Introduction
Articles on academic libraries and academic librarianship written nearly 40 years agoFootnote 1 and the early SPTL standardsFootnote 2 describe a world of fewer students and many multiple sets of printed series of law reports and journals. Academic law libraries were often housed in separate buildings from the main library. With fewer law students there was less of a market for student books and less options available for law libraries to expand their stock. Titles went out of print and could become quite difficult to source. The publishing regimes of organisations like HMSO were driven by government departments and it was very difficult to source material once the initial print run had been exhausted.
It is difficult to recall a different world of legal publishing where, if lucky, the reader would find a short book on the subject of his interest that might have been published many years before, and any book was thought to be a way of finding out about an obscure subject. Even as late as 1985Footnote 3 it was common for readers to be referred to books published 20 years earlier as a source of authority on a particular subject area. Academic libraries started 40 years ago were often pleased to house any material on a particular topic on their shelves. There was less purely academic publishing in law.
The academic law library of the early 21st century is more rarely a separate library integrated within the law school and more frequently an area within the main university library. Changes in technology and the UK government's desire to see greater numbers of students given the opportunity to attend university have greatly increased the numbers of students going through law schools. Although there may be an expressed longing for a separate law library, the costs of maintaining that separate library are often too high to contemplate. There is a conflict between maintaining the traditional print law libraryFootnote 4 and recognising the preferences of many users for electronic access.
Arriving at significant anniversaries often makes organisations and individuals review what they have achieved and where they are going. In 2008, Kent Law School, http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/index.html, celebrated its 40th anniversary. At Kent students are encouraged to think “critically” and draw on the literature of many other subjects, so it is hard to imagine the separate law library model working well for either students or academics.
Kent Law School has never had a separate law library and prior to 2006 had only had two law librarians during its first 38 years. The appointment of a replacement law librarian in 2006 was an opportunity to review the provision being made for law library access and check to ensure that it was fit for purpose. There is now less demand for printed materials as the only source for a reference. Law students use the library as somewhere they can concentrate on their studies, accessing mainly book materials in printed format as and when they need them. Their preferred means of access to journals, law reports and legislation is via on-line sources. Access statistics show that it is law students at Kent who make the highest number of visits each year, but they do not necessarily borrow as much material as some of their colleagues in other subject areas.
The design of a programme of adjustments and alterations to services can be driven by a number of factors: user comment and feedback, external drivers, observation and overall changes in operations.
User comment and feedback
Increasingly academic libraries are driven by feedback and by scores generated in national and local surveys of library users. Individual feedback is always welcome and can enable a more timely response to issues raised. At Kent feedback is collected both by Information Services and by KLS and the following mechanisms are open to academic staff and students:
• National surveys – this group includes surveys which often have rather general questions relating to library usage. The National Student Survey (NSS) is increasingly important, but single responses by one or two disgruntled final year students can often have a disproportionate affect on rankings, as there is so little leeway between the scores obtained by many institutions. It is difficult to use general responses to general questions to improve and enhance library provision.
• Local surveys – Information Services run surveys (most on an annual basis, although there is the opportunity to occasionally survey reaction to a service innovation). Questions can be included on any issue. Responses are analysed and are usually made available to academic liaison librarians for their own areas of responsibility so that they can use them to influence service development. Responses are anonymised and are usually well thought out and can give a good guide to reaction to service innovation (or lack of it).
• Student representatives – each KLS course can elect a representative who will input student feedback to e.g. Learning and Teaching Committee, Library Committee and who may also represent individual student's feedback when there are issues relating to e.g. the supply of course texts.
• Individuals – academic staff and students are encouraged to contact the liaison librarian by any means to raise issues that affect their use of the library.
• Focus groups – these are held by the KLS Head of Department to obtain the views of different cohorts of students.
• Comments from external examiners.
External drivers
The greatest external driver for change in academic library use has been the availability of the world wide web and accessibility via broadband. The large proportion of original source material (law reports, legislation) and secondary materials (journal articles) available online has meant that in many cases students and staff do not need to physically attend the law library in order to access material. At Kent there is an overwhelming preference for accessing material online rather than in print format. If online use is temporarily disabled, many academics and students will prefer to wait for its reinstatement rather than use the print alternative. Anecdotal evidence is that there is still a reluctance to read long documents on screen, but online access is good for checking points and quick dip access.
A glance at the increase in student numbers recorded in the BIALL/SLS surveys and a review of academic law library expenditureFootnote 5 will, not surprisingly, show that increase in student numbers has not been replicated by a corresponding increase in academic law library funding. The popularity of electronic resources comes as a welcome relief where access is an issue.
Observation
Using observation can be useful where it does not require a prolonged use of resource. Judgement about use of a reference collection situated very close to staff accommodation can be confirmed as low use if few users are seen using the material over a typical academic use cycle of one year. Constantly requesting students “not to…” can lead to the observation that the current layout/set up is not working effectively.
Overall changes in operations
Provision of an innovative service can help to make better use of available facilities. Typical changes might be variation in loan periods, provision of a café within the building, provision of group study space. Academic law libraries need to be capable of flexing and reacting to use patterns.
Implementing changes
In three years at Kent, the following have been implemented. It was a combination of change drivers in each case that made the decision timely:
Lawlinks upgrade
Lawlinks, http://www.kent.ac.uk/lawlinks/index.html was a major service to support. The decision to upgrade has been documented previously in this journal.Footnote 6 There was strong support from academic colleagues to continue with the website. It remains a useful teaching tool for the law librarian and takes the place of separate handouts. It is a way of ensuring that all students have a reference point for accessing both free and paid for legal information and have guides available to set them off on the path to finding legal information.
Disbanding of separate reference collection
Like many law libraries, high use encyclopaedias and other reference works, which often required the intervention of librarian support, were kept in an area equipped with appropriate furniture close to where such support could be offered. The increased use of online services had reduced the use of this material to a stage where it was mainly used by visitors. The decision was taken to disband the collection and integrate it with the rest of the book stock and, soon after, to discontinue the majority of the print subscriptions. The space is now occupied by a very popular group study area (the only one close to the law collection) and by the current issues of periodicals. The law faculty had particularly requested that a display of all current issues should be available for browsing.
Collection management
Many of the changes that have been made in this area are directly driven by feedback. Implementing changes here has also taken the most time. Students expect to see current material, although they often confuse this with recently published material. They often find it difficult to acquire the skills necessary to distinguish material that is outdated. This has resulted in us no longer leaving superseded editions of texts on our main collection shelves. All of our stock is being checked for currency and material that is outdated is removed to a store area.
Students also complained that there were insufficient copies of relevant and recommended texts. There is now a matrix that is used to decide how many copies of a text to purchase. Factors that are used are numbers of students on a module (individual course eg human rights law), what stage (or year) the course is taught, whether the students are expected to purchase their own copy of a text, or whether it is recommended for further reading, the popularity of previous editions (using data from our library management system), whether there is also an e-book version of the book, etcetera.
Kent students have expressed reluctance to use e-books as their preferred study mechanism. Like many academic libraries, Kent has chosen to provide e-books as a back up to the print sources. This deals with issues of pressure on numbers of copies. Different publishers have different policies with regard to making texts available as e-books. Although students are sometimes reluctant to use an e-book as a complete substitute for print, they can take the pressure off the library at times of very high demand. Normally a print and an e-copy are now made available. The exception to this is practitioner texts. With reluctance print copies of practitioner texts and encyclopaedias have been cancelled and are now mainly provided in e-format. E-format with its links makes these titles easy to use and navigate and equally available to all students whether they are working on or off campus.
Growth of postgraduate numbers in recent years has also led to increasing the breadth and scope of material being purchased that is suitable for use by students writing dissertations.
When new modules are developed, special attention is paid to ensure that a suitable range of materials to support study is purchased.
New academics joining KLS are invited to deposit their research bibliographies with the law library. The bibliography is then annotated to indicate which material is already in the library, what could be obtained if required and which material we would struggle to obtain. This allows both the library and the academic to understand where problems might arise if new modules are developed according to this subject expertise.
Students at both undergraduate and postgraduate level had expressed difficulties in accessing recommended reading. In summer 2008 the Templeman Library reorganised and re-branded its short loan collection into a core text collection.Footnote 7 After the first year of operation usage figures for the law part of the collection are greatly increased and there have been very few complaints about the difficulty of access to recommended texts.
These changes have budgetary consequences. As neither BVC nor LPC is run at Kent we no longer maintain print sets of the major encyclopaedias or many loose-leaf publications. We no longer provide Blackstone's Statutes for student use. Our students have access to alternatives online and are expected to use them. There have not been cutbacks on expenditure; rather there has been a redistribution of resources to enhance the collection according to the current teaching and research interests of Kent Law School. Holdings are being strengthened in areas where teaching is developing.
Use of online is very important to our students and academic staff. They can access this material on or off campus at whatever time they choose to work. They have access to a good range of full text materials and journals. The range of journal titles has also been reviewed. Certain titles were cut and others added at the discretion of the academic staff.
The final and most recent development in collection management strategies is the plan for the law section to be reclassified. A local variation of Moys has been used for many years. The law collection has developed and changed its emphasis. The local variation no longer works for Kent students who are confused by it. Funding has been obtained to return to “pure” Moys. It will be an opportunity to tidy up anomalies that have crept in over the years which result in puzzled students asking “Why…?” too frequently and in comments made on feedback surveys.
Skills training and workshops
The use of legal materials has been well integrated into law courses for many years at Kent but that has not spared it from review. Although training was provided it was disconnected from activities to reinforce that training. Students often struggled to understand its relevance. We have continued the practice of using students to induct students in the library familiarisation training at the start of their courses. The aim of this has become more focused so that the law librarian now provides training to the students who act as mentors to the Stage 1 students. Each mentor is charged by the law school with ensuring that their mentees get a tour of the library and the law librarian provides a checklist of issues that must be covered. This varies according to our observation of last year's Stage 1 students and the things that they might have had difficulty with. It also focuses on innovations in service delivery that both mentors and new students need to know about.
Less training is delivered at the start of the session. It is felt that little of this training will be remembered if there is no chance to practise what is being taught. Undergraduates need to read and access case sources very quickly, so they get shown how to access them at the beginning of the year. This then gets reinforced by specific databases usage workshops which every student is expected to sign up for and attend. These take place half way through the first term.
Immediately prior to assessment 2 (when students are hoping to improve on their performance in assessment 1), students are shown how to access the different resources available specifically related to the assessment questions. Although the traditional lecture format is used for this, the relevance to the assessment makes it a focused session. All students are expected to work through the Citing the Law resource, https://ilrb.cf.ac.uk/citingreferences/oscola/tutorial/ and to submit their work using OSCOLA.
During the last few years additional training has been given to students at the point at which they are planning their first extended essay or special study. The subjects are diverse but well controlled. Up until this year the additional training has been given towards the second half of the second term in the property module. Three one hour lectures are given covering the different sources of material that may be used and examples relate to the topics that may be selected. The lectures are recorded and students can refer back to them. This helps to avoid having to deal with individual students on basic usage details. Time can then be given to more specific assistance with specialised requests. From next academic year this training will be given a term earlier in a different module.
Students opting for modules where dissertations are written may also attend module specific workshops arranged at the request of the module convenors.
The impact of the training is carefully monitored and improvements in student engagement with research tools are continually sought.
There have also been plans led by KLS academics and the former law librarian to provide a website (through a commercial law publisher) linked to a book which will provide many skills exercises that can be used by undergraduate students. Problems with the development of the website have led to a delay in implementation. When it does appear it will act as a useful reference point to which to refer students.
Additional training is now offered to postgraduate students on taught courses. In addition to induction sessions and specific training in the use of reference management software, every taught postgraduate student has the option of attending a subject specific research skills workshop. Again this is a useful way of ensuring that all postgraduates are aware of the resources available to them and start to use them early on in the year and can choose to be well practised prior to commencing dissertation work. This will be the first time that many of our international students have been exposed to the wealth and selection of resources in this way. It is also an opportunity for all postgraduates to refresh their knowledge of searching techniques.
Our final group of users are research postgraduates and academic staff and they can request one-to-one sessions to suit their own research timetables.
Aiming at fitness for purpose
Academic law libraries are subject to pressures to change in the same way as all libraries. The catalysts for change are users and universities themselves through pressure for better management and use of resources. Academic law libraries need to maintain pace with user requirements in the same way that all libraries do. What makes law unique as an academic subject is the way in which through the work of the Society of Legal Scholars and BIALL there are standards and annual monitoringFootnote 8 of academic law libraries is undertaken. This gives law schools and academic law libraries useful reference points on which to compare the services they are offering. Use made of law library services at Kent is increasing in response to the changes outlined.
