Two Fortnights in Sheffield
Report on a Law Librarian Exchange
by Cindy May
Head of Cataloging
University of Wisconsin - Madison
(Visit Date: October/November 2002)
Reprinted from Technical Services Law Librarian, vol. 28, no. 3 (March 2003)
In October and November of 2002 I had the golden opportunity to live
and work in Sheffield, England, on a “professional development
attachment” to the Crookesmoor Library, the law library of the
University of Sheffield. This article recounts my experience there and
some of the ideas I’ve brought home. I begin with a little background
on the exchange program and on the city of Sheffield itself. Secondly,
I give a brief overview of legal education in England and describe the
three law libraries I visited. I then highlight the major differences I
noted between those three libraries and my own. Next, I summarize what
I learned about online catalogs, budget issues, and interlibrary
cooperation in the Sheffield area. Finally, I examine the value of this
experience both for me and for my institution.
How It All Started
Steve Barkan, University of Wisconsin Law Library Director, visited the
University of Sheffield in summer 2001 to set up a law student exchange
program. While he was there, Steve met Sheffield’s library director,
Michael Hannon. The two of them began to explore the idea of a law
library staff exchange between our universities, and their discussion
quickly came to fruition when Sheffield’s Academic Liaison Librarian
for law and education, Maria Mawson, came to Madison for four weeks in
the spring of 2002. My visit to Sheffield in the fall was Wisconsin’s
reciprocal half of this first exchange.
Sheffield
Sheffield is a picturesque city just on the eastern edge of the Peak
District National Park, probably best known to the American public as
the setting for “The Full Monty.” The city has moved well beyond its
industrial revolution steel town image, with lots of green space and
beautiful public buildings. The people I met there were incredibly
friendly, and their hospitality more than made up for the rainy fall
weather.
Legal Education
In England, law is an undergraduate major. After graduation, students
may opt to continue their education at a vocational law school to
prepare themselves for a career in law. England retains the distinction
between solicitors, who deal directly with clients, and barristers, who
present cases in court. Solicitor training requires one additional year
of school beyond the undergraduate degree, and barrister training
requires two. Graduates who did not major in law may proceed to
solicitor or barrister training after completion of a one year catch-up
course, known as a “conversion” course. Syllabi for all three courses
are very practice-oriented and are determined by the bar.
Law Libraries
The Crookesmoor Library, a branch of the University of Sheffield
Library, is housed in the Crookesmoor Building together with the rest
of the Department of Law. The library serves 1,250 law students,
primarily undergraduates. The Department of Law also offers the
one-year conversion course, and the library provides materials for
those students in a special room. The library houses a large print
collection of primary British, European, and Commonwealth materials;
legal periodicals and treatises; and a computer area with twenty
workstations. The staff consists of 6.5 FTE who work together as a
team, sharing reference/circulation desk duties. Evening and weekend
staff are rotated in from the main library.
The other
university in town, Sheffield Hallam University, is spread over three
campuses, each with its own “learning centre.” The Collegiate Learning
Centre that I visited covers the subjects of law, history, English,
health, psychology, education, and ESL. Currently there are 647 FTE law
students and one librarian “law specialist.” The library is open 24/7,
with two security guards in attendance at night and multiple video
monitors in the entrance area. Students check out their own books at a
self-charge machine in the large lobby. While they’re waiting, they can
entertain themselves by reading a scrolling electronic sign that offers
“interesting facts,” the sign and its facts rented as a package. The
library contains over three hundred computers, some dedicated to the
catalog and library resources only, others for open use. Some are even
password-protected for students with disabilities. The print collection
of legal materials is quite small; the emphasis is definitely on
electronic resources. A small café area with tables and vending
machines is located within the library.
The College of
Law of England and Wales comprises five branches. The York branch,
which I visited, enrolls 600-650 students. The director of all five
branch libraries is stationed in London, visiting each library on a
rotating basis. All five branch libraries share networked resources,
although their print collections are handled independently. Like
Sheffield Hallam, the library at York concentrates on electronic
resources. It houses four IT suites (computer labs) with a total of 64
computers. The York branch is essentially maintained by two librarians
who have managed to find the time, wedged between acquisitions and
cataloging and circulation and reference duties, to create an inviting
space with elegant signage and many helpful guides to the collection.
Notable Differences
At all three of these schools, students rely on the library to supply
required course readings. As a result, libraries order multiple copies
of titles from faculty reading lists. This is economical for the
students, but significantly reduces the amount of money available for
other purchases.
Another striking difference between
academic libraries in Sheffield and those in the U.S. is the absence of
student employees. Administrators were surprised at the extent to which
the University of Wisconsin has institutionalized student employment,
with campus-wide standardized pay scales and a centralized student
employment office. They are very enthusiastic about the idea of
employing students in Sheffield’s libraries for more efficient use of
limited resources, and posed some hard questions (e.g. what to do about
no-shows at the circulation desk during exam periods) which I naturally
forwarded to my more knowledgeable colleagues back home.
Possibly as a result of a primary clientele of undergraduates, polite
reminders about noise abound. I was especially fond of the wording on
the sign posted just inside Crookesmoor’s entrance: “Welcome to the
library. Please help to maintain Crookesmoor Library as a quiet place
for study.” Sheffield Hallam has separate rooms for group study, quiet
study, and silent study, with prominent signage. Even the library at
York, catering to graduate students, has a designated “silent room.”
Library Catalogs
As Head of Cataloging at Wisconsin, I was especially interested in
Sheffield’s cataloging policies and practices. I was surprised to learn
that Talis Information Limited serves not only as the source of their
automated system, but also as the source of the bibliographic records
they use for copy cataloging. Talis is, in effect, their ILS and
bibliographic utility rolled into one.
Call numbers
include sequence, classification, and suffix. Like Wisconsin,
Sheffield’s law library shelves volumes in separate sequences for
reference, reserve, periodicals, primary materials, treatises, etc.
These sequences are recorded as the first part of the call number. The
classification part of the call number is a Dewey Decimal number. Every
library I visited in Sheffield uses the Dewey Decimal classification,
with the exception of a few of the public library branches that use the
“book store” arrangement of books into broad topical areas. The
“suffix” part of the call number consists of the first letter of the
author’s last name or, if the book lacks an author, the first letter of
the title. Obviously, this results in many identical call numbers, but
they’re not considered a problem because volumes are uniquely
identified by their bar codes.
The University of
Sheffield’s OPAC is called Star and can be viewed at
http://library.shef.ac.uk/. In addition to author, title, and key word
searches, Star can be used to find out whether a serial is held at any
of the nearly one hundred libraries, both on and off campus, which
contribute to the Sheffield Union List of Serials.
Sheffield Hallam uses Innovative Interfaces as its ILS. The public
library system uses Epixtech (formerly Dynix). Although I was surprised
to discover that Epixtech is a non-MARC system, I was impressed by its
ability to route new books in different orders of precedence among the
library’s 27 branches, so each branch receives its fair share of brand
new titles.
The “catalog versus home page” debate
concerning access to electronic resources is alive and well in
Sheffield. The University of Sheffield relies on its home page almost
exclusively. The only electronic resources in the catalog are
e-journals, and they are simply linked to the e-journal page of the
library web site. By contrast, the philosophy at Sheffield Hallam is
that access to electronic resources should be through the catalog, and
that creating separate lists of electronic resources on the library’s
web site would be unjustifiable duplication of effort.
Regardless of system, dedication to high quality cataloging and
authority control were evident in every cataloger I met. The Head of
Cataloging at the University of Sheffield and I were so immediately
congenial that we decided it must have something to do with
“cataloger’s wave length.”
Budgets
In my discussions with library administrators and in meetings I
attended, I was repeatedly struck by the extent to which libraries in
England and the USA are facing the same pressing issues, including
collection management in the face of steeply rising subscription costs
combined with budget and space constraints, fund allocation decisions
between print and electronic resources, and electronic licensing
restrictions. There were times when I could close my eyes and easily
imagine myself at a meeting back home (except for the classy accents,
of course). In fact, the University of Sheffield is committed to a zero
collection growth policy by 2005, and is planning a new library that
will be almost entirely electronic.
To help bridge the
gap between needs and resources, librarians in Sheffield have become
experts at pursuing grant funding. I read a successful application for
a digitization project that was an absolute gem, and saw several
innovative public library initiatives brought about entirely through
grant funding, including the installation of computers for public
Internet access in all branches, computer training for all staff,
bookmobile service for disadvantaged groups, and even baby packs for
every Sheffield birth.
Library Cooperation
The University of Sheffield Library is a member of both RLG and its
British equivalent, CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries).
CURL’s union catalog, COPAC, is used as a backup when Star has to be
taken down for any reason.
SINTO, the Sheffield
Information Organisation, is a partnership of library and information
services of all types in South Yorkshire and North Derbyshire with the
aim of improving the quality of information services through
cooperation, planning and partnership. Crookesmoor Library participates
in the SINTO Legal Information Group, which has published a pamphlet
entitled “Looking for Legal Information in Sheffield.”
Crookesmoor was also part of the ambitious Case Project
(http://www.leeds.ac.uk/case/), a grant-funded feasibility study to
evaluate the possibility of enhancing access to legal research
materials through increased collaboration among seven university law
libraries in the region. The project experimented with pilot projects
for virtual reference service, legal document delivery, consortial
purchasing, a union catalog, collection descriptions, a web gateway, a
repository of documents relating to information skills law students
need, and online tutorials. The two-year project will be completed at
the end of February 2003 and a final report will be submitted by the
project manager.
Outcomes
On an institutional level, this first exchange represents an enhanced
level of interlibrary cooperation and knowledge transfer. As staff at
our two libraries get to know one another, there will be a greater
willingness to draw on one another’s expertise. We at Wisconsin will
have at our fingertips a group of law librarians with a total
accumulation of many years of experience in British and European legal
research. And likewise our colleagues in Sheffield will be able to call
upon us for assistance with U.S. legal research questions. The level of
service at both institutions will be raised and strengthened
symbiotically.
On a personal level, my visit to
Yorkshire was incredibly valuable for my professional growth. I
returned to Wisconsin much more knowledgeable about English legal
education and the issues faced by law libraries there. I was able to
compare and contrast policies and practices in several libraries, and
then compare them with those at Wisconsin. I was able to inventory the
primary materials in Crookesmoor’s collection, and bring that
information back to assist the collection development librarians with
decision-making here at home. I developed professional relationships
with colleagues whom I can contact should I ever need their help with a
reference request, a resource evaluation, or an explanation of policy
choices. And I was inspired by the team spirit, positive attitude, and
social commitment exhibited by the librarians I met throughout my
visit. I returned home with renewed enthusiasm for my job and my
library, and that’s got to benefit the library as well as me. I
sincerely hope that our two libraries will be able to continue these
short-term exchanges in the future, and heartily recommend them to
other institutions.
I want to thank Steve Barkan,
University of Wisconsin Law Library Director; Nancy Paul, Assistant
Director for Technical Services and Collections; and Michael Hannon,
University of Sheffield Director of Library Services and University
Librarian, for making this exchange possible. I also want to thank the
Law Librarians Association of Wisconsin for its financial help. And I
especially want to thank all my colleagues at the Crookesmoor Library,
the Main Library, and all the other libraries I visited, for going out
of their way to make my visit a success. I’ll never forget how generous
they were with their time, and how willing to share their knowledge and
experience with me. Special thanks to Maria Mawson, my unofficial
hostess extra ordinaire, for all the time she spent scheduling
appointments for me before my arrival, accompanying me to meetings,
chauffeuring me around and about, and just generally ensuring that I
was comfortable and content every day I was there. Maybe next time I’m
in Sheffield someone will finally tell me where those Full Monty guys
perform!