Suzanne Thorpe & Allen Easley
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Suzanne Thorpe & Allen Easley |
Thank you for inviting me to speak to you this morning. This is an honor and privilege.
By way of background, I thought it might be useful and important to talk briefly about what we on the Questionnaire Committee consider to be the driving forces behind the framing and scope of the questions we ask.
Recognizing that the burden of responding to the annual questionnaire is significant, an important factor that we continually reexamine, particularly as accreditation standards change, is whether the data being collected is needed for accreditation purposes?
Another important question is whether the data is useful for schools or consumers?
A third consideration is whether we believe the data we are getting is accurate? We have often reframed a question when it appeared that ambiguities in the way we were asking the question was causing schools to answer it in inconsistent ways, making meaningful data comparison across law schools impossible. Sometimes, we have even eliminated questions when we thought that the data we were getting was not reliable, particularly when it was also unclear whether reliable data would be useful.
The heavier the burden of producing data in response to questions, the more important it is in our minds that the request for data be justified by clear need, usefulness, and a sense that the data we collect is likely to be reasonably accurate.
Always lurking in the background is awareness that some of the data we collect through the annual questionnaire is being used by US News for ranking purposes. While we try not to allow that awareness to drive decisions, it highlights the importance of the factors just mentioned. Do we really need the data? Is it really useful? And perhaps most important here, is it accurate?
So, for example, when we decided two years ago to resume collecting median LSAT/UGPA data, we did so because we thought the data useful to consumers and helpful, more complete information on the entering class, for the Accreditation Committee.
But we were also acutely aware of the fact that while we were not collecting median data, US News was, and there was a lot of concern out there that because they were using data we weren’t collecting the data they were getting might not be very accurate.
So, although there were some fairly strong sentiments expressed in the committee that we ought not to start collecting media data simply because US News used that data in its rankings, we found that the median data was useful and helpful to us, and to consumers. And we knew, whether it was a motivating factor for us or not, that others would gain greater confidence in the median data being given to US News knowing that we too were collecting it.
Now, let me turn to some of the major library related issues the Questionnaire Committee has been examining over the past year, and the major changes coming down the pike, at least one of which has been somewhat controversial. First, let me say that in my years chairing the Questionnaire Committee almost every change made to parts of the questionnaires relating to libraries came to the committee initially as proposals from the Library Committee. The only exception to this I can think of is the decision by the Questionnaire Committee to move the counting of professional library staff out of the profiles, about which I will talk more in a few minutes. But, in general, proposals for changes regarding library questions are going to come initially from the library committee, and while the Questionnaire Committee has not always approved proposed changes coming from the library committee, it is highly unlikely to propose a substantive change to library questions itself, without the proposal having first been vetted and approved by the library committee.
The overriding issue for the Questionnaire Committee regarding library matters, since the early 90’s, has concerned electronic resources. More specifically, how should we be assessing the strength of collections in this electronic age?
There were three major changes proposed by the library and questionnaire committees this year: the first having to do with how electronic titles are counted, the second having to do with serial titles and subscriptions, and the third, and most controversial, having to do with eliminating volume counts and making title counts the primary collection measure.
We have been struggling with the electronic titles question for some time. A few years ago, we took the position of not even trying to count electronic titles, focusing on electronic resources on the expenditures level instead. The change that we proposed this year, and that the Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar approved in June, separates electronic titles into titles owned and leased. Titles owned will be counted and reported. Titles leased will not be reported at the title level; rather they will be subsumed in databases, reported at the collection level.
Obviously, there are arguments both ways on this question. And this is a work in progress. As technology changes, our thoughts about appropriate methods of measuring the strength of collections may change as well. But for the moment, we believe that the distinction between titles owned and leased makes sense. And for the moment, were we to count titles leased in our title count, our feeling was that title counts would become almost meaningless as a measure of collection strength.
Our second recommendation this year, again approved by the Council in June, was to eliminate serial title and subscription counts. There has long been discomfort with how serials were being counted, and with the inconsistency in how they were being counted, a problem exacerbated when electronic serials were factored in. But serial titles will still show up in the total titles count, and serials are also counted at the expenditure level, split between print and non-print.
Our final, and again most controversial recommendation, was to make titles owned the primary collection measure, eliminating volume and volume equivalent counts. This recommendation was driven by two primary concerns. First, in this increasingly electronic age, volume counts were becoming increasingly irrelevant. And second, volume counts were notoriously unreliable. While there may be some comfort, at most libraries, with the count of volumes added and subtracted over recent periods of time, inevitably total volume counts start with a base of inherited totals in which we often have little confidence.
So, from the perspective of both the Questionnaire Committee and the ABA library committee I think it is fair to say that we had grave questions about the usefulness and accuracy of volume counts. And to the extent that volume counts play a role, albeit a small one, in the US News rankings, that only exacerbated our concern over accuracy and usefulness.
We were concerned enough about these proposed changes, particularly relating to volume counts, that we took the unusual step for the Questionnaire Committee this year of seeking comments regarding these proposals before finalizing our recommendations to the Council. And on the volume count question, while we received a wide range of reactions, some favorable and others unfavorable, there was enough concern expressed about the common use of volume counts by some schools for planning and management purposes that the committee decided to delay implementation of the elimination of volume counts for two years, to allow the law library community time to develop alternative methods for the continued collection of volume count data if it continues to believe that this data is important and useful. So, volume and volume equivalent counts will continue in the fall 2007 and fall 2008 questionnaires, but will be eliminated in the fall 2009 questionnaire.
We haven’t seen the end of the tinkering with how we measure and assess collections. I hope in the near future, however, we can devote more attention to how we assess quality of service. This is more important, in my mind, in part, because in this electronic age, I am not sure we can ever get a good handle on collection measurements anymore.
The one other change to the annual questionnaire relating to libraries that I want to mention briefly has to do with the profiles section of the questionnaire and how professional library staff are counted. For years, we have used the profiles to count four groups of people within law schools, slightly oversimplifying: full-time faculty, part-time faculty, non-teaching decanal and director level administrators, and salaried non-teaching full-time library personnel. The profiles are an important tool for counting teaching resources because the rules for counting those resources are complex, with subtle but important distinctions between tenure-track faculty, clinicians with or without 405(c) job security, legal writing instructors, visitors, faculty with significant administrative responsibilities, etc. And it is important to get all these folks categorized correctly because it impacts the student-faculty ratio.
But the profiles are a pretty cumbersome tool for counting other staff resources, like non-teaching administrators or librarians, where, although getting the count right is important, there are not the same complexities about who counts, for how much, and who doesn’t. So, we decided to move everyone out of the profiles except those individuals who in one way or another contribute to the faculty count. This does not mean any changes in who we count in terms of different types of library staff. It just means that the counting will not be done through the profiles.
This does not mean that no one from the library will end up in the profiles. The director, who generally holds a faculty appointment, will have a profile. If there are other librarians who are full-time employees and teach or hold faculty rank, they will have a profile too. One question that has arisen is about what should be done with professional library staff who assist in teaching in the legal writing program. I think the answer depends on whether the individual has primary responsibility for teaching the class, or is simply assisting in teaching some segment of the class, e.g., relating to legal bibliography tools.
I think in the former case, this individual would be part of the law school’s teaching resources, and in the latter case, not. It is a judgment call, but one that in the grand scheme of things probably does not matter much. For in neither case would this individual count as a full-time faculty member. So, at best, this person would be part of the additional teaching resources the law school can count in the ratio calculation, subject to the 20% cap on additional teaching resources. And since virtually every school maxes out on the cap, counting or not counting this individual as an additional teaching resource won’t affect the ratio. And whether this individual is listed in the profiles, or counted elsewhere, will not affect the count of library staff either.
In closing, let me mention one other new development coming down the line which should be of some interest to library directors. It is my impression anyway, that library directors make much better use of the ABA’s takeoff data than deans. Certainly the comprehensive library takeoffs are a very well developed thoughtfully constructed tool for looking at and analyzing massive amounts of library data. The takeoffs, however, even the comprehensive library takeoffs, are a paper record in an electronic world. They are an anachronism. And soon they will be changing.
The ABA is in the process of developing a prototype for an online version of the takeoffs that will allow users to select desired data elements and download them into spreadsheet formats, allowing for easy sorting, and formulas that do calculations based on comparisons of different data elements. E.g., you could easily calculate the acquisitions budget per FTE faculty member. Or create reports on a select group of peer schools, sorted based on whatever criteria you desire. Eventually this will make the takeoffs, as they exist today, irrelevant. And will make all of the data collected by the ABA in the annual questionnaire far more useful to deans and library directors.
The first prototype will not have all the data available. It will probably focus primarily on financial data. But the rest of the data should very quickly become available in this new online format. And it will revolutionize the way law schools use the extraordinarily useful but often neglected data collected by the ABA.
Thank you again for inviting me to speak to you. It is an honor to be here. And if any of you have questions, I would be happy to try to answer them.
