COSELL's Collection Development for Academics Roundtable
SEAALL Annual Meeting
Thursday, April 11 2002
4:30 - 5:15 p.m.

Summary of Meeting

The Collection Development Round Table met at 4:30-5:15 p.m. in the Atlantic Room of the Doubletree Hotel. About 10 people attended. The major topic of discussion was the BNA decision to withdraw its publications from the LEXIS and WESTLAW services and sell access to them separately. Some of the libraries represented at the meeting have already subscribed. Most are still mulling the cost implications. Mark Bernstein mentioned that NELLCO has approached COSELL about making a united effort to negotiate with BNA. At first blush, BNA pricing seems radically out of line with the pricing of other legal research databases. LEXIS and WESTLAW run about $1.50 per FTE law student, while BNA runs about $18 per FTE.

The second topic was the challenge of starting a brand new law library "from scratch". The discussion was inspired mainly by the fact that four of the librarians present at the meeting were in that situation. Part of the discussion centered on the way those librarians perceive the ABA standards for law libraries, as interpreted by individual members of inspection teams, to be perhaps unnecessarily tied to traditional information formats.

Reported by Ann Puckett apuckett@arches.uga.edu

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