Penn State University Libraries - Focus on Assessment - Nov 7, 2011

Creating two libraries out of one collection

By Gail A. Partin, associate director and law librarian,
H. Laddie Montague, Jr. Law Library, Penn State Dickinson School of Law

In 2000, the Dickinson School of Law merged with Penn State University unleashing a chain of events that fundamentally affected the operation of its Law Library. Chief among these was the Law School’s decision, in 2005, to offer a law degree program at the University Park campus beginning with the Fall 2006 academic year. Since law libraries are intricately intertwined in the law school curriculum and scholarly community, a second law library would be required to support the new program in its second location. By early 2006, the H. Laddie Montague, Jr. Law Library was fully immersed in an ambitious project to divide its entire collection between our two main programmatic locations –the Law School’s traditional home in Carlisle, PA and our new law school building in University Park. With over 280,000 print volumes and 1.2 million microform pieces housed in three locations, this was a complicated puzzle with few models to offer guidance.

Guiding Principles

Before assessment of the collections could begin in earnest, we realized early on that we needed to establish a set of
guiding principles that would outline the goals of our project and illuminate a path toward implementation. Through
a dialog with key stakeholders, within the Law Library, the Law School, and the University Libraries, we identified the
following “Guiding Principles” as the most critical goals for transitioning our single law collection into two excellent law
libraries:
• Support faculty scholarship in each location.
• Support legal writing courses, seminar courses and other research-heavy curricular offerings in both locations.
• Support the distinct clinical and externship focuses of each location.
• Support law reviews, moot court teams, and other extracurricular research-intensive activities.
• Identify and support the general curricular focuses and specializations unique to each location.
• Undertake minimal duplication. Creating two identical print collections was simply not cost-effective or
necessary to achieve a high level of excellence.
• Use e-resources, where available and appropriate, to provide equal access for all users anywhere.
• Identify core geographic areas or regions for which we must acquire primary source materials for each library.
• Identify core subject areas which require basic collection resources in both libraries.

Refining the Guiding Principles: Creating Assessment Tools

Once guiding principles were established, the next step was clear. We needed to review and rethink our collection development philosophy in light of our new paradigm – that of maintaining two excellent, but not identical, law collections. This required further fact-finding, evaluation and collection development decision-making to prepare for the implementation phase. Four decision points were critical to our assessment analysis.

First, we needed to define our core collections – those resources that were critical to supporting our users in both
libraries. We evaluated all aspects of our collection: case reporters, statutes, periodicals, monographs, government
documents and microforms. For guidance, we turned to two well-regarded publications that recommend and describe
resources that should be included in every academic law library collection.

Our second and third assessment tools focused on discovering subject concentrations for each library location.