The Case Project: sharing legal resources in Yorkshire and the Humber

The Case Project, a pilot project into the funding of law libraries, aimed to establish models of co-operation and to analyse the costs of collaboration between law libraries. In this article from the Autumn 2001 issue of Directions Project Manager Elizabeth Kensler outlines the activities of the project.

The Case Project, a 24 month project starting in January 2001 with the University of Leeds as lead institution, evaluated the possibility of enhancing access to legal research materials through increased collaboration, in this case between seven university law libraries in Yorkshire and Humberside.

The key outcome of the project was the Legal Information Gateway for Yorkshire, giving researchers access to a range of resources direct from their desktops. The gateway aimed to make a significant contribution to meeting the rapidly developing academic requirements of a subject whose information needs are both extensive and increasingly expensive.

The feasibility of increased and effective collaboration was considered through:

• improved access to legal research material through searchable online collection descriptions and collection strengths indicators
• development of a regional online catalogue of law reports, journals and statutes
• an automated regional document delivery service
• improved cross-sectoral co-operative library access arrangements and resource sharing
• development of a regional collection development strategy
• investigation of consortial purchase and user-led customisation of a legal online product

One of the main issues under consideration was the development of a regional online catalogue of law reports, journals and statutes and a collection descriptions catalogue. These catalogues would enable researchers to locate specific materials quickly and identity the level of research material in their chosen subject area, anywhere in the region.

The first level of collection description would indicate collection subject areas and highlight access and institution information, primarily for the seven universities. The second, a more detailed collection mapping database, would specify collection strengths and weaknesses. Users would be able to search by a specific subject and be given an indication of which institutions hold collections in this area and to what strength. Due to licensing restrictions it was not possible to provide access to legal electronic resources, but it was planned to expand the scope of the catalogues to other regional cross-sectoral legal collections.

The project received on-going feedback from legal researchers and information specialists on the project team, and distributed a questionnaire to academics in the region aimed at identifying their existing methods of locating research materials and establishing their present and future research needs. Information gathering was extended to cross-sectoral bodies, including librarians within further education, public libraries, law firms, government libraries and law societies in the region.

The project explored the best way of making cross-sectoral legal resources available by electronic means, using the regional legal information gateway. Issues of how these services would be made available beyond the academic community and at what charge were explored, including agreements with publishers where materials purchased for academic use are made available to a wider legal community.

Faced with the increasing cost of periodicals, including e-journals, alternative means of article provision were also explored. Two options for provision were considered; first through sharing existing resources regionally through a document delivery pilot and secondly through a fee based ‘just-in-time’ document delivery service:

• the document delivery pilot calculated the possibility of large scale resource sharing across the region, especially the cost effectiveness of running such a service in comparison with existing document delivery services. The study look specifically at what proportion of requests could be satisfied by project partners.
• a trial of the British Library’s Inside Web service, which offered Web-based access to journals and conference proceedings, to assess its costs and benefits and the demand for materials outside the scope of the region’s legal collections

Last Modified: 9 July 2010