RE: Academic Library Rules on Newspaper ILL
Cornell has the same issues that you describe. We discuss it with the
editors regularly. However, Cornell Law Review and Cornell International
Law Journal maintain that their purpose is to cite to a solid source that
should really not change or become unavailable. The best source
verification, they maintain, is not always to confirm what the author saw
but to have the source that the reader can truly find. Our law student
editors consult with authors on content as well as citations and believe in
this deep checking. And, of course, when the freelancers took their
articles out of the databases a couple years ago, some articles found by an
article author on Lexis/Westlaw are no longer "there" electronically.
(NYTimes v. Tasini, 533 US 483)
Sometimes, it becomes an interlibrary loan problem if we need too many
articles in a year from a newspaper we do not own. However, as time
continues, we will be seeing more opportunities like the ProQuest
Historical Newspapers service that has electronic access to pdfs of major
newspapers.
AALL Academic SIS has a subcommittee on academic libraries working with
their law review staffs. They may have information to share on this
situation, too. We have a good liaison system here of librarians working
with the journal staffs, so we will continue to dialog around this
question. As the nature of authority changes, one day it might only matter
where it's findable electronically and not the original source because that
will be what lawyers and researchers know how to find and that's what
publishers will provide, and this circular pattern may spiral down on
itself until authority has an entirely new construct (alas?).
For now, at Cornell, we're getting those newspaper articles for the journals.
Pat Court
Acting Director
Cornell Law Library
At 12:19 PM 5/14/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>Fred-
>
>We are kicking around the same issue here -- no resolution yet. It's the
>library's position (i.e., mine really as the head of our ILL operation)
>that it makes no sense for us to have to track down copies-from-originals
>when the authors did not use them (a process that is increasing in
>complexity as consolidators expand their databases by adding more and more
>obscure, regional, local serials). And it's clear that authors are NOT
>using the originals.
>
>Our journal/review editors are at this point resisting making a change
>that would permit them to verify the citation/source actually used.
>
>I've not tried to compile the statistics, but I suspect a shockingly large
>percentage of our annual newspaper requests are for the cite-checking of
>articles whose authors never bothered to track down the originals
>underling the database (most frequently Lexis-Nexis).
>
>
>Stanley
>
>=============================<
>Stanley Conrad, JD/MLS
>Reference/Special Collections Librarian
>Rittenberg Law Library
>St. John's University School of Law
>8000 Utopia Parkway
>Jamaica, NY 11439
>718-990-2012
>718-990-6649 (fax)
>conrads@stjohns.edu
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-law-lib@ucdavis.edu [mailto:owner-law-lib@ucdavis.edu]On
>Behalf Of Fred Shapiro
>Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2004 11:35 AM
>To: Multiple recipients of list
>Subject: Academic Library Rules on Newspaper ILL
>
>
>
>Our library is contemplating whether we should have a rule against student
>journals using interlibrary loan to obtain original copies of newspapers
>for cite-checking (as opposed to using Nexis like the author of the
>article undoubtedly did). I would welcome information about other law
>school libraries that have adopted such a rule.
>
>Fred Shapiro
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Fred R. Shapiro Editor
>Associate Librarian for Collections and YALE DICTIONARY OF QUOTATIONS
> Access and Lecturer in Legal Research Yale University Press,
>Yale Law School forthcoming
>e-mail: fred.shapiro@yale.edu http://quotationdictionary.com
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------
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