The Indiana Lawyer writes
Proposed changes to law school library accreditation standards are raising concerns for Indiana law librarians, but advocates for online-only law schools say they see the issue differently.
Initially, on Aug. 17, the Council of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar released for comment proposed revisions to Standards 601-606 and 701-702. Among the more notable changes would have been language in Standard 601 saying “
(a) physical plant is not required” for a law library, and the removal of language from Standard 603 explicitly requiring a law library director to be a full-time employee.
Public comment on the proposal is open until Sept. 29, but already a new version of the revisions has been released.
A second memo was issued Aug. 30 that, most notably, removes the “physical plant not required” language. Instead, the revision to Standard 601 now says, “A law school shall maintain a law library and information resources sufficient to operate in compliance with the Standards, carry out its program of legal education, and support scholarship and research.”
“The purpose of these revisions is to give law libraries flexibility to use technology, information resources, and collection formats most appropriate for their law schools,” the Aug. 30 memo says. “Furthering flexibility for law libraries, there is no longer a requirement of a core collection (former Standard 606(a)) that must consist of the materials enumerated in former Standard 606(b); revised Standard 604(a) instead requires reliable and efficient access to a collection of materials and information resources that is complete, current, and in sufficient quantity or with sufficient continuing access.”
Librarians react
Miriam Murphy, director of the Ruth Lilly Law Library and a senior lecturer at Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, said the initial proposal to remove the physical plant requirement was concerning.
“It felt like the library was being disenfranchised from legal education to a certain degree because as we all know, the media out there on the internet and things are just so unregulated in a lot of ways and there’s a lot of misinformation out there,” Murphy said.
She pointed to how vast the internet is and said without resources and guides, misinformation can spread and it can be difficult for students to determine what is accurate. Some students need face-to-face interaction to understand how to research a topic or write a paper, she said, and that brings them into the physical law library.
“Some of the most important things are interactions, are face-to-face, not just online: students being able to have the ability to have study groups, a place to casually congregate,” Murphy said.
The IU McKinney library director gave as an example a student who spent their summer working as an associate. When the student returned the next fall, they said they were the only associate who knew how to effectively use online resources like LexisNexis, Westlaw and Bloomberg — skills they learned in the law library.
“We went from the guardians of the books to the purveyors of information, and the information is a lot online, but not entirely,” Murphy said. “You need a guide, because it is a wild world of information out there.”
Down in Bloomington at the IU Maurer School of Law, Susan deMaine, director of the Jerome Hall Library and a senior lecturer in law, said she isn’t concerned about her library, specifically, but she does have concern for her colleagues.
