Collection Development

Strengthening our Collections in a Pandemic

Collection development is one of the foundations underlying our services to faculty, students, and other researchers. It is a unique aspect of librarianship, particularly at a major research library such as we aspire to be. Collection development for us includes preserving publications and manuscripts that may be as much as 800 years old, addressing the needs of scholars and students stretching far into the future, collecting resources from around the world, and supporting research and scholarship of the national and global communities. During the pandemic era, our University was far less open to visiting researchers than usual, and our primary patrons—the faculty and students of Yale Law School—faced unprecedented difficulties in their education and research. Thus a significant part of the Law Library’s efforts needed to focus on developing special methods of making our collections accessible to the primary patrons and acquiring online study aids helpful to students. One aspect of this enhanced service in 2021–22 was that we initiated a subscription to the Aspen Learning Library, which consists of multiple types of popular study materials. Another new subscription this past year was to Intelligize, a tool for streamlining corporate filings research. We also acquired access to Westlaw UK, a basic resource for British legal research. The University Library added to its holdings a license to Bloomberg.com, which includes articles not available through Bloomberg Law and which has been much desired by our faculty and students. We also negotiated a deal with the Wolters Kluwer company for an unprecedentedly large discount on their electronic and print products. In furtherance of our library goal of contributing to the public good, we have increased our attention to social justice issues in our collecting of rare and non-rare publications. Social justice issues have also been prominent in our exhibits, as described elsewhere in this Annual Report. Looking forward, Kathryn James and Fred Shapiro have worked prodigiously on a major exhibit on the Founders of Yale Law School and Slavery, which will open in the Fall 2022 and is expected to be of significant importance to the Law School. In the past, the Law Library has not acquired archival collections of papers by Yale Law School faculty or prominent external individuals. We have provided funding for an archivist processing law-related papers for the University’s Manuscripts and Archives department, but this was a term position that is drawing to an end. We are now investigating whether there are sustainable possibilities for our launching a small Law Library archival program as part of our mission of preserving and providing access to historical resources relating to YLS and the larger legal and social-justice communities. In terms of our organization and processes for collection development, we inaugurated (with substantial impetus from Lucie Olejnikova) regular meetings of the Associate Director for Collections and our selectors. The selectors (Lucie, John Nann, Evelyn Ma, Cate Kellett, Trezlen Drake, and Kathryn James) play a crucial role in the collection development operation.

Library Publications

One example of publications emanating from the Law Library is that we have for over a decade partnered with the Cengage Gale publishing company to create the Making of Modern Law digital legal history resources. This is one of the most important legal-history digitization projects in the world. During this last year, we lent microfilm reels of records and briefs from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to Gale as part of a MOML module of federal Courts of Appeals briefs. Another library-related publication is the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference. This is a book series published by Yale University Press and featuring outstanding scholarship by our own faculty and other authors. It has been described by the Press as one of the “crown jewels” in their prestigious publishing program. The 14th book in the series, Power and Justice in Medieval England by Joshua C. Tate, was published in May 2022, and the 15th book, Oscar Wilde on Trial by Joseph Bristow, is forthcoming in October.