The Ginger (Law) Librarian

The things we spend our time on: Two librarians at Yale Law School have found that Yale Law School created The Bluebook , not The Harvard Law Review. As noted in the NYTimes article : Among the low points in an American legal education is the law student’s first encounter with The Bluebook, a 582-page style manual formally known as “A Uniform System of Citation.” It is a comically elaborate thicket of random and counterintuitive rules about how to cite judicial decisions, law review articles and the like. It is both grotesque and indispensable. True, true, and true. And the creation of this behemoth was originally credited to The Harvard Law Review. The Harvard Law Review has long claimed credit for creating The Bluebook. But a new article from two librarians at Yale Law School says its rival’s account is “wildly erroneous.”  The standard account of the origins of The Bluebook is reflected in a 1987 speech by Erwin N. Griswold, who had been president of The Harvard Law Rev...

As the library liaison to a law review, I blog about law reviews often (just filter my posts by 'law review').  I am pleased to announce that two of my (very) short articles dealing with the various ways that law librarians can help law reviews have been published. The articles discuss law librarians assisting with publication agreements and law librarians creating a law review library for cite-checking . The articles are part of a broader Best Practices Manual that came from the 2013 National Conference of Law Reviews.  For more information on law librarians assisting law journals, please see: Keele, B. J. & Pearse, M. (2012). How librarians can help improve law journal publishing . Law Library Journal , 104(3). 383-410.

I would like to start out by saying that Benjamin J. Keele is the man! He is a Research and Instructional Services Librarian at Indiana University's Robert H. McKinney's School of Law, and he takes an active interest in legal periodicals as the liaison to IU's three law journals. He is also an accomplished scholar , and I have learned so much from his scholarship. I sent Ben an email to get his advice about what my law journals should consider when contemplating a move to go all digital. His response covered all of my concerns -- budget constraints, hardware/software implications, law review turnover, and sending to third parties (LOC, Wexis, Hein).  Ben gave me permission to post his email response to this blog to further the discussion of an online-only law journal. The good news about law journals is that their content is pretty basic: it is almost all text. The formatting and pagination are also fairly easy to maintain. The biggest risk for law journal pre...

Most of us are in agreement that it's time for law reviews to go online. As a librarian, my biggest concern is archiving. I want to make sure that we do not lose the valuable information that legal scholars create. From the Durham Statement : "[W]e believe that, if law schools are willing to commit to stable and open digital storage for the journals they publish, there are no longer good reasons for individual libraries to rely on paper copies as the archival format. Agree-upon stable, open, digital formats will ensure that legal scholarship will be preserved long-term." I've been trying to find best practices for archiving, and I haven't come up with much. What we consider "stable, open, and digital" is constantly changing, and there are no set standards. From the FAQ's on the Durham Statement's website : Are there "stable, open, and digital" formats available now for preserving law journals? We recognize that there is work to...

It's amazing that in this day and age, no flagship law review has taken the lead to go all digital. To date, all of the American law school's flagship law reviews still publish in print and most are duplicating coverage through their own institutional website or through a digital repository. The information is also uploaded to Lexis, Westlaw, and HeinOnline. There are many pros to going all digital -- the cost savings associated with canceling print, greater access, and marketing through social media, to name a few. In fact, the issue was solidified in 2008 with the Durham Statement on Open Access in Legal Scholarship . "[T]he directors of the law libraries at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Harvard University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, the University of Texas, and Yale University met in Durham, North Carolina at the...

This year, The National Conference of Law Reviews was hosted by my law school.  I was lucky enough to present on the various things that I do with the law review to help make it a better publication. It is no secret that law librarians are often an under-utilized group, so it was nice to talk about some of the ways that law librarians can assist with law journal publishing. Now I have the task of writing articles to memorialize my presentation.  The NCLR Committee will publish a NCLR Best Practices Manual that will cover the content of the most recent NCLR. My articles will include a discussion on revising publication agreements, how to create a mini-library for a law review, how to investigate a sophisticated online edition, and how to use social media to publicize recent articles. My experience at the NCLR was amazing because it gave me a chance to connect with other law review librarians.  It felt reassuring that many of our law review functions overlapped, and...