National Jurist's Annual Waste of Time: Academic Law Library Ranking

Once again National Jurist has published its asinine annual ranking of law school libraries. 50 percent of the score is based on the number of volumes and unique titles. The ratio of library study seating to enrollment counts for 20 percent. The ratio of full-time professional librarians to enrollment and the number of hours that the library is open each week account for 15 percent each. At least the magazine stopped counting the number of computer workstations because "wireless technology has replaced old school-provided hard-wired stations."

National Jurist might want to rethink some of the other old-school metrics it is has been using to perform this annual waste of time. No, I am not going to report the top X-number of academic law libraries from this ranking. It's utterly too ridiculous. If you can't resist, click on the above link.

Beware the status-obsessed law school dean or prof who wants you to produce a press release about how great "our law library is" based on this ranking. Years back, at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, we just said "no." You see, our library that year was ranked higher than Harvard's law library. Why? Seating-to-student ratio. Oh yeah, that made our library better than Harvard's. [JH]