Tradition and Change in Law Library Goals

Abstract

In a time of great technological change and frustrating financial constraints, it is difficult to see what the future holds for librarianship in general and law librarianship in particular. Libraries and the profession of those who administer them are, of course, shaped by the economic, political, and scientific forces which influence all social and intellectual activity. In the contagion of prophesying which took place in 1980 (as it has at the beginning of every decade), librarians, like other professionals, sought to discern what the future held for their field. Fiscal pressure, increased need for access to an ever expanding literature, and technological change were the dominant themes of those speculations among law librarians.