RIPS Blog - Law Librarians Assisting Law Journals

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Please see my recent Research Instruction & Patron Services (RIPS) Blog post about law librarians working with law journals.

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For The Love Of Archives

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On a night out last month, I was on my way to a R. Buckminster Fuller documentary at the Detroit Institute of Arts when my friend asked me, "why do we need libraries and librarians when everything is online?" I hardly had a moment to answer because the documentary was about to start, but I did rattle something off about the slow process of digitization and the need to organize the world's information. Then something magical happened. During the beginning of the documentary, the narrator went into great detail about his visit to the Dymaxion Chronofile . "The Dymaxion Chronofile is Buckminster Fuller's attempt to document his life as completely as possible. He created a very large scrapbook in which he documented his life every 15 minutes from 1920 to 1983. The total collection is estimated to be 270 feet (80 m) worth of paper. This is said to be the most documented human life in history." And the very reason that we still have this wonderful piece of rec
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Law Library Lessons in Vendor Relations from the UC/Elsevier Split

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In early March, the University of California , one of the largest research institutions in the world, blew up negotiations with Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of research articles in the world. The university would no longer pay Elsevier millions of dollars a year to subscribe to its journals. It simply walked away. Despite months of contract negotiations , Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals. UC's goal of open access is something that every institution should move toward because: (1) At the same time academic institutions are paying for access to journals, their employees are providing labor to journals for free. AND (2) journals pay for the research that they publish. In the United States, research funding often comes from government agencies—in other words, from taxpayers. Yet if members of the public tried to read new acad
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Library Catalogs & Discovery Layers

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Librarians are adept at searching for material in traditional catalogs because we understand how the catalog searches metadata. The catalog searches for the classic fields like title and author. But there is a push to make library catalogs more like Google. We are dealing with the "Google generation" after all, and if our patrons can't find the information that they are looking for in library catalogs by searching a few keywords, then the fear is that they won't use the library catalogs (thus library resources) and will always resort to Google and the very convenient (and maybe less reputable) resources. The trend now is to use software that allows for discovery layers in catalogs . "Discovery layers are a relatively new software component for libraries that provide a search interface for users to find information held in the library’s catalog and beyond. Typically, a discovery layer is based on an enterprise search platform that can interact with a metadata
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