Re: Article in "Inside HigherEd"

[richards1000@comcast.net]

I had asked a previous poster to identify information resources 
that are effectively unavailable to scholars in the U.S.  As no 
response has been posted, I'd like to respond respecting legal 
scholarly publishing in the U.S.

In the U.S. legal publishing market, there are, I believe, two 
categories of materials that at times are effectively unavailable 
to U.S. law professors because of expense:

(1) practitioner-oriented materials (periodicals - usually 
newsletters - and treatises), and

(2) certain scholarly materials (some monographs - often 
festschriften or other article collections - and certain 
journals) on international law or the law of non-U.S. countries, 
generally published in continental Europe.

Respecting category (1), unavailability is usually no great loss 
because with rare exceptions, these materials usually have little 
or no scholarly value (the request is often intended to fill a 
non-scholarly need, such as for consulting work or a 
practice-skills course), and the library can often negotiate with 
the law professor to avoid the request or to find an affordable 
substitute.

Respecting category (2), these are often high-quality scholarly 
materials, and ILL and document delivery at times fail, for any 
number of reasons: the work has recently been published and no 
library has a copy available for lending, no library in the ILL 
network has licensed ILL rights respecting a digital copy, or the 
borrowing library has exhausted its copyright limit respecting 
the desired journal.

I suspect that in the current economic environment, the number of 
titles in category (2) will grow, as more U.S. academic law 
libraries cut back on monograph purchasing and the licensing of 
costly journals, or they limit the rights they license in order 
to reduce cost.

I'd be very interested to know whether either scenario rings true 
in other fields, and especially in other professional scholarly 
fields.  I suspect the category (1) problem is endemic to 
professional fields.

Robert Richards

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Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D.*, M.S.L.I.S., M.A.
Law Librarian & Legal Information Consultant
Philadelphia, PA
richards1000@comcast.net

* Member New York bar, retired status.
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