Symposium Introduction - The Law Librarian's Role in the Scholarly Enterprise

The law library is an essential component of legal education for many reasons relating both to the physical and human resources in the law library. Librarians perform an important function as intermediaries between information and its users, both students and faculty, and they are experts in establishing the authority of legal information. The legal academic world is becoming more and more interdisciplinary and empirical, and legal scholarship thrives on complex and sophisticated research. Aside from the librarian's role as guardians of knowledge, librarians also need to provide more sophisticated services to faculty members related to their research. Becoming an integral part of the research team with faculty allows librarians to add value to the scholarly enterprise in anticipation of scholarly needs, not merely in response to individual research requests received out of context. The papers in this issue of the Journal of Law and Education and the others presented at a conference1 held in November 2008 explore the law librarian's role in the legal scholarly enterprise. Professor Stanley Katz of Princeton University delivered the keynote address focusing on the librarian's core intellectual skill of selecting materials and building both digital and print collections to support faculty scholarship. Other presentations focused on the use of bibliographic management software to manage scholarship, the instructional role of librarians in improving information competency in the age of the internet, a call for a formal institutional scholarly role of a "professional research associate" within law libraries, and a discussion of librarian status within the academy. Professor Katz in his address laid out the most important issues and trends currently affecting scholarship and libraries. He points out that current law faculty who frequently have advanced degrees in other fields are not invested in the law. They seek to do research in areas related to law and divide their scholarly loyalty between law and other social science disciplines. The emphasis on interdisciplinary research has in some ways made newer faculty less loyal to the law as an academic discipline. Recognizing that the introduction of technology into libraries and the academe has many benefits, Katz also notes that technology has added to the librarian's work; it has not relieved librarians from any existing duties. Technology has added tasks to the librarian's plate, not taken any away. With these additional burdens, the challenge for librarians is to develop tools that integrate the various forms of information currently available- born digital information, electronic information, web-based video and audio, and the print collection- for use by scholars. Intellectual property issues have come to dominate scholarship and research libraries as never before. Along with the complexity of the various forms and types of information come more complex intellectual property issues. In the future, the operative principles of copyright law may be determined by the Google Books settlement, a private contract, rather than reference to public law such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The current trend in education and pedagogy is active learning- the engagement and participation of students in and outside the classroom with the course material. Some of this active learning must include engaging students and scholars in the library. An important curricular role of the librarian is to teach the authority of information as well as how to locate it. Katz provocatively suggests that we may indeed see the digitization of all human knowledge within a generation- a feat unthinkable just a decade ago. With the increased availability of digital information, digital scholarship2 becomes more prevalent. In Katz' view, digital scholarship is by definition collaborative and, thus, challenges the notion of the solitary scholar- a long standing tradition of the legal academe. …