The University Library: A Driving Force for Reform in Legal Education?†
Abstract Information skills training offers opportunities for gradually embedding changes in legal education programs and to bring about the integration of legal knowledge, skills and experience. If shared goals are formulated in a spirit of close collaboration, curricular changes and revisions will potentially have a greater effect and be more likely to enhance long-term programs. The university library can serve as an ideal base for the use of information technology such as web portals and content integrated search engines, which in turn will help refocus attention on the use of library facilities. The harmonization and maintenance of this apparatus, however, requires both a new form of cooperation and a re-interpretation of the legal education curriculum. This article compares several library developments which could prove important for legal education from a Dutch perspective, and also examines library education in the law schools of the United States of America.
How College Students Seek Information in the Digital Age
A report of findings from 2,318 respondents to a survey carried out among college students on six campuses distributed across the U.S. in the spring of 2009, as part of Project Information Literacy. Respondents, while curious in the beginning stages of research, employed a consistent and predictable research strategy for finding information, whether they were conducting course-related or everyday life research. Almost all of the respondents turned to the same set of tried and true information resources in the initial stages of research, regardless of their information goals. Almost all students used course readings and Google first for course-related research and Google and Wikipedia for everyday life research. Most students used library resources, especially scholarly databases for course-related research and far fewer, in comparison, used library services that required interacting with librarians. The findings suggest that students conceptualize research, especially tasks associated with seeking information, as a competency learned by rote, rather than as an opportunity to learn, develop, or expand upon an information-gathering strategy which leverages the wide range of resources available to them in the digital age.
Embedded Librarians: Teaching Legal Research as a Lawyering Skill
The current movement for reform of legal education focuses on teaching both knowledge and practical skills in combination, as recommended in the 2007 Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers. In light of technology that now makes masses of law and related information available online, unorganized and seemingly unmanageable, this article proposes that law schools draw on the professional skills of their law librarians to teach students advanced legal research and analysis by embedding them in law school clinics. It outlines a pedagogy for teaching legal research in clinics as a lawyering skill, complete with ethical responsibilities and professional standards, consonant with the recommendations of the Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers, the 2009 Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education, and the 1992 ABA Taskforce on Law Schools and the Profession, Legal Education and Professional Development (the MacCrate Report). It examines how the relatively new trend of embedding librarians in practice settings, offering assistance at the point of need, could be effective in law schools. Finally, it advances a model for embedding law librarians in law school clinics based on the experiment conducted at the UDC David A. Clarke School of Law, begun by first embedding one librarian in the Juvenile and Special Education Law Clinic and then continued by adding on other clinics. This article has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Legal Education.