This morning I delivered the keynote at the Ark Group’s two-day conference starting here in New York, "Best Practices & Management Strategies for Legal Library & Information Service Centers."
My keynote was titled "The Law Library of the Future," and I want to share some it with you. But before I do: Many thanks to the organizers of the conference, as well as to the many attendees I had the opportunity to speak with (some of whom I knew and some of whom were new). Here’s how the conference materials summarized my presentation:
9:15AM KEYNOTE: The Library of the Future
As information resources are increasingly delivered in digital format and online, and as new generations of lawyers show increasing preference for, and adeptness at, employing powerful search technologies to engage in “self-service” research, the role of the law library in the 21st Century is seen by many as threatened. Indeed, comparing the physical footprint of a library designed ten years ago to one planned for tomorrow will show drastic down-sizing and profound functional changes. In light of these trends, many are questioning whether the library can maintain its central role in the life of a firm.However, what law firms sell is knowledge; and libraries, above all, are purveyors of knowledge. Therefore, the library of the future will move from a tactical to a strategic resource, from a static repository to dynamic, on-demand portal, from one-way delivery of assets to vibrant communities of practice, and from a “one size fits all” commodity to a focused, adaptive resource tailored to the precise needs of your firm today.
Libraries are environments for learning, and human beings learn through conversations within their social networks. This means that the mission of the library of the future is to sustain and foster these social communities. The implications of this are that libraries move to the forefront of a firm’s knowledge management initiatives, that to provide the on-demand, highly targeted answers lawyers are relentlessly seeking, effective libraries will adopt Web 2.0 techniques, and that libraries will become increasingly central to differentiating a firm from its competitive set, and providing strategic advantage in the marketplace.
Bruce MacEwen
AdamSmith, Esq.
Let me flesh out what I talked about.
I opened by telling the (true) story of walking through an AmLaw 25’s library with a junior and a senior partner, examining the space given to the library
with an eye towards reconfiguring it for the firm’s pending move to new offices:
Junior Partner (adamantly): "We need to get rid of all of this." Senior Partner (wistfully): "Well, maybe not all of it…."
The fact remains that:
- The books are going away (nearly two-thirds of firms surveyed by The American Lawyer last year had cancelled West reporter subscriptions). And
- The space is going away. New offices designed today never feature the "monumental" library behind plate glass off the reception area. In fact, one of the leading commercial real estate brokers in the country (in terms of law firm clientele) told me just last week that space planners’ biggest worry about the library area is not that it will be too small but that it will be too big. To hedge their bets, new library areas are planned in advance to be flexible enough to be able to serve other functions, such as litigation "war rooms."
In general, the model for the new library is not the reading room at the Library of Congress or the British Museum, but: Starbucks. In other words, not the sacrosanct temple, but the drop-in, get away from the phone, casual environment ideal for reading in solitude or meeting informally to sling ideas around.
In pursuing this type of model, librarians need to understand that they are dealing with four generations of lawyers in terms of attitudes towards media, technology, and research. This is roughly how I characterized it:
|
Traditionalists/ -Silent Generation
|
Boomers
|
Gen X
|
Millennial’s
|
| Born <1946 | 1946—64 | 1965—81 | 1982—2000 |
| Patriotic, loyal, risk-averse | Idealistic, competitive, driven | Self-reliant, skeptical, risk- takers | Civic-minded, collaborative, realistic |
| Case reporters, treatises | law reviews, mainstream legal periodicals, Google | work product of trusted colleagues, focused legal online resources | blogs, RSS aggregators, Wikipedia |
| ABC, CBS, NBC | CNN, PBS | Fox, MTV, Comedy Central | YouTube |
| Letters | voice-mail | IM, SMS |
Reflecting on this topic spurred me to look up one of my favorite quotes on attitudes toward technology, which comes from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy:
- "Anything that is in the world when you were born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural way the world works.
- "Anything that is invented between the time when you are 15 to 35 is new, revolutionary, and exciting, and you can possibly get a career in it.
- "Anything invented after you are 35 is against the natural order of things."
Still, it remains the case that while the books may have gone away, the demand for knowledge has not—if anything, the demand is more voracious than ever. This is actually good news for librarians, if they can transform their role from passive custodians of information to active champions of knowledge resources. I portray it as follows:
| 20th Century | 21st Century |
|---|---|
| Information was scarce, hard to find, a treasured resource | Information is ubiquitous, overwhelming, impossible to sift through |
| Requiring professional trained searchers to locate it ("librarians") | Requiring sophisticated guidance to find the needle in the haystack ("librarians") |
| Status conferred by shelf-feet of books, grandeur of space | Status confirmed by "a seat at the table" in key law firm activities |
| Isolated from the firm | Integral to the firm |
Ultimately, I believe the law library of the future is Knowledge Management. If I’m right, this is terrific news for librarians who can adapt themselves to this role and ensure that the conversation with the executive committee about resource allocation is cast in terms of scholarship, professional development, client and business intelligence, and competitive advantage through astutely marshalling the firm’s intellectual assets: And not in terms of overhead, square footage, the price of subscriptions, headcount, and non-fee-earners.
If so, the library of the future will evolve:
- from a tactical to a strategic resource
- from static repository to dynamic, on-demand portal
- from one-way delivery of assets to home for communities of practice, and
- from a "one size fits all" commodity to an adaptive resource tailored to the needs of your firm today.
Such was my message, in any event, for those willing to re-imagine the the library’s fundamental purpose, its clientele, the services it offers, and the firm’s level of satisfaction with those services.
Update: 22 Feb.: Stephen Rosenberg of The McCormack Firm, LLC (Boston) wrote me with the following thoughts which he has given me permission to publish:
"Adam [he knows my name is actually Bruce], have long enjoyed your posts (long being a relative term in light of when the age of blogging dawned), but today’s post was the first to provoke me to comment. Yesterday I posted an essay on the death of the law review, arguing that new sources of information – and the preference of younger lawyers to use them over traditional library sources – were replacing them in terms of relevance and usefulness. The post is at: http://www.bostonerisalaw.com/archives/people-are-talking–law-reviews-are-dead-they-just-dont-know-it-yet.html.
"Your post today seems to make the same point, only on more of a macro level: that technology is and will completely transform the entire legal research model, eliminating the old fashioned library in its entirety, and not just, as per my post yesterday, law reviews (at least if they do not change their DNA in a manner that allows them to join the on-line interactive world)."
I agree with Stephen entirely. Indeed, I would submit that if your firm has not yet "re-engineered" your library, your peers who have are in a position to steal a march.
