The Role of the Law Librarian in the Pre-Publishing Phase of Legal Scholarship

Traditionally, law librarians have assumed different roles in the production of legal scholarship per se. Like our entire service-oriented persona, our participation in the scholarly enterprise has been diverse. Most of the time, we do it in such a way that our patrons assumed it as part of the profession to a level that made some of us feel unacknowledged.  It consists of the role we have traditionally played at the reference desk. In addition to our role to support legal education – teaching legal research in formal or informal settings — most of the time, academic reference librarians find sources faculty members use in writing their work; training faculty research assistants; and working with journal editors and members of the journals’ editorial boards to produce scholarly product consistent with the rules of citation given by The Bluebook. We all remember the days when we fielded dozens of requests about how to collect the same source badly identified, which came up in multiple student assignments, as well as the days when a footnote identified only the name of an author and we had to come up with the source containing the specific quote. This is what we have been expected to do at the reference desk: this is work assumed and usually not acknowledged by us, as librarians as being part of the scholarly enterprise.

Now, when technology has changed what we do so much that much of our work is defined by technology, we propose a new approach to how the pre-publication process of legal scholarship is being undertaken by law journals. We argue that librarians can do more. We can teach law students how to best use their time and energy. Rather than have them make an infinite number of trips to the reference desk to ask for the same source, why couldn’t we help them build searchable free-of-charge databases to store and organize all these sources?

The Bluebook: a Uniform System of Citation (18th Ed.)