by Sarah Gotschall
I recently watched a June 2017 conference presentation by Tony Seba, a Stanford professor who studies technological disruption. To illustrate the shockingly quick disruption of horses, he compared a photo of 5th Avenue from 1900 with one from 1913. In 1900, one lonely car is surrounded by a sea of horses. A mere 13 years later, the car/horse ratio is reversed.
Seba predicts a slew of similarly speedy disruptions to cars in the next 13 years. By 2030, Seba estimates that 95% of cars in the U.S. will be electric, self-driving, part of an on-demand fleet, and cost a fraction of what we pay to operate our gas powered, personally owned cars now.
Seba also discussed how easy it is to fail to spot disruptive technologies using AT&T’s 1985 effort to predict the market for cell phones in 2000 as an example. AT&T’s high-priced consultants produced an estimate of 900,000 cell phone subscribers by 2000, substantially missing the mark by about 100 million.
The various predictions for disruption and the ease of failing to spot disruptive technologies got me thinking about law librarianship. I, like many people, like my job, career, and industry. But, it is no secret that people are predicting, nay, even hoping for, our extinction. For years, we have heard that legal services and higher education are ripe for technological disruption because the legal profession and academy under performs and overcharges. The costs for both legal services and higher education continually rise as wages continually stagnant, pricing out the poor and, increasingly, large segments of the middle class. The American Bar Association reports that 80% of poor or moderate income people lack meaningful access to our justice system. In 2016, the average yearly in-state tuition at a public university was $9,650, and the average student graduated with $37,172 of student loan debt. Of course, that seems insignificant compared to the expense and debt load of law school. We can hardly blame anyone with crushing student debt or unmet legal needs for hoping that the whole lot of us (lawyers, judges, law professors, law librarians) are quickly replaced by a much cheaper robot lawyer, an AI bot, Turbotaxforlaw, something…
What does this all mean for the future of academic law libraries and librarians? Are we on the precipice, with the first car having appeared among the horses, so to speak? I am not sure I have spotted a clear sign of it yet. It is true that the number of applicants to law schools have decreased in recent years, but the other day I read that President Trump might be causing a resurgence of interest in legal education.
After pondering for a bit, I turned to my colleagues at the University of Arizona Cracchiolo Law Library, for their predictions about the future of academic law libraries/librarian by year 2027.
Michael Chiorazzi, Associate Dean for Information Services, Beverly & James E. Rogers Professor of Law, Professor of Information Resources & Library Science
Predicting the future is always a fool’s errand, at least in my case. The last time I predicted anything correctly was the fall of 1973 when I predicted that this kid Springsteen would be big, although even then I was only partially right about that; I never thought he would become huge. With that warning, as to the academic law library of the future, here are some predictions:
Law schools will continue to evolve and expand. Undergraduate degrees in law, Masters programs, Ph.D. programs, LLM programs, online education, etc., will all affect the way we deliver services. We will need to teach more, and to a more varied audience, reconsider how and what we subscribe to and purchase, and expand support to faculty and students.
The building of collections will be reactive to faculty demands and purchased as needed. Rented might be a better term as electronic resources are usually purchased through subscriptions rather than outright ownership. Vendors will still try to figure out how to maximize profits, in a world they will continue to not understand, and are slow to react to. The battle, between librarians and vendors, of disintermediation versus mediation will continue to be fought until the senior officers in these vendor organizations begin to realize they are not selling widgets, but a specific product to a very specific audience – an audience that they are so far removed from as to make them clueless.
AI will significantly change the practice of law and the way lawyers do research. For many areas of law, fuzzy legal logic will be enough to get the job done. Lower costs and knowable outcomes will trump finely crafted legal arguments. Good enough will rule the day. And with AI, library staffs will continue to shrink although there will be a rise in paraprofessionals in the remaining positions.
We will need to continue to emphasize the law library as a third place. Laptops, noise dampening headphones, and handheld devices, allow students to work and study anywhere. What can a law library offer that is more attractive than the local Starbucks or a cozy apartment?
Preservation doesn’t matter. That which needs to be preserved will be, and that which doesn’t will not.
Status of academic law library directors will decline, but the status of academic law library reference librarians and associate law librarians will improve. There is nothing more hierarchical than universities and academic law librarians will continue to be valued as mid-level professional employees that add value to the enterprise but never the same level as faculty, who will dominate the top levels of the academy. This will be true no matter how much we teach or publish. Gradations of faculty grow because of costs and the fight against tenure.
Finally, in the future we will all wear tie-dyed clothing.
Travis Spence, Head of Technical Services
By 2027, the broader trend toward consolidation among library content and service providers will have a profound impact on law libraries. Law libraries will have to make even tougher choices about how to spend their budgets among a dwindling number of providers which could, in turn, spur yet another round of consolidation as providers compete for customers. The larger, more established companies will continue to acquire startups for their technological innovations instead of spending money on in-house development. That could also stifle innovation. In short, I don’t think law libraries in 2027 will look that much different compared to 2017 but budgets will be tighter and options will be fewer.
Specifically in technical services, by 2027 the focus will be primarily on managing access to online resources with a much smaller percentage of the work focusing on physical media. By 2027, library technical services will become a specialization area under the broader field of IT technical services. The desired skill set for library technical services workers won’t have much to do with managing physical collections by that point. As discovery becomes more metadata-driven, cataloging will become even more automated. Library technical services will continue to become more about importing metadata into a discovery system and less about traditional cataloging. Cataloging, already a fading art, will be almost completely gone by 2027.
Dan O’Connor, Library Specialist/Circulation Manager
If all libraries discard print statutes, and the ‘net is knocked out by an EMP blast…ol’ king Hammurabi’s law code may be the only code standing. An eye for an eye!
Cynthia Condit, Reference Librarian & Professor of Practice
I guess I don’t think they’ll change that much. Maybe more digital materials, maybe space reconfigured a bit to accommodate viewing materials on larger screens, perhaps food and drink options. Maybe all old materials will be digitized and old print versions stored away in some underground cave/bunker. No librarians, of course – we’ll be replaced by friendly robots who will know far more than we do – and make better coffee too. It will be like asking Siri.
