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STRAIT to the future8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference How deep is the legal information service?: developing a public law collection and reference service at the State Library of Victoria
Vicki Nelson and Steven Kafkarisos Keywords: Public Law Reference AbstractThis is an account of how State Library of Victoria is creating a specialist law service to assist the public to search for law and government information using electronic and traditional resources. The State Library of Victoria has extensive collections of Australian and overseas government and law publications. These significant current and historical collections in law were not being promoted to the general public, usage was low and the value of the collection to the public was being questioned. Remedial work was needed. The library is strategically shifting towards a sharper focus on client services rather than collection building and this has prompted a focus on electronic resources to complement access to hardcopy law collections. In the tradition of forward looking institutions the library is mastering the cultural and technological shifts that are taking place and is pushing to enhance staff skills in assisting the public in legal resources. The Law and Government Team took up the challenge by reorganising the collection, enhancing ease of access to electronic resources, providing on call reference consultations with clients, maintaining closer links with external bodies and by designing and delivering a wide range of training for reference desk staff. Future directions require enhancement of self-help access to law resources and improving delivery of reference service to remote users. The relevance of this paper to the conference is two-fold, firstly to show the steps required to revitalise an under-used resource into a niche market service for the public and, secondly, to stress the value of state libraries as a legal and government resource available to all. IntroductionThe theme of this conference - Strait to the future encourages us to look back once before we dive in, to establish where we are starting. Law libraries are not the exclusive resource of lawyers, barristers and the courts, the general public have always needed access to the law but this need is now more demanding. However, it remains a complex area where the public often feel they are in deep water and in need of assistance. This demand is demonstrated most aptly by a quick look at what is affected by the law in our everyday lives.
Therefore larger public libraries are getting queries from individuals wanting information to know whether to litigate and to understand the law as it affects them.
Like other state libraries, State Library of Victoria holds extensive historical and current law and government publication collections and has the responsibility to meet the information needs of all Victorians. Until recently the law collections were not being used fully, due in part to a nineteenth century building bursting at the seams, pushing collections into every available space with fewer and fewer books on open access leading to a heavy dependence on the catalogue to find relevant materials. This resulted in reference staff feeling uncomfortable that they did not have the time to devote to complex legal queries nor did they have confidence in their ability to fully exploit the collection and satisfy queries for legal information. These issues of under-used resources were documented in a consultant's report on the law collection in the mid 90s. The elements for a good service were there - competent references staff, strong collection and unanswered demand. What did State Library of Victoria do to turnaround a passive service and establish a legal information service? What steps did we take to promote usage of this collection? The consultant's report made a number of useful suggestions but the critical moves that led to the establishment of the Legal Information Service were made possible by a combination of the library redevelopment, vision and hard professional work. Many of the problems were obvious problems that required things such as space, collection reorganisation and support. Some of this was made possible by default with the rebuilding of the reference centre in 1997. The Law and Government Team moved swiftly to rejuvenate the legal collection and, with a strategic reassignment of legal materials into the larger, redesigned space, established a working collection within reach of reference staff. For this arrangement to work to maximum effect the team provides full staff back-up and a rolling training program to raise the skills level of all staff working at the Trescowthick Information Centre. Much of this work was librarianship at its most basic as the team assessed tools, reviewed guides, rearranged the collection and reviewed new electronic products with the aim of producing an integrated, in-depth collection offering multiple points of access to Commonwealth and State legislation, law reports, guides and legal encyclopedias. The material available spanned historic as well as current materials and included access to UN, UK, US and EC documents and indexes. With these changes the rewards were quickly seen as staff confidence increased. As a result of the team's focus on legal public inquiries, they are able to fine-tune collection arrangements and training to best meet public demand. Training is the key to future service delivery and forms a major part of our continuous improvement program. Organisational catalystsThere were a number of drivers encouraging the library to recreate itself and its law collections and services:
Public trendsThere has been a major increase in public awareness of the law and it is having a more obvious impact on our everyday lives. Through the 90s there has been a tightening of funding for legal aid and community legal services in Victoria. This has resulted in people wanting more information on the legal system before going to court or even going to a lawyer and they are looking for plain language interpretations of the law. State libraries are a natural first line for this growing public demand. State Library of Victoria recognised the opportunity for improving its public face by encouraging this niche market and is well aware that there are few other law libraries readily accessible to the public. Organisational changesIn the political and business environment we live in, workplace restructures, marketing strategies and political and budget constraints leave us with the imperative for all of us to do the job smarter with no staff or service point increases. State Library of Victoria underwent a complete restructure and re-evaluated all services and work units. Other management issues challenging individual teams is confirming the performance management review process and the setting of team goals. A marketing strategy is aimed at creating a lifelong clientele using the library and the law collection fits nicely into this philosophy. The reference staff were regrouped, the process creating a Law/Government team to address our consultant's report. The team's challenge was to establish a Legal Information Service within the parameters of no extra service points and working with existing staff resources. We started an extensive re-organisation of the law collections to improve access, extensive training of reference staff to raise competency levels and put the law team on permanent reference standby to assist with any complex legal inquiry. Building redevelopmentMost of the state libraries have undergone rebuilding programs over the past decade and most of your law firms will undergo building upgrades and moves. There are major opportunities available from these processes always keeping the final view of the redevelopment in mind. State Library of Victoria is midway through an extensive rebuilding of its nineteenth century heritage site. This has added some significant obstacles and significant opportunities to creating a law service and delivering reference service in general, as the library is cohabiting on the site with the builders and other tenants, any space is at a premium. At every stage of the redevelopment there is a two fold effect - a new space to be exploited for public access and the loss of the next space to building works, further handicapping growth. The major gains have been the new all-purpose Trescowthick Information Centre well endowed with public PCs enabling integration of hardcopy reference tools with electronic resources on CD-ROM and on the Internet. The Trescowthick Information Centre will ultimately be the hub with satellite centres for newspapers, Australiana, multimedia resources, arts and genealogy and will act as the gateway to a major open access reading room. The Legal Information Service acts as a link to unite these areas and supplement reference staff skills to make use of all materials to help clients meet legal information queries. This may involve tracking down newspaper articles on a magistrate's case or redirecting a person's request for information on a local community's fight over a quarry in the newspapers section to a case in Victorian reports. One major task was to regroup the essential one-stop shop tools and the major index resources in the central hub to get maximum value from the reference tools and staff and ensure the client had a tool in their hands as soon as possible after posing their question. Service deliveryOne of State Library of Victoria's primary goals is to provide excellence in information and reference service, so it has investigated or applied most of the current theories on managing reference services. Client focus has replaced collection focus, we have re-assessed reference values and are currently benchmarking reference desk services. The challenges of digital reference and remote reference are being incorporated into the current business plan. As a large public library user education and user guides are a focus for encouraging self-sufficiency among users. It should, of course, be stated that most of these changed practices are pro-active not merely a reaction to events. By creating a Legal Information Service we are following in the tradition of leading figures such as John Metcalfe, who believed in pro-active librarianship and who recognised the need for the profession to be prepared to stimulate a demand[1]. The area of legal information is a prime candidate for this approach. It is also an area very much concerned with human relationships and, in this sense, the connection between the collection, the staff and the client is eloquently underlined by Jesse Shera's comment that the library is "primarily a humanistic enterprise"[2]. State Library of Victoria has embraced client focus strategies and, against a backdrop of market research, a picture of our client population is being created which can be applied to the users of the Legal Information Service. A major user group is the first time law seekers who are also first time library users and often frustrated and overwhelmed by the building and the systems of the State Library of Victoria. The aim is to change this group into busy clients with book in hand finding information and comfortable enough to touch base with desk staff as they investigate new leads. The difference between a frustrated first time user and a busy client is the rapid intervention of a knowledgable reference librarian with clear advice on how to start, what to use and where to find alternative information if it isn't immediately available. There is no room for the fallacy that the information world is transparent and that entering a few key words on a PC can open all the doors into the world of legal knowledge. While this is not a new dilemma, it still requires careful monitoring of new technology and new management tools to improve services and expectations. It is part of the reference librarian's role to help clients understand were their query fits in legal information, so their hunt is within the right jurisdiction and under the relevant legislation. To achieve best practice in assisting first time users to achieve self-sufficiency has involved some long-term strategies drawing on detailed training in legal resources for all reference staff. Working from a strong public reference skill base, reference staff have been given specific training in the revamped law collection and services, training in Victorian legislation, case law, electronic law resources and loose-leaf services. All sessions involved a hands-on approach. There are some 40 staff regularly doing duty in the Trescowthick Information Centre and to have 120 participants at the first 3 sessions shows the level of enthusiasm from staff for this training. The current program of training involves a skills audit of all reference staff on their current law knowledge and while this is being assessed additional training will be held in United Nations publications and treaties. The training aims to ensure desk staff are comfortable handling legal resources and that they understand the breadth of the legal resources available. Most important of all, the training gives staff the confidence that they can call on the support group, who are ready and willing to supplement their knowledge or to take over an inquiry if they need more time or more detailed knowledge. With the Law and Government Team on call for most of the library's opening time, much of the frustration experienced by users and staff can be quickly smoothed over. The same will hopefully apply in the future with the development of interactive communications that some commentators predict will allow users and staff to seek help on screen while using the library's electronic tools. This was an issue raised at the recent Online/Ondisc99 conference and State Library of Victoria is focussing on Anne Lipow's forecast that libraries need to address remote users as the next stage of reference development[3]. Given that the library has a responsibility for country users as well as local Melbourne users, developments in this area are being closely monitored as are those involving e-mail and the Internet in general. As a step towards this future the Law Foundation of Victoria has agreed to fund a program for training public librarians in legal resources. The Law team is working closely with Victorian public libraries on this state-wide expansion. Electronic resourcesTo state the obvious, Internet has turned the library world on its head. With this in mind, management support for electronic tools and services was a clear marker of a forward looking vision in developing the collection and the State Library OPAC provides access to a broad range of services including full text legislation and law reports. Staff are aware that the practicalities of the "best tool for the job" dictates that a substantial doubling of tools in both formats was needed to address the issue of effective service for the broad range of public using the Legal Information Service. One of the key tasks when setting up the legal reference collection was to select CD-ROM and Internet resources which would enhance the paper collections. The higher profile law resources were indexed on the public PCs in a menu system providing equal access to the Library's catalogue, the union catalogue of the Victorian based universities and subject access to periodical indexes including full text journals. This networked set of resources provided access to different versions of Victorian legislation, Australian legislation and case law, representing all local law publishers, sites such as AustLii and government sites including industrial awards, Hansards, bills as well as the journal indexes covered by Attorney General's, Cinch and Federal police. The library's collection is significantly boosted by its government deposit collections and we have incorporated Internet and electronic tools into this first line of resources for such bodies as the United Nations. The next wave of Internet resources was covered by the library's complex system of providing general access to the Internet. Staff encourage use of research PCs to access government and law sites by maintaining a set of bookmarks on staff and public PCs. First line resources are complemented by access to relevant sites with the emphasis on plain language resources from bodies such as Victoria Legal Aid. These resources are selected and evaluated in the same way paper copy is added to the collection. This arrangement has proved to be useful and the inclusion in the menu system has encouraged clients to ask about legislation and similar material which is effectively invisible in the catalogue. A collection of electronic resources has the same dilemmas as a hard copy collection; the potential of the collection is unlimited but runs the risk of being under-used. The remedy for under-use works for both mediums involves training. Ensure all desk staff understand the tools and how they work; understand the differences and values of different format versions of similar tools and ensure staff understand the search strategies for the electronic versions and understand when their clients need to use different formats. To gain this level of comfort with the resources requires ongoing training and back up resources in the form of quick staff guides and on call assistance. Even with training, however, it remains a complex area where reference skill and subject knowledge are required to work through an involved inquiry and identify relevant resources. The Law and Government team need to monitor feedback and be ready to offer support, retraining or apply changes as needed. The Law team chose electronic resources to complement paper resources, not to replace hardcopy tools. First time law seekers are often better served by understanding the dimensions of the law and finding relevant chapters in a loose-leaf service shows this better than text popping up in isolation on a PC screen. In some instances duplicate versions of paper resources are held because Internet has encouraged governments to provide open access to primary resources. In these instances it is imperative the law team and desk staff understand the differences between the options available, better searching capability on this product, currency of updating on that tool. In all these instances the human element is the most important, the Law team works to connect the client and staff to the best tool for the task in a seamless collection of paper and electronic resources. CollectionState libraries as a resource should not be overlooked by law libraries. They can provide law resources in combination with other major collections not specifically relevant and therefore not included in normal law libraries and can often bring a different approach to a query. State Library of Victoria till now has been the equivalent of a physical Internet. If you can crack the code to find material you had the wealth of government deposit collections from international bodies and governments around the world. Government publications include Hansard, government gazettes, bills, parliamentary papers and legislation from not only Victoria but all other states and the Commonwealth. Superimposed on this was a legal deposit collection of all Victorian publications and one hundred and forty years of selecting and collection building to create general collections with specific collection strengths in newspapers, genealogy, arts, business, Australiana and law. Where the Legal Information Service differs from a normal law library is in this collection scope. Regardless of the query there will be some information on the topic whether this is in the form of newspaper articles, a book summarising the history of an event or the original historical government reports connecting to the current law. Local government by-laws are often discussed in local histories but are not collected by most law libraries. A history on child welfare will include information on adoption practices which will channel a search of government gazette resources, which may otherwise be missed by following normal search routes. The major point is to invest the time in the hunt and to use the staff collective knowledge and skills in building and working with these collections to enhance law resources and to connect the law seeker with the best resources for the task in hand. ResultHow deep is the Legal Information Service is an understanding of human factors involved in collection development, training and service delivery. Essentially, what gives depth or soul to the Legal Information Service and what allows the best to be trawled from a bottomless collection is the layers of staff and the depth of reference experience on desks, connecting the desk staff with the specialist areas of law resources. The depth of collection is a combination of Legal Information Services staff knowing their users and selecting electronic and paper resources which provide the plain language tools worked in harmony with the whole of the State Library of Victoria collection. The depth comes from the ability of the reference librarian to connect the first time user with a way to search and find information. What makes the generalist staff stronger and more able to dive deeper is ongoing training reinforcing the skills needed to understand the collections. What encourages generalist staff to dive deeper is the knowledge that the Legal Information Service staff will offer a line or another course of action. This can be summed up as a deepwater collection with lifesavers. FutureWe all have the same essential future strategy - to be good at what we do, survive and become better. The Legal Information Service will be faced with more changes to reference service, building issues and the need to keep itself and general reference staff at a level of service excellence. We will need to justify selections given ever tightening budgets and prove to political forces that the expenditure is justified as demonstrated by the consolidation of user populations and the encouragement of more clients receiving better service. To achieve ongoing continuous improvement in service requires training, training and retraining in original ways and requires constant use of the resources. We must expand out the Service to remote users via expansion into the public library network developing stronger links with community groups and, as a consequence, marketing the human and collection resources of State Library of Victoria. This is basic librarianship, never the less, that is what the future is about. References
1. A general introduction to library practice/compiled by J. W. Metcalfe. 3rd ed. Sydney: Public Library of NSW, 1955. P.4.
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