Abstract
We suggest that libraries define for themselves a more active role within scholarship production, which we define to include publication, distribution, access, and the process of scholarship impact assessment. The argument rests on the practical considerations of business organization. Curating the output of faculty scholarship is simply good business for law schools, and many already do it through faculty repositories. Given that foundation, it seems logical for the library, as the institution which already manages those repositories, and which supports the students’ law reviews and journals in numerous ways, to step up and manage the full range of scholarship publication. This library management of student-edited scholarship production could cover all its aspects, excluding editorial publication decision and manuscript editing, from training and assisting to gather sources for cite checks, adding journal content to institutional platforms, administering technology services, and advising on copyright. Another reason for supporting a more active role for libraries in the scholarly enterprise rests on the flaws of the current academic ranking of scholarship. Without human input, no automated system—including the newly-promoted Hein database—can meaningfully contextualize the value of a citation. For instance, only librarians can find the equivalent (if any) of scholarship cited and reviewed in the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books among scholarship cited in another law journal or review article, or calibrate the value of an article citation in a court decision. To the extent there is agreement that quantifying scholarship citation impact requires human expertise, then we argue for librarian expertise. A more active role for libraries in the scholarship enterprise, especially as publishers, seems only natural. Here, we present the suggestion as a logical outcome of data collected from two surveys about the role that libraries already play in this area. In addition, we use a small sample of citation sources for criminal law scholarship to further buttress our thesis on measuring scholarly impact. Finally, we suggest that the libraries’ active role in scholarship production and communication could be assumed either individually, through a consortium similar to OCLC, which is a global information cooperative founded in 1967 by presidents of colleges and universities in Ohio, ergo, Ohio College Library Center. An alternative strategy could rely on repository user groups which offer in-house application of collectively-devised standards.
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2020
Repository Citation
Neacsu, Dana and Donovan, James M., "Academic Law Libraries and Scholarship: Communication, Publishing, and Ranking" (2020). Law Faculty Scholarly Articles. 794.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/law_facpub/794
