Supporting Scholarship: Thoughts on the Role of the Academic Librarian

Abstract

Discussing the role of the law library in legal education is necessary and essential, both because of the demands libraries place on increasingly tight law school budgets and space, and the challenges that libraries face as the information they collect and organize has moved largely from print to digital formats. This paper explores the roles of academic law librarians in supporting faculty scholarship within the context of the forces affecting libraries, librarians, and legal education in the (still early) twenty-first century. Although it has been more than 30 years since the widespread adoption of the legal research databases in the 1970s, the legal information environment continues to be seen as changing and uncertain, roiled by such new developments as working paper services providing pre-publication looks at new articles, growing interest in blogs and other varieties of short form legal scholarship, and the potential for open access publishing to reduce or eliminate reliance on printed law journals. As these developments continue to affect the processes of legal research and scholarly communications in law, what implications do they have for the role of law librarians in those processes?

Keywords: law libraries, scholarly communication, law librarians, legal scholarship