraries in public institutions that have a mandate to be open to the public although the “open” may be in the eye of the beholder.
What is the obligation for a law library to maintain a collection for its community, though? When the students have graduated or the person is a researcher without a legal issue? I completely understand the argument that we should retain whatever we can for posterity but the reality is that many of us do not have that capacity. Physical space is finite and often shared. Money to store or digitize is, likewise, limited. The argument is particularly hard to make when other libraries offer the book.
My mind turned to a shared collection that operated in a partnership or consortial manner as a direct lender with the goal of cost recovery or profit. We have the Legal Information Preservation Alliance and LLMC or even HeinOnline and what I have in mind is not quite what they are doing. Law libraries are part of or customers of those organizations and so the funding stream continues to be ours, for the benefit of others. The question in my mind is how to get the others to pay their way too.
We may have shifted our collection development to just-in-time but sometimes our collection management remains just-in-case. I have heard from others and experienced the “well, we have shelf space, let’s keep it” argument about holding on to a book. I feel keenly the need to keep books myself, at home, that I am worried may became rare or the last copy. Not for any financial gain, the books are not of that quality, but out of a reluctance to let the last one of anything go.
Whose Books
I ended up picturing a warehouse full of books with people to manage access and organization. A library, in other words, although something more austere and functional and located in a way to make access convenient but inexpensive (probably not downtown). The books would be donated by law libraries in the region. It has to be accessible enough for people to get information rapidly: access in hours, not days. Instead of storing their own books in individual university repositories that are now starting to run out of space or in off-site storage at an additional cost, law libraries would shift them to a central physical shared collection. As donations came in, a professional team would receive them and add them to the collection where necessary. They would make the call on how many of anything to keep to achieve the organization’s goal, which might mean some law libraries would be deselecting titles they donate.
The goal would be to make that book collection available to researchers who would pay for the access. This would be law libraries who have shrunk their own space—courts, law firms, even law schools—on the reliance of someone, somewhere, continuing to provide that access. Those researchers would pay for access, through a membership fee or other financial support, to engage with those materials. They might be able to ILL a book or have someone send a scan of a page or, most likely, visit the location.
None of this is at all novel. We are doing this right now but we tend to do it individually, with large metropolitan public law libraries often being the most likely to be in this position. We also do it without the expectation of anyone providing financial support. The public access creates an expectation of free access. Even in subscription law libraries, the dues-paying revenue is not nearly enough to run the law library and may only amount to a few percentage points of overall income. But we all know that free access is really “free-to-you access” because, even with the sunk cost of a book purchase, there are ongoing maintenance costs whether it is rent or the staff time required to organize and make available the materials.
The library I am picturing would just be a consolidated, dedicated approach to this problem. The less- or under-utilized print collections that cannot be digitized would be centralized—with the donating library having a continued right of retrieval—in order to try to create an income generating outcome. Something where the storing law library would not themselves be paying for that storage, which may largely be for the benefit of others, but would possibly shift the cost of maintenance to the retrievers.
It could also crack open private law library collections that are maintained for an internal audience but still may not get much use. How many of us are holding on to materials that not only no one is using but no-one will be using, with the likelihood of them ever being used decreasing as time goes by? If nothing else, it would give them a potential alternative purpose than being pulped or shredded in a space elimination outcome.
In any event, another idea out of the brain. I am not really in a position to make this vision happen and I am sure it comes with many challenges. But I have a feeling there are a lot of free riders of law libraries of all types and that there may be a way to monetize that usage to the benefit of the people currently providing the free service.