Minimum Holdings for Law Libraries

Standards for law libraries may help to stop the damage caused by continual cancelling of highly valued serial and monograph holdings, damage which has been going on, in several countries, such as Australia, since the seventies. There is a limit to what a law school needs in its library to function effectively. No matter what standards are being set for the composition of materials, the flow of adequate funding is paramount.

The SPTL had provided guidance to law schools and law librarians since 1958 through statements of ‘minimum holdings’ of specified legal publications.

The Standards for University Law Libraries developed by the Law Librarians Group of the Australasian Universities Law Schools Association, initially recommended 50,000 volumes but this was quickly increased
to 100,000 volumes [COMMITTEE OF AUSTRALIAN LAW DEANS, AUSTRALIAN LAW SCHOOL LIBRARIES: A POSITION STATEMENT AND STANDARDS June 1995 (Revised, September 1995) Guideline 3, 40-46 (Centre For Legal Education, 2001). See also THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION, STANDARDS FOR APPROVAL OF LAW SCHOOLS AND INTERPRETATIONS (Indianapolis, The Office of the Consultant on American Legal education to the American Bar association 1986 as amended 1994); Society of Public Teachers of Law, Committee on Libraries Statement of Minimum Holdings for Law Libraries in England and Wales (revised 1986) 6 LEGAL STUD. 195 (1986) and Supplement 7 LEGAL STUD. 224 (1987); British and Irish Association of Law Librarians Sub-Committee on Standards, Standards for Law Libraries, 12 L. LIBR. (1981); British and Irish Association of Law Librarians Sub-Committee on Standards, Standards for Law Libraries, appendices vi-xi, Recommended Holdings for Law Libraries 14 The Law Librarian (1983) Special Issue].

Nigeria

The National Universities Commission as well as the Council of Legal Education made it
a pre-requisite to full accreditation that all universities that offer law as a degree course must
have functional well stocked law libraries.

The Council of Legal Education has provided university law libraries’ collection
standards. To ensure that faculty law libraries meet the accreditation requirements, the standard
list of law library minimum requirements was released to the law faculties by the Council of
Legal Education. The list has 23 law classes which was subdivided into 535 titles. The classes
were broken into:

* the local and foreign laws and statutes;
* local and foreign law journals (which is the subject of this study);
* local and foreign law reports and
* local and foreign law text books.

Most of the law books are authored and published abroad, and usually law libraries find it difficult to acquire them because of the problems associated with foreign exchange in Nigeria.

Australia

AULSA (now ALTA) first adopted law school and library standards in 1961. Concern in the early seventies about the changing scene in tertiary law education produced the 1974 Richardson Report for AULSA on Law Libraries in Australian Universities. Shortly after this report the law libraries began to make cancellations. Every year since the late seventies law libraries
have been cancelling titles, some commonly held in Australia, some unique.

Further concern at the state of law libraries was expressed in the Pearce Report in 1987. …

There are difficulties with Guideline 3 on the core collection. As a statement of what the library should collect it suffers some lack of credibility by overuse of the word “all”. For example, it
would seem to be irresponsible for the university library to aim to collect “all legal texts, treatises and loose-leaf services published in or about Australia or New Zealand, but excluding texts for secondary schools”. Many such texts are simply not worth collecting and a first class collection will be testament to its librarian’s selection skills. Unfortunately generalisation in this form pervades this Guideline and detracts from its value. For the primary material it is valid, but for secondary material the standard would have been more effective if it reflected the title’s intent: “the core law library collection”.

In my view there is more useful guidance to be gained in the 1974 AULSA Report which succeeded to some degree in mixing the general with the specific. The earlier report also gives a good listing for international law which does not have its own section in the 1995 standards. It is useful to have some classic titles mentioned rather than a statement such as “Basic legal texts from major bibliographies” (44) followed by a list of eight works which between them probably contain most current legal publications. It is rather bewildering to a new law librarian to be directed to look in International Legal Books in Print 1990–1991 (2 vols.). Perhaps some guidelines by topic such as the AALS Law Books Recommended for Libraries (1967–76) would be more useful, at least for the classic texts up to the 1970s.

Electronic publishing in the last two years has expanded so quickly that this section of Guideline 3 is already out of date. It relies on the direction to select “relevant” products but as a standard it may be better now to couch it in terms of, for example, “one comprehensive database of federal case-law with satisfactory search facility and standard of printout”.

Author: Jacqueline Elliott, Court Librarian, High Court of Australia

Further Reading

Dada, T.O. (2007). Acquisition of Law Libraries: emerging issues. Paper presented at the
course on Technical Services in Law Libraries organized by the NIALS Abuja/Lagos,
June 26 – 28.
Kotso, J.E. (2007). Standards for Law Libraries: concepts,
considerations and consequences. In C.O. Omekwu (ed) Law
Libraries in Nigeria, Abuja: Nigerian Association of Law Libraries,
1 – 6.