This email message is intended for academic law librarians. The contents
discuss the results of a recent survey regarding casebooks conducted
through the AALL Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section
listserve. At the suggestion of others, I'm posting the original email on
the Law-Lib Listserv for those who may be interested in the topic but are
not on the All-SIS Listserv.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 4 Sep 2002 10:40:37 -0700 (Pacific Daylight Time)
From: Leonette Williams <lwilliam@law.usc.edu>
To: all-sis@lists.washlaw.edu
Subject: Casebooks-Survey Results
Thank you for your replies to my question regarding casebooks. I received
26 replies which as I promised, I will summarize for you.
In general, my survey sample showed that the majority of libraries do not
purchase required casebooks for law school courses. A few libraries do
not purchase or collect casebooks at all. Libraries which either purchase
or collect casebooks share the same reasoning for adding casebooks to
their collection: 1) a member of the law school's faculty authored the
casebook; 2) a member of the law school faculty requested that the
casebook be purchased; 3) the casebook was received as a gift. Several
librarians stated that their acquisitions budgets could not afford to
purchase required casebooks. A few libraries had examined circulation
statistics for their casebooks and discovered that the majority of titles
were never checked out.
As many of the replies that I received stated that casebooks were accepted
as gifts, I'd like to share some relevant information which we discovered
in a recent poll of our law faculty. The USC Law Library maintains a
policy of accepting one copy of all casebooks regardless if the gift
offered is a current casebook or an older edition of a casebook. We
polled our faculty on their usage of casebooks in an effort to determine
whether or not we should weed the collection of older editions of
casebooks. The number of responses from our faculty was significant; over
one-half responded. The responses were unanimous - keep all casebooks,
older and current editions. The faculty explained to me that they find
reviewing many casebooks, from the various different legal publishers and
regardless of their edition, to be helpful references in preparing to
teach their classes. As a result of the poll we continue our practice of
accepting gift casebooks and adding one copy of the different titles and
editions to the collection. Also as a point of information, we purchase
casebooks if they have been authored by one of our faculty members or if a
faculty member has requested one.
Statistically, the responses to my original question regarding casebooks
on the ALL SIS listserve resulted as follows:
20 libraries do not purchase required casebooks for law school
courses. Of those 20 libraries, casebooks are purchased
or added to the collection because of one or all of the
three reasons addressed above in paragraph 2.
6 libraries purchase required casebooks for law school courses.
2 libraries neither accept casebooks as gifts nor add any
casebooks to their collection.
14 libraries accept casebooks as gifts.
10 libraries did not address their policy for handling gift copies
of casebooks.
Thank you for your participation!
Leonette Williams
Associate Director for Collections and Technical Services
University of Southern California Law School
lwilliam@law.usc.edu
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