Legal Needs and Library Collections
I’ve found one survey that comes close to what I was hoping to find : 2014 Civil Legal Needs of Low Income in Washington State Survey. (Warning: PDF) And it’s not perfect because it’s limited to low socio-economic outcomes. There’s possibly a second if the people from Findlaw can get back to me with detailed results from this five year old survey. I’m really surprised that no one seems to be researching the legal needs of Joe and Jane Public.
It seems that, when it comes to law, the collection development of primary legal materials can be summarized as COLLECT ALL THE THINGS. Take, for example, the AALL County Public Law Library Collection standards. What if it turns out that this is not what people actually need? What happens when the time comes (and it may be here already) where a library’s budget is going to only be able to afford complete primary law OR incomplete law and secondary resources on certain topical areas?
I guess basically I’m just surprised that we’ve been doing collection development in a knowledge vacuum of what subjects people actually need to research.
On a somewhat related note, I went to a talk today on The Future of Libraries (which I always like to pronounce like a 1950s sci-fi movie announcer) and one of the speakers brought up an interesting point about metadata. Basically, metadata is not neutral – it’s heavily influenced by the people that created it. Take, for instance, the Dewey Decimal system. The 200s in Dewey are for religion and 200-289 are dedicated to Christianity. All other religions are crammed in those last 10 slots. Which of course lead me to think about the Law’s version of the Dewey Decimal System, The West Key Number system. Like Dewey, it too is an artifact of the 19th century and created by and for western white men. What is missing from Key Numbers and, as a result, who is getting missed? How is our current organization of legal information failing to serve the needs of all citizens?
I think I mentioned it earlier, but one of the things I was going to play around with this year is topic modelling, which I was clued into at the 2015 CALIcon. I wonder if a more inclusive, and not to mention OPEN, taxonomy of law could be developed and if so, what it would look like?
The AALL guidelines are aspirational, in that many of the courthouses with something designated as a library are not staffed or funded at a level to meet it. But my experience in Ohio libraries is that a courthouse tends to be strong in its state or region because it can’t afford to do more. Guidelines may help in discussions with budgeting bodies, but, like formal collection development policies, may only be used selectively in practice.
I’m not sure there’s a knowledge vacuum, even if there is a data vacuum. People in public libraries and courthouse law libraries know what people using that library are looking for and are collecting to meet that need. An analysis of collections (if that were possible) would probably reflect a much greater focus on the public access, with heavy use of NOLO materials (like this: NOLO Renter’s rights) than AALL guidelines. In discussing library usage with Texas courthouse librarians, their role in mediating access to the state-specific LawHelp.org forms also helps them focus on need. I’d love to be able to measure how much legal information access happens through public libraries, which are not (to my mind) included in access to justice discussions as much as law libraries are.
Good luck with the topic modeling; the results would be interesting.