LIS 657���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� Jonathan Eaker Mecklenburg Law Library Site Visit ����������� At the Law Library I expected to see lots of books with laws and court cases in them. I knew lawyers used the library but was not sure if the public could. I also thought the library was run by county. I thought that the lawyers probably knew how to find what they were looking for, so anyone who worked there was probably for maintenance or fielding phone requests. I knew Lexis-Nexis has a large number of legal documents so I was not sure how much a law library would to have in print. ����������� At the Mecklenburg Law Library we met Anthony Aycock. He is the part-time director of the library. He also has a full time job as librarian for a law firm.� The only other staff there is a paralegal who works as an assistant librarian. Anthony described the library as being both public and private. It is public because it is open to the public on Monday, Tuesday, and half of Thursday. It is private because all of its support, beside the space provided by the county, is private. It is funded by membership dues from lawyers and law firms. A personal membership is $300 a year. The library is run as a non-profit by a Board of Directors who approves the budget. They are looking at writing grants to get more funding. He said funding was one of the biggest challenges because many lawyers believe that with online resources, they do not need the print ones anymore. ����������� Anthony said that to work in a law library, a librarian does not need a law degree unless they work in an academic law library. Dealing with the public and lawyers is very different. He said lawyers will often give him too much information, taking longer to say the question than it would take for him to find an answer. The public, on the other hand, are usually not used to working with legal issues and may not know what it is they are searching for. He said the reference interview is very important in these cases. A problem in dealing with these people is separating legal reference from legal advice. It is illegal to give legal advice with out certification so a law librarian can only point people to where they can find thing, not tell them, even if they know the answer. Anthony said it can be very rewarding helping people who need urgent help and are not sure where to turn. ����������� The sources at the law library are divided into primary and secondary sources. The primary sources are the laws, statutes, and opinions that come from cases. They have sets of books called �Regional Reporters� that have all the cases for an area of the United States. There are separate reporters for other areas like bankruptcy and federal cases. The cases are listed chronologically and have no index, but do have a separate set of books that can be searched. Thomson-West and Elsevier are the biggest publishers of legal sources. In the books they publish the statutes and laws are public information but they get a copyright for the annotations that they add. The secondary sources the library has do not contain laws but are more like encyclopedias that you look a subject up in, and it has information and a list of relevant cases. They are tools that help you find a law for the situation you have. They have books that are more oriented toward non-lawyers for the general public to use. They have treatises which are multivolume sets on a particular subject. Some have update pages you put in a notebook. Another source they have is the Martindale-Hubbell directory. He called it the �yellow pages of the law.� ����������� Many of the laws in the books are outdated but Anthony said an outdated law isn�t useless. People doing historical searches of laws or a subject (he gave civil rights as an example) will want to know what the old laws were. It�s also a good place to start searching for a topic. He said they have a full set of the Harvard Law Review which started in 1887 and it�s probably one of the only complete sets in the state. The library has access to Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis databases. The databases are good, but he said it can be difficult to search for some things and they don�t go back very far. The online databases do save space for sources. Anthony reads ads from vendors and talks to patrons to see what is needed for the library. The library has no electronic catalog and the printed catalog is just a list in a notebook which may not be up to date. Members are allowed to check out books from the library. The library was once part of county library system and he would like to get some partnership with them or the county itself again. Since they do help serve the public he feels that the county should give some support. ����������� I was surprised that the library gets no funding from the county. I would have thought that being in a county building and serving the public that it would have to be county supported. I was also surprised that they have no catalog beside the notebook. It sounded like the public uses the library regularly. I thought it was just for lawyers, but it sounds like they serve both groups well. I was also surprised that they don�t get more support from the lawyers and law firms. I would think that lawyers get benefit from it, and the law firms wouldn�t have to purchase as many sources themselves if they could use the library. �����������