WHAT DO THEY HAVE THAT WE DON'T HAVE?: A COMPARISON OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLECTIONS IN INDEPENDENT LAW SCHOOL LIBRARIES

摘要

During the 2000 Special Libraries Association Conference, I presented a paper on the subject of interdisciplinary competency for academic law librarians. As part of my paper, I discussed the collection at California Western School of Law (CWSL), and presented statistics on the number of interdisciplinary materials held by the CWSL library. Based on a suggestion from an audience member, I decided to embark on a comparison study of the collections of libraries for other independent, ABA-accredited law schools. I studied the interdisciplinary collections of 11 other independent law school libraries, along with reexamining the collection at CWSL. I focused the study on independent law schools because, like CWSL, they are not affiliated with a larger university community. Unlike university-affiliated law schools, students at independent law schools do not have the same level of access to other university libraries with a more diverse collection. Therefore, the students would be more dependent on the collection housed at the law school's library. I selected the 11 other law schools from a list of approved law schools published on the American Bar Association's web site. I searched each of the library catalogs for these law schools, using the Library of Congress classification system. I then calculated the number of non-legal records (i.e., items with call numbers other than "K", "J", or "X") in each collection, and determined the estimated percentage of non-legal materials for each law library's collection. The findings of my analyses are detailed in the following paper. Generally, the percentages of non-legal materials in the collections were fairly close among the 12 schools, averaging at approximately 24 percent. The highest non-legal Library of Congress classification was "H" ("Social Sciences"), with "HV" ("Social Service, Welfare, Criminology") being the highest sub-classification in 9 of the 12 libraries studied.