Brian Leiter quotes a Washington & Lee announcement that the law school is undergoing major changes. They are slashing lots of stuff, but increasing the law library budget:
- The current student-faculty ratio (9:1) will be preserved, but with smaller enrollments the allocation for faculty compensation will be reduced by about 20 percent (equivalent to six positions) and will be achieved through attrition over the four-year period. In addition, some senior faculty salaries will have a one-time salary reduction of 2 percent with salaries frozen for all faculty during the three-year period....
- Operating budgets will be reduced by 10 percent in 2015-16 with the exception of the library budget, which will grow by 2 percent.
I know libraries face major budget pressures, especially with escalating journal subscription fees. But aren't law libraries also facing obsolescence? A Pacific Business Journal article reports:
Traditional libraries are becoming obsolete at some Hawaii law firms as technology and online access provide more efficient ways to keep up with legal issues.
But some firms say they’re not quite ready to toss away those big leather-bound books.
... Lexis and WestLaw, do provide most of the manuals needed by attorneys. And, they are more efficient to use, said Daniel Chen, a litigator with Rush Moore LLP, which recently converted from books to digital.
“We had a law library for a long time, but it was an expense to continue to update it,” Chen said. “Every year there are supplements you have to order for the books. Plus, with most of the manuals available online, you pay twice if you have the hard copy too.”
Goodsill Anderson Quinn & Stifel recently tossed its law library for the same reasons. Partner Randy Steverson, head of the firm’s technology committee, agreed with Chen that it didn’t make sense to continually update hard copies of manuals that are available online.
Meanwhile a report of Iowa informs us that:
The once-busy Black Hawk County law library is being dismantled as the Internet provides information once available only in law books.
The library on the third floor of the courthouse used to be heavily used by judges and lawyers, but it’s now rarely used.
The Board of Supervisors voted last week to let the district court dispose of the law books and legal publications that fill high shelves. Officials are offering the books to the Waterloo Public Library, local governments and attorneys.
Ultimately, they could be given to recycling centers.
Assistant County Attorney Pete Burk says, “nobody wants them.”
UCLA's law library is fabulous and our reference librarians are a wonderful resource. But I haven't set foot in it for years. Almost of my research is done online, supplemented by office copies of a few books. If we got rid of the books tomorrow neither my teaching nor my research would take a major hit (probably not even a minor one).
Granted, the law school library can be a useful study hall for the students, but that doesn't mean that their budgets should be going up while everything else is getting slashed.
