Survey of Law School Faculty: Evaluation of the Law Library

The 120-page study presents detailed data on law faculty evaluations of a myriad of law library information resources and services, including but not limited to information services such as West, LexisNexis, Bloomberg, FindLaw, and Google Scholar; services such as group study rooms, database training and other infoliteracy services, inter-library loan, range and quality of law journals and legal databases, course reserves, law library information technology and much more. In addition, the report presents faculty judgments on the idea of hiring more librarians, on the future of the library budget and on the overall efficiency of the law school library compared to other departments and units of the law school. Respondents also rate the overall quality of their law librarians and discuss what they like most and least about their performance and the law library in general. Moreover, the study gives detailed data on how often law faculty visit the library and for how long and how they reach out to librarians, in person, by phone, email, chat service or other means. 124 law school faculty from 38 law schools in the United States took part in the survey Data is broken out by age, work title and gender of survey participant, as well as by law school size and US News & World Report law school ranking, among other criteria. Just a few of the report’s many finding are that: More than 64% of faculty in law schools ranked in the top 30 thought that the range and quality of legal journals available to them in their libraries was excellent. 14% of the interviewees from schools with more than 900 students and 7% from schools with 600-900 students regard availability and quality of the group study rooms as problematic or bad. Only 43% of the female respondents consider the noise level excellent or good, in contrast about 70% of their male interviewees are have no significant concern about the noise level. Faculty at the lowest ranking law schools were particularly dissatisfied with the quality of the technology in the law school library. 19% of respondents use Google Scholar at least once per day.