Law Librarianship Commons^™

Library E-Book Licensing And State Law Reform, Kincaid Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Libraries don’t “buy” most e-books the way they buy print books; they license them. That reality is at the crossroads of budgetary constraints and patron satisfaction in modern libraries. With print, a library typically pays once, owns the copy, and lends it until it wears out. With e-books, publishers and intermediaries, like platforms such as OverDrive, commonly offer time-limited or loan-limit-ed terms (for example, a license that expires after a set number of checkouts or after a set period), can impose embargoes, and can set prices far above consumer retail. Libraries argue these terms frustrate their public mission and make …

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 …

Cool Tools 2022 Spotlight: Airtable, Sarah Woloschuk

Law Librarian Scholarship

Picture this: I’m opening up an Excel spreadsheet. Contained within are the citations for faculty publications that have been held up from being added to our institutional repository (IR). The reason for the delay? All of them need to have permissions requested from a publisher before we can load a PDF. I’m new to the Scholarly Publishing Librarian position and curious about what this part of the workflow might look like.

And then I see that there are over 750 records-in-waiting.

My next thought was: how the heck am I going to keep track of what I do to clear …

Ask A Director: Tackling Technology Competencies, Kincaid C. Brown

Law Librarian Scholarship

Question: What technology competencies do librarians and legal information professionals need to assist their organizations as they grapple with issues such as data analytics, artificial intelligence, etc.?

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.

"And Other Duties As Assigned:" Expanding The Boundaries Of The E- Resource Lifecycle To Get Things Done, Stacy Fowler, Marcella Lesher, Esta Tovstiadi

Law Librarian Scholarship

This presentation focused on how elements of the electronic resource lifecycle, such as those described in the NASIG Core Competencies for Electronic Resource Librarians and the Techniques for Electronic Resource Management, apply to the management of physical library projects, including the weeding and shifting of physical collections, a digitization project, as well as other “duties as assigned” that are part of the average librarian’s workload at a small library. Additionally, this presentation touched on issues related to managing print and electronic collections in law libraries.

Service: The Core Of Law Librarianship, Margaret A. Leary

Law Librarian Scholarship

This guest editorial by Margaret A. Leary describes her vision of one of the core values of our profession: service. It eloquently reminds us of our responsibilities as law librarians.