Educational Requirements for Law Libraries

Abstract

How can one know what the educational requirements for law librarians are? The question relates not to minimum requirements, but to such qualifications as will enable their possessor to elevate his position and meet the demands of an expanding profession. What are the educational requirements of law librarianship? There is no ready-made yard-stick with which to measure these requirements, and, I fear that any unit of measure which might be suggested would be found irrelative to different types of law librarianship. Suppose we begin, therefore, not with the yard-stick, but with the thing to be measured. Not long ago, an eminent professor who has been using libraries all his life said to·me, "What do librarians do, anyway? When they have the library started a~d stocked with books, I don't see how they continue to keep busy?" It is not easy, in a few words, to answer such a question. Suppose the question were "What do law librarians do?" If we can answer that question, perhaps we will then also know what are the educational requirements of law Iibrarianship. But that will be so only if we study the behavior of a composite being made up of many different law librarians all confronted with different problems. And this law librarian must also be presumed to be doing, either in his proper person,·or through his assistants, everything that is done in a law library.