Survey of Law School Faculty: Use of Law School & Other Digital Repositories

This 110-page report presents detailed data and commentary drawn from law school faculty from more than 60 law schools about their use of law school and other digital repositories. The study defines how faculty use law school and other digital repositories, answering with hard data questions such as: what percentage of law school faculty have deposited a journal article into a repository? A book? Newspaper and magazine articles? Blog posts? Videos of classroom lectures? Other forms of intellectual property? How do faculty use repositories in research and teaching? Do they use the repositories of law schools other than their own? General university repositories? The study also gives detailed information on how faculty assess their law school and other repositories, including assessments of how well the repositories are marketed, how well they help faculty with obtaining permissions, how well they report usage data and other repository services to faculty. The report includes faculty from these and many other law schools: Australian National University Law School, Birmingham Law School, The University of Birmingham, England, Boston College Law School, California Western School of Law, Charleston School of Law, Columbia University Law School, Cornell Law School, CUNY School of Law, Denver Law, Griffith University Law, Harvard Law School, Hofstra Law School. Northeastern University Law School, NYU Law School, Oklahoma University College of Law, Rutgers Law School, School of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, St. Louis University School of Law, Stanford Law School, Texas Tech University School of Law, The John Marshall Law School, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, University of Alberta Law School, University of Maryland School of Law, University of Miami Law, UNLV Boyd School of Law, University of Washington Law and many others. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: Close to 66% of the law faculty sampled said that their law school administration or law library maintain a digital repository. Faculty from law schools ranked in the top 40 were somewhat more likely than others to say that their law school administration or library maintains its own digital repository and 77.78% of them felt that this was the case. Public law school faculty were much more likely than private law school faculty to have deposited a book into a law school repository; 16.13% of the former but only 5.77% of the latter had done so. Nearly 29% of faculty sampled had used the digital repositories of other universities. For law schools with fewer than 455 enrolled students more than 30% of faculty thought their law schools or libraries inefficient or highly inefficient in this area; for those with more than 950 students this same figure was 19%. Data in the report is broken out by many useful criteria such as academic title, teaching load, size of law school, law school or university rank and other factors.