Survey of Law Library Database Licensing Practices

The 105-page report gives detailed data about the acquisition, licensing deployment and management of online databases by law libraries in the United States and Canada. The study helps its readers to answer questions such as: How do law libraries value and evaluate different vendors of online databases? How much do they spend and plan to spend and on what kinds of products do they plan to expand their collections? What do they think of the training provided by database vendors and what are their feelings about the rate of price increases? How do they feel about eBooks? What are the most valuable sources of free legal information and how have these sources – such as Google Scholar and FindLaw – impacted legal information use? In addition, the report explores the nature of negotiations between vendors and libraries, highlighting areas open to negotiation and the results of such negotiations. The study also gives detailed information on the size of staff maintained to deal with online licenses, legal expenditures for contracts, use of consortia and the annual staff time, and cost of this staff time, spent in reviewing and paying invoices for online information. Data also details the propensity to sue vendors and to be sued by them. Data in the report is broken out separately by size and type of law library. Just a few of the report’s many finding are that: • The law firm libraries in the sample spent a mean of more than 845 hours of annual staff time in reviewing and paying invoices for online information. • Law libraries sampled expected to increase their number of online contracts in the next year by 2.8%. • 42.86% of libraries sampled provided access to the Bloomberg legal information service. • Google Scholar accounted for 5.9% of the overall legal research time for law librarians in the law firms in the sample. • Tablet computers accounted for 4.46% of access to online databases for the law libraries sampled with a median of 5% and a range of 0 to 20%.