Law Library Statistics, Ranking and the "Value" of Law Libraries

Special guests will include, Scott Pagel, Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Frank Houdek, and Darin Fox, current and past members of the ABA Data Policy and Collection Committee and noted experts in law library data and statistics. Regular line up of co-hosts and pundits includes: Ken Hirsh, Elizabeth Farrell Clifford, Roger Skalbeck, Mandy Lee, and Greg Lambert. 

By some objective measures, academic law libraries are “disappearing” before our very eyes. The ABA Annual Questionnaire may have no law library questions next year and Self Study/SEQs now only contain about ten questions regarding the library! (In the past year I served on two site teams and the report template that I completed last month was smaller than the one I did last year!) Does it mean we’re less important? Nope. Not by a long shot. Other indicators show strong evidence that law libraries in law schools are more important and popular than ever before.

Topics that will be considered are how the center of gravity is shifting away from objective measures of what is a law library, to subjective ones that emphasize services that we provide to our institutions. Anecdotally, it seems that law libraries are as popular as ever and are providing many expanded services, such as managing digital publication in law schools, PERMA, developing digitization of primary materials, expanded teaching throughout curricula via specialized research classes, etc., etc. But on paper, in the ABA Questionnaire, SEQ, etc., it seems we’re disappearing.