Library footprints - why it's not as simple as just going digital

It is not often that my local paper The Canberra Times carries a story about the changing culture in law firms, so a story on the upcoming office move of Sydney firm, Gilbert+Tobin this morning caught my eye. ("Death of the office as walls come down" Canberra Times, 23/10/2015  p. 10. Ironically, it is not online... but the AFR version can be read here - https://www.afr.com/business/legal/gilbert--tobin-minter-ellison--just-some-of-the-lawyers-to-embrace-the-open-plan-office-20151015-gk9ujr)

The story focussed on the decision of partner, Danny Gilbert, to move into an open plan workstation. After making such a move myself earlier this year, I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Gilbert’s assessment that he would not go back to his office.

Towards the end of the article was something particularly unusual – a discussion of what national law firms in Australia are doing with space for their physical law libraries. The article contrasted the decision by Minter Ellison to downsize its library in a recent move for its Sydney office to “a display wall of books” with that of Clayton Utz, which “kept its large law library” in a recent office move. Aside from wondering whether Minter Ellison’s “wall of books” might be rather larger than my physical library at Meyer Vandenberg, it reminded me of the discussions within my firm about the appropriate physical footprint for our library when we moved earlier this year.

There were three key issues that came into play for us, which I think need to be considered when determining the physical footprint for any law library – and maybe any special library:

Nature of the work of the firm:

As observed by the partner from Minter Ellison, it is true that a lot of legal information is available online. But there is still a lot of legal information available only in hard copy.

Smaller firms doing mostly transactional work or fairly unsophisticated work may find that all they require is online – some simple commentaries such as are available online, along with some transactional material online may suffice.

However, any firm working beyond that level is likely to still require a book collection, for two reasons.

Firstly, in my experience, books are not updated as often and therefore can afford to be a lot more detailed than online commentary services, which are meant to be regularly updated. There are a number of books which have been converted to online commentary services and in my experience, many of these have lost a level of detail in their conversion in order to ensure they can be kept reasonably regularly updated. In some cases, we have both the online commentary and the last edition of the book as published. In at least one case, we have retained the last edition of the book and have dropped the online service, due to the inadequacy of the service for a firm like ours providing high level work for sophisticated clients.

Secondly, the Australian legal publishing market is quite limited and there are a number of legal topics for which there remains no online commentary pertinent to Australia. We have a number of books in our collection published in the UK, providing some coverage of common law countries including Australia, because no Australian commentary exists on that topic in hard copy or online.

Accessibility to e-books:

Many, though not all, books are nowadays available as e-books. I define e-books as being digital replicas of hard copy books, which are updated when a new edition of the hard copy is published.

Until this year, the major legal publishers in Australia were not offering my library e-books in a format that enabled the library to lend them to the clients. The e-books were only being offered for purchase by an individual, for their individual use. So when designing our library, the firm knew we could not rely on e-books being included in the library collection.

Earlier this year, one of the leading publishers came to me with a well thought out system for lending e-books. We are continuing discussions, as there are still issues around the cost benefit of the e-book model and around how well the technology works – but it is good to see that there might be access to e-books for our library in the future. As it stands, our library still cannot offer e-books for lending to our clients.

Legacy collections:

A member of staff at Meyer Vandenberg recently complimented me on the size of my collection, observing that it was just the right size. The collection is efficient in both cost and relative footprint and contains what is needed but no more.

My response was that this was partly due to the age of our firm. While our antecedent firms date back at least 40 years, Meyer Vandenberg is ten years old. The library is therefore not burdened with a large legacy collection of old law reports and the like. So it is easy for our library to have that small footprint, without having to make decisions on legacy collections.

I also pointed out that, particularly in an age where libraries are restricted by publishers’ licences from loaning or otherwise sharing their digital resources, Meyer Vandenberg relies upon and appreciates those libraries that are able to retain legacy collections. Without such collections, our ability to legally access law reports and journals which we do not hold would be highly restricted.

Out of these considerations, we developed a library which I suspect takes up less of a footprint than our previous book room and two offices – but make much more effective use of that space, in an inviting, open plan environment.