Representing the value and usage of a print collection

by Helen Mok, Librarian, Parlee McLaws, LLP, Calgary, Alberta

Does anyone use books anymore?  I can find everything I’m looking for online, can’t I?  Do we really need a print collection?  Librarians hear these questions frequently today.  In the law library field, the answers to these questions are yes, no, and yes.  However, as organizational budgets tighten and the need for office space increases, librarians may face pressure to reduce or possibly eliminate their print collections.  How can we show the value of our print material in response to these pressures?

One of the most common ways to show value is through usage statistics generated by the integrated library system.  However, many law libraries in the corporate and government sectors are smaller and may not have an automated circulation system in place that can easily produce these statistics. To supplement general borrowing statistics, here are a few other strategies to demonstrate the value and use of a print collection.

Measuring browsing, informal lending, and library use of the print collection

In corporate and government libraries, library users often browse material for quick reference without signing it out. Additionally, colleagues often share borrowed material among themselves, i.e. a book borrowed by one user is informally lent to another without the library’s knowledge. This type of usage is just as valid as regular borrowing but would not be captured by regular circulation statistics.  So how do you show this usage? If you ask users to leave material they use for quick reference unshelved, this allows library staff to include the number of items reshelved in usage figures, rather than only the material that has been officially signed out.

To help track informal lending, it may be useful to place a label on the book and ask users to sign their name or check a box whenever they borrow the book from another colleague instead of the library. This method would also work to gather circulation statistics for satellite collections outside the main library. Recording use of the collection by library staff is also important. Library staff often consult print material when working on reference requests or providing document delivery. Whether staff record print sources consulted separately or as part of a general reference statistics document, this type of use should definitely be counted.

Show how having a print collection saves time/money

Calculating a metric that shows how much money or time staff save by having access to an on-site collection is another way to highlight the value of your collection. For example, using the hourly rate of a fee earner in a law firm, calculate the cost of accessing an off-site resource by multiplying the hourly rate by how long it would take to get the resource. While it would take merely minutes to grab a book from the shelf, it could take hours, days, or even weeks to get a book via interlibrary loan.   And don’t forget to factor in the costs of interlibrary loans such as transactional borrowing fees, copying fees, and courier costs.

Demonstrate how the print collection supports organizational objectives or staff work

Pinpointing and quantifying how the print collection contributes to achieving organizational objectives or supporting staff performance will help show the collection’s value.  If operating efficiently and cost-effectively is important to your organization, how does your print collection contribute to this? Depending on your organization’s purpose, can you quantify how often staff use the print collection in pursuit of this goal? For example, in law firms, how often do staff consult print material when working on cases and client files? This number should include the reference work library staff do on behalf of lawyers.

Final thoughts

While the focus of this post is demonstrating the value of a print collection, perhaps we shouldn’t separate this aspect from the other services/resources the library provides.  The library is more than just a collection of books on a shelf. Loose-leaf filing, current awareness services/monitoring, routing journals/tables of contents, reference services, training and instruction, interlibrary loans/document delivery, electronic resources—the library provides all of this to the organization and its staff. Defining and quantifying their impact along with that of the print collection sends a strong message on the overall value of the library to the organization.

After the Evolution: Promoting the Value of Law Librarians

Submitted: Emily R. Florio, Manager of Libraries & Library Information Systems, Fish & Richardson (florio@fr.com).

On Thursday April 25th, 2013 LLAGNY (Law Library Association of Greater New York), ILTA (International Legal Technology Association) and SLA (Special Libraries Association)’s New York chapter sponsored After the Evolution, an educational event and networking reception. This strategic initiative and program built upon the LLSDC (Law Librarians’ Society of Washington, D.C.) Showcase, a grassroots approach to communicating the value that law librarians bring to their firms, particularly lawyers, the “C” Suite and other firm administration. Several non-DC librarians from AALL’s Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section attended the DC event and helped bring it to NY with future plans for Boston, Chicago and hopefully beyond the East Coast. The objective of this ongoing project is to aggressively promote the management value of law librarians to the target community of law firm leaders. Participating librarians promoted their diverse management skills to administration, technology and marketing professionals rather than to our traditional audience of peers. This concept recognizes that library management is an insightful component of firm management strategy and that our contributions are vital to the overall operation and success of the firm.

Both the LLSDC Showcase and After the Evolution addressed many of the common challenges firms face and provided a stage for presentations and discussions on some current proactive solutions and innovative approaches. The events were designed to evoke the exhibit hall at a conference, featuring kiosks where presenters had laptops and iPads to showcase certain skills, but no formalized or lengthy presentations or PowerPoint slides. The five topics or sales force teams were developed from key law firm strategic priorities:

1. Knowledge Management: Beyond practice support, KM is now an enabler to provide your firm with a competitive advantage

2. Business & Competitive Intelligence: See proactive methods to grow your firm’s business and anticipate the next growth opportunity

3. Strategic Research & the Embedded Research Librarian: Librarians have moved out of the library and are now integral practice group members providing enhanced practice support

4. Strategic Cost Cutting: Learn about the new generation of cost management tools to tame Lexis, Westlaw and other metered research services

5. eBooks: The move to digital continues with the adoption of easier to use eBooks that provide far more functionality than the desktop

The event had over 90 attendees with members from all sponsoring associations, along with CIOs, IT professionals, administrators, law firm consultants, and marketing, records and information governance professionals. Librarians showcased the value they bring supporting the practice of law and their strategies and approaches for supporting the business of law. As librarians and information professionals, we spend a lot of time corresponding, networking and presenting to our peers, but don’t always have the same visibility within our organizations. This event provided an informal, but lively atmosphere for presenters and attendees to interact and make valuable connections and contributions to the topics at hand.

We’ve heard from many attendees, including sponsors, vendors, attendees and presenters, who were very pleased with the event. For many attendees, the overall impact of the event helped reconfigure their perceptions of the law librarian and information professional. For the betterment of the profession, we hope the successes from this new strategic and outreach opportunity will grow from benefitting an individual or firm, to impacting the industry as a whole. As collaborative, innovative and proactive librarians, we are certainly on the way towards gaining mutual respect and are always looking for further opportunities to collaborate with our peers and other industry professionals.

Selling conference attendance to your employer

by Susannah Tredwell, Library Manager, Lawson Lundell LLP, Vancouver BC

Conference season is coming up, and whether you are heading to Montreal, San Diego, Glasgow or Seattle, conference attendance can be a great tool in improving your skillset. However, when law firms are looking at their bottom line, management may be not be as enthusiastic as you would like them to be about paying for conference attendance. So how do you make the case to your employer that the value that they will receive from the conference outweighs the cost?

Education

The legal world is constantly changing, and being able to keep up to date (whether you are a lawyer or librarian) is important. Depending on the geographical area that you work in, there may not be a lot of opportunities for professional development. While professional publications and webinars allow librarians to learn at a distance, there is a lot of value in being able to physically attend a conference.

Conferences provide both formal and informal ways for a librarian to improve his or her knowledge. Conference sessions provide the “formal” element of learning, and generally cover both soft and hard skills. Highlight those conference sessions that are particularly appropriate to the work that you are doing (or hope to be doing) and explain to management why you would benefit from them.

Formal conference sessions are not the only way that librarians can learn at a conference. There are lots of chances to learn informally; for example, talking to other librarians (whether they be private, academic or government) about the problems that they are facing and how they are solving them. You can learn a lot from these informal chats, as these may be issues that librarians are not willing to talk about in a formal setting (such as a conference session), but are happy to share informally.

Networking

One of the most valuable elements of a conference is the chance to get to talk to people you might otherwise not meet. From your employer’s point of view an obvious benefit of networking is that knowing someone working in a different jurisdiction can save your firm time and money. If you need information from another jurisdiction, having a contact there is very helpful. Even if your contact does not have the item you are looking for or know the answer to your question, they should be able to point you in the right direction.

Vendors

The exhibit hall is an important part of every conference. It is where you get to see new products and see what developments are happening with existing ones. It allows you to have a better idea of what options there are for your library. You may get a chance to talk to the decision makers at the vendors, and tell them what you do or do not like about their products. This can be a surprisingly effective way of giving feedback, and your firm benefits from improvements in the products they use.

Note that the Special Libraries Association has drafted a letter for your employer that can be used to get your employer’s approval to attend a conference.

How to Sit at the Table: Lean In

by: Joan L. Axelroth, Axelroth and Associates, Library & Information Management Consultant

I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about the challenges facing law firm librarians, including the obstacles to success and what we can do to overcome them.  Always a worthwhile topic, it is of particular interest these days as I work alongside a stellar committee on programming for the upcoming Private Law Library Summit to be held this July as part of AALL’s annual meeting.  

Why is it that librarians are so often the first to recognize how technologies (intranets, social media) and services (knowledge management, competitive intelligence) can be used to advance our firms’ strategic interests and yet so often lose control to others in the organization?  Does management still look at the library as a place rather than a critical service?  Do we present ourselves as spokespersons for one department rather than as an integral part of the team?  Do we fail to sell our ideas using words and techniques that will be heard?  Bottom line, what should we do (or stop doing) to retain ownership and to merit a seat at the management table?   

While pondering these questions one day, I found myself distracted by an interview with Sheryl Sandberg whose new book, Lean In:  Women, Work and the Will to Lead, hits bookstores this week.  Sandberg’s resume includes her current position as Facebook’s COO, a past position as Google’s VP of Global Online Sales and Operations, and a couple of Harvard degrees.  She cites the statistics we all know about the paucity of women leaders and states her belief that increasing the number of women at the top of the corporate ladder will benefit us all.  Her advice to women for how to get there:  lean in (not back) and embrace success.   

Yes, Sandberg has chosen to direct her remarks to women but nothing about this advice is gender specific.  Unfortunately, in our profession, law librarians with a seat at the table are sparse regardless of gender. 

For me, Sandberg’s advice resonates because it addresses something in our power to control:  our own actions.  If a seat is what we want, we can make a decision not to hold ourselves back by deciding in advance that we won’t be heard.  We can make a decision not to be afraid.  As Sandberg told NPR,

Of all the posters plastered around Facebook’s Silicon Valley headquarters — “Move Fast and Break Things,” “Done Is Better Than Perfect” and “Fail Harder”. . . Sandberg has a favorite: “What Would You Do If You Weren’t Afraid?“ 

http://www.npr.org/2013/03/11/173740524/lean-in-facebooks-sheryl-sandberg-explains-whats-holding-women-back 

We can also make a decision to enhance our strategic skills.  A goal of this year’s Summit is to help participants shape their success by defining the roles and developing the services that add value to our organizations.  Lean in.  Embrace Success.  http://pllsummit.wordpress.com/2013-summit/

Enter the Librarian Activist

by John DiGilio, National Manager of Research Services, Reed Smith LLP

Recently while speaking at the Ark Group’s Best Practices & Management Strategies for Law Firm Library & Information Service Centers conference in New York, I said something that seemed to really resonate with the audience.  I was talking about methods for driving resource utilization and optimization, when I shared my opinion that there is little room in the law firm information industry for passive librarians.  What we need to survive and thrive as a profession, I postulated, are true activist librarians.  Judging by the discussion after my presentation and the tweets I saw online, my point hit home.