Law Commons^™

Locating Free And Low-Cost Secondary Sources In Michigan, Cody James

Law Librarian Scholarship

Secondary sources are all the legal resources that describe what the law is without actually having the force of law. For example, treatises, law review articles, and practice series are secondary sources while statutes, regulations, and cases are primary sources. Although secondary sources are not binding authority, they provide valuable, up-to-date insight and commentary about existing laws. These insights are especially useful when handling matters outside of an attorney’s usual areas of practice.

Unfortunately, secondary sources are not cheap — consider that a full set of Michigan Civil Jurisprudence has a retail cost of $25,119. That said, a lot of …

Buckets, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Inspired by “‘A Day in My Law Library Life,’ Circa 1997,” this compilation collects descriptions of a day in the lives of law librarians in 2018. The descriptions provide a current snapshot and historical record of the law library profession, with similarities to, and differences from, the profession of 1997.

How Many Copies Are Enough Revisited: Open Access Legal Scholarship In The Time Of Collection Budget Constraints, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

This article discusses the results of a study into the open access availability of law reviews, followed by a discussion of why open access has such a high rate of adoption among law reviews, especially in comparison to the journal literature in other disciplines.

Law School Institutional Repositories: A Survey, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of law libraries managing institutional repositories for their law schools. In 2011, there were some 30 law schools with such repositories; now, 80 of the top 100 law schools have their own or participate in a university-wide repository wherein the law school has an identifiable, school-specific collection or community. This article discusses a survey of the of the top 101 law schools, in hopes of facilitating an understanding of the breadth of material to be found in law school institutional repositories.

Issues And Trends In Collection Development For East Asia Legal Materials, Joostaek Lee, Xiaomeng Zhang, Keiko Okuhara, Evelyn Ma

Law Librarian Scholarship

The authors delineate the general policy and guidelines for developing foreign and transnational law collections in U.S. law libraries, and they analyze factors that shape East Asian collections, such as law libraries’ preservation and digitization efforts and their related cost-efficiency, and the availability and quality of English translations. The authors then discuss the main sources for Korean, Japanese, and Chinese law.

Marketing And Outreach In Law Libraries: A White Paper, Amanda Runyon, All-Sis Task Force On Library Marketing And Outreach

Law Librarian Scholarship

In recent years, libraries have turned to marketing and outreach to better educate library users about services and resources while gaining an understanding of their needs. Marketing and outreach are relatively new concepts in academic law libraries, and librarians tasked with these functions have found resources and examples of this type of work to be lacking. Though focused on academic law libraries, the article identifies the challenges facing all law libraries, explains why libraries need marketing and outreach plans, and provides examples of marketing and outreach successes.

Getting Law Students Into The Law Library: The University Of Michigan Succeeds With A Plan, Jennifer L. Selby

Law Librarian Scholarship

The goal of the University of Michigan Law Library's Awareness Campaign was to raise the consciousness of law students about the many ways in which librarians here can help them succeed as students now and as lawyers later. We sought to increase the number of students using the library. We wanted to get them physically into the library, and, once here, we wanted to increase students' use of the library's services: reference and circulation services, research consultations; our multitude of web-based resources, including our online research guides, book sts, and tutorials; group study rooms, etc. Not onl did we strive …

Microfiche Checking And Refilming At The University Of Michigan Law Library, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

In an effort to combat this loss of important legal information, UMLL instituted a fiche-checking process where, to the best of our ability, we check the fiche not just for bibliographic accuracy, but also for readability, cut-off text, and omissions. When we discover problems, we ask the publisher to refilm the problematic volumes, offering UMLL paper volumes for the job. The following is the process UMLL has instituted wherein we try to discover and remedy problems with purchased microfiche.

Building A Foreign Law Collection At The University Of Michigan Law Library, 1910-1960, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Ms. Leary describes the vision, energy, imagination, and techniques of the dedicated people who built an eminent foreign law collection at the University of Michigan Law Library. She also uses Michigan as an example to illustrate the development of libraries and librarianship nationally.

How Many Copies Are Enough? Using Citation Studies To Limit Journal Holdings, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Mr. Brown introduces the University of Michigan Law Library’s use of citation study literature to develop a new policy regarding the number of duplicate copies of law review titles to be held in the library’s collection. The specifics of the new policy are described

The Case Of The Disappearing Briefs: A Study In Preservation Strategy, Margaret A. Leary

Articles

Federal appellate court records and briefs are significant to researchers in many disciplines, but academic law libraries are discarding them. Ms. Leary chronicles the demise of paper holdings in law libraries, the rise of microforms, and the contents and usage of the National Archives and Records Administration's files. She then derives principles for preservation strategies that may apply to other categories of legal material.