It’s cliché at this point to say that Legal Education is in a time of upheaval and change. There are calls on all sides to create practice ready attorneys or at least more real world skills training. Guess what? Your law school is already doing this. Yes, the legal research and writing faculty (who are often librarians) at your school has been using the law school library as a practice laboratory to give students the real world skills they need. As we are all struggling to find new and innovative techniques to improve legal education, we should remember that we all have a laboratory filled with all the tools that our students will use in their practice that we can utilize in our endeavors.
Source: www.slaw.ca
Some basic facts:
- While, in the above example, the library budget is increasing by 2%, I can almost guarantee that its material costs are going up 10% or more. Annually.
- The subscription databases that are “replacing libraries” are actually paid for from the library budget. They are not a competitor to the library, but rather they are a digital branch of it.
- Yes, even books are on the databases. But not all are. Also, depending on the agreement with the database vendors, they may or may not be accessible to members of the public. As many academic law libraries are open to the public and are a filler of the Access to Justice, it’s important that the library has resources available to them.
- Everything is not on the Internet. Not even close.
