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The Virtual Law School Library

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2019

Nicholas Pengelley
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What do the next twenty years hold for law school libraries? How will they look in 2021? What will be in them? Who will use them? Will we still use books, or will everything be accessed through an electronic medium? These questions are canvassed in the context of a law school library that is, in 2001, uneasily poised at a junction where signposts point to alternative futures for the delivery of legal education itself.

I. Introduction

We seem, yet again, to be at one of those moments in time, so common in the last quarter of the 20th century, and likely to be continuous in the 21st, when the future appears as a melting pot of possibilities for law libraries, particularly university law libraries. This time the uncertainty is largely driven by the potential advent of Web-based learning, and the as yet largely undeveloped nature of the law school response to the possibilities of education outside of the traditional classroom model. Uncertainty is also due to the growing awareness that IT literacy is increasing rapidly among our user community, and that students in particular now prefer electronic sources of information over print – sources which, increasingly, they can access from places other than the physical law library.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Legal Information , Volume 29 , Issue 3 , Winter 2001 , pp. 615 - 642
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 by the International Association of Law Libraries 

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References

1 Berring, Bob, “Carpe Diem” 7(2) Legal Division Quarterly, 18 (2000).Google Scholar

2 “Changing times in the law library of the future” Australian Law Librarian 4, 160–169 (1996) (with Lisa Smith); “The ebb and flow of the electronic tide” Australian Law Librarian 6, 155–159 (1998).Google Scholar

3 “Bricks plus bytes: How ‘Click and Brick’ will define legal education space,” 46 Villanova Law Review, 95 (2001).Google Scholar

4 Ibid. 105–106. “Most of the next generation of web appliances will be wireless and by the end of the next decade the majority of communications will be wireless. Many of this generations’ portable devices (e.g., PDAs and mobile phones) will take on additional wireless network functions and most appliances and devices will also communicate wirelessly inter se.”Google Scholar

5 See, e.g., “The new wristwatch,” New York Times January 20, 2000, D1.Google Scholar

6 See “Have laptop will travel – to Starbucks” National Post, December 26, 2000 http://www.nationalpost.com/search/story.html?f=stories/20001226/417948.html [on file with author].Google Scholar

7 See, e.g., Reich, Robert, The Future of Success, 2001.Google Scholar

8 Advances are being made on a variety of fronts. See, e.g., “IBM's wearable PC may debut early next year,” CNN, June 30, 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/06/30/wearable.pc.idg/ [on file with author]; “Canon develops paper thin digital display,” CNN, November 24, 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/11/24/canon.thin.display.idg/index.html [on file with author]; “Review: ActiveWorlds offers 3-D Interaction,” CNN, September 12, 2000. http://www.cnn.com/2000/TECH/computing/09/12/3d.homesteads.idg/index.html [on file with author].Google Scholar

9 All of us, of course, can point to a Professor X who is a proudly self-proclaimed Luddite, refusing anything to do with computers. But such people are a disappearing minority.Google Scholar

10 Above n. 3, 95.Google Scholar

11 It is interesting to observe that economic circumstances are not a governing factor in the level of progress made in this area. I know of some law schools in Australia that are far more advanced in their embrace of information technology than their generally much better funded North American cousins.Google Scholar

12 http://www.concord.kaplan.edu.Google Scholar

13 See generally, Traub, James, “Online U: How entrepreneurs and academic radicals are breaking down the walls of the university,” New York Times Magazine, November 19, 2000, p. 88; Katz, Richard (Editor) Dancing with the Devil: Information Technology and the New Competition in Higher Education, 1999; Dunn, Samuel, “The virtualizing of Education,” The Futurist, March 2000, v. 34 i. 2, p. 34.Google Scholar

14 Above n. 3, 113.Google Scholar

15 This is already the case in Australia, following recent amendment to federal copyright legislation. As an example of how one university library is already taking advantage of this change in the law, see the web-site of the Monash University Library Digitisation Centre: http://www.lib.monash.edu.au/dcentre/.Google Scholar

16 The incorporation of such facilities in lecture theatres, so that Powerpoint presentations and the Internet can be called up from a console at the press of a button is a necessary step forward in classroom technology. Naturally professors are reluctant to move beyond whiteboards and overhead projectors if, to call up a Powerpoint presentation, they have to lug a laptop to class and spend time connecting it up and testing it out. The employment of additional staff as classroom technical assistants, something that is starting to happen, will also facilitate moves in this direction.Google Scholar

17 See, e.g., Traub, James, above n. 13, 92.Google Scholar

18 See generally Terry, N., above, n. 3, 116–117.Google Scholar

19 See, e.g., Traub, James, above n. 13, 88.Google Scholar

20 See generally American Council on Education, Developing a Distance Education Policy for 21st Century Learning (March, 2000). http://www.acenet.edu/washington/distance_ed/2000/03march/distance_ed.html.Google Scholar

21 Danner, Richard, “Focus on information literacy” National Law Journal, July 17, 2000, C1.Google Scholar

22 See, e.g., the Interactive Legal Research Web Course, part of the Legal Research Methods Unit taught at Monash University Faculty of Law, designed by Kinder, Petal. (http://www.law.monash.edu.au/Undergraduate/Subjects/Legres/Intro/index.htm).Google Scholar

23 See, e.g, “Mining the ‘Deep Web’ with sharper shovels” New York Times, January 25, 2001, D1.Google Scholar

24 Hanft, John, “A model for legal research in the electronic age” 17(3) Legal Reference Services Quarterly, 77, 79 (1999).Google Scholar

25 Above, n. 3, 118.Google Scholar

26 Even with Lexis and Westlaw of course, there is no guarantee that a particular publication will be maintained given that the powers behind them, Reed and Thomson, do not own all of the titles hosted on the databases. The recent removal of much of the French material from Lexis is a case in point.Google Scholar

27 Faculty members of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law recently endorsed such criteria put forward by the Bora Laskin Law Library in agreeing to its policy of electronic replacement of print subscriptions to primary sources.Google Scholar

28 Whilst the law libraries of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United Kingdom have benefitted immeasurably from the resources now freely available via the Internet, their gains pale when contrasted with those made by the much smaller and far poorer Pacific, Caribbean and African jurisdictions which have hitherto relied on very small and very out-dated print collections usually donated by law libraries in other countries. Where these jurisdictions are able to afford Internet connections their access to information has entered an entirely new dimension. As far as legal education is concerned these jurisdictions may be among the first to make extensive use of Internet-based learning. To take a Pacific Islands example, a student in Kiribati (the former British colony of the Gilbert Islands) can now study law through the University of the South Pacific Law School (based in Vanuatu), a student who could not previously have done so because she or he could not have afforded to travel. The likely impact on the standard of education and the aspirations of people in places such as Kiribati is simply immeasurable. It makes debates about the pedagogic value of traditional classroom learning and the necessity or otherwise of maintaining the Socratic method seem rather beside the point.Google Scholar

29 In terms of ongoing subscriptions this implies, of course, that the publishers themselves, West in this instance, would continue to produce print copy. I acknowledge that this is by no means a certainty.Google Scholar

30 Examples include Monash University (Australia) in 1995, and the University of Toronto in 2000. A recent survey on the Canadian Association of Law Librarians’ list has indicated that many Canadian law libraries have cancelled their subscriptions to the series (summary by Denis Le May on the CALL listserv archive, October 27, 2000).Google Scholar

31 The Starr Foundation Information Transfer Network (ITN), founded by New York University School of Law, under the direction of Kathleen Price, is a model for co-operation among law school libraries that could drive such an initiative at the global level. See “NYU Law Library Builds Global Partnerships” (http://www.law.nyu.edu/globallawschool/newsletters/spring1999/lawlibrary.html).Google Scholar

32 At the time of writing, the author was Centre for Innovation Law and Policy Librarian, Bora Laskin Law Library, University of Toronto.Google Scholar

33 At the time of writing, it is apparent that some moves are in fact being made in the direction urged. It seems that Canadian material available on E-Carswell is to be made available via Westlaw. Subsequent to the delivery of this paper, the Australian Butterworths Online site was renamed LexisLegal, and, and in a press release on July 4, 2001, Reed Elsevier announced what appears to be a merger of their various local products under the Lexis-Nexis identity (the press release is available at http://www.butterworths.ca). In a further interesting development, in December 2000, Butterworths and CCH in Australia announced that they would provide access to their local legal and tax publications through a single interface, to be called “LexisLocal.” The press release takes care to state that, “While working together to present the publications in a single service, each company remains entirely independent.” (Circulated on the ANZ Law Librarians’ list, December 6, 2000. On file with author).Google Scholar

34 http://www.canlii.org/.Google Scholar

35 http://www.law.mq.edu.au/scnsw/index.htm.Google Scholar

36 See e.g., supra note 7.Google Scholar

37 See, e.g., Terry, Nicolas, above n. 3, 119; Keller, Larry, “Not an endangered career: looking it up” (CNN Report) (http://www.cnn.com/2000/CAREER/trends/11/28/librarians/) [On file with author].Google Scholar

38 Luczyck, Rebecca, “How good is your library?” National Jurist, Nov/Dec 2000, 18.Google Scholar

39 Ibid. 22.Google Scholar

40 Or that we, as librarians, thought they needed to know. These are quite often two very different things.Google Scholar