No Library is an Island: Thinking More Cooperatively to Preserve our Legal Information Legacies

All libraries make choices about what we keep, since none of us have the space, staff, or financial resources to keep everything forever. We weed, stop or downgrade preservation efforts, and decline purchases all the time, relying on the assumption that some library somewhere will have, and keep, that material so we don’t have to.  Unfortunately, those assumptions no longer stand on as solid ground as they used to, as we all face the relentless challenges of shrinking budgets, space reductions, declining ILL networks, and vendor practices that impose licensing over ownership and fail to preserve their own older content. Those trends show no sign of reversing in the future, and the ABA’s recent revisions to the law library section of the accreditation standards have further removed some of the cover academic law libraries had for keeping physical materials other law libraries could not.

We are rapidly approaching the point – if we haven’t already passed it – where we can’t communally rely on the implicit promise that one of us will be the “library of last resort” for a given item and not withdraw that last surviving copy, or let it deteriorate to unusability on our shelves.  Instead of accepting the inevitability of the race to the bottom, law libraries can choose more cooperative approaches to legal information preservation, reaping practical benefits in terms of more efficient budgetary and space management as well as fulfilling our libraries’ fundamental mission of preserving access to critical information.

One such approach, collaborative collection agreements, is being undertaken by four Philadelphia-area academic law libraries with respect to steward Pennsylvania’s state and local legal history and ensure access to critical legal materials for students, scholars, practitioners and other users into the future. The Pennsylvania Collaboration is a pilot project by Temple University Beasley School of Law Library, Drexel University Thomas R. Kline School of Law Legal Research Center, Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law Library, and the Biddle Law Library at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School to collaboratively collect and preserve Pennsylvania materials in print.

The first phase of the consortium's work, currently underway, will focus on primary materials, including case law, statutes, and regulatory materials. Building on a completed inventory of the member’s current holdings, each member institution will take on responsibility for specific geographic areas and the associated legal materials, providing space for storage, preferential ILL, and enhanced access to each other.  Following successful completing and analysis of the first phase, the members expect to extend the cooperation to selected secondary materials.

The members hope that this consortium will not only benefit us and our communities by ensuring that key materials are not lost, but also provide a framework for others to create collaborative collection development and preservation agreements. To that end, we plan to transparently document the process of establishing and maintaining the partnership, and offer insights to others from both our successes and our challenges along the way. Papers on the collaboration have already been presented at several conferences.

Similarly, LIPA is currently in discussions to make collaborating on collection maintenance and preservation easier by establishing a resource center for those interested in consortial arrangements, including a repository for policies, MOUs, and other functional documents. Stay tuned for information as that project gets started, and in the meantime, if you are weeding titles, consider joining and donating to the PALMPrint repository to ensure lesser-held or unique titles aren’t lost forever.