I was out of town for a weekend in New York City (Hairspray--go see it! Sweet Charity was good too), and as usual my mailbox was full of glossy "law porn" when I returned. You know--law school bulletins, alumni magazines, "introducing our new faculty" brochures, and all the sort of things all the law schools mail out to try to bump up their reputation counts in the U.S. News rankings.
For some time now I've been browsing through these mailings, looking for law library news. Perhaps not surprisingly, I rarely find any. One of the law school admissions bulletins I received today didn't even mention a law library. On the other hand, the law library sections of most admissions bulletins are pretty much interchangeable--see how many volumes we have! We have computers too! And wireless!
I'm no better than anyone else at figuring out how to sell the law library in our admissions bulletin. I usually say something about our JD/MLS program, because we've had some excellent students and most of the our grads have received multiple job offers--not something that most law students can say. However, I realize I have internalized the librarian's traditional diffidence, and I don't really feel that I know how to make libraries interesting to the audience these brochures is intended for.
Even so, this seems to me like a significant problem for us as librarians and for the future of law libraries. I'm open to suggestions: has anybody come up with new ways to publicize their libraries, or new things to say about them? This is really a question about how we define libraries now and in the future: as a collection of information resources? A place? A service? A community?
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