What Business Practice Do You Find Especially Harmful to Law Libraries? AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus calls for member input

The AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus has issued a call for member input about significant anti-consumer practices and issues at Tell Us What Business Practice You Find Especially Harmful To Law Libraries. Quoting from the text of the post by Michael Ginsborg:

We formed the AALL Consumer Advocacy Caucus to better protect all law libraries from anti-consumer practices of information providers. We will recommend that AALL’s Executive Board petition appropriate government entities to remedy business practices that illegally restrict competition or otherwise harm law library consumers. We are just starting to consider ideas for our first recommendation, which we would like to propose for Board action at the July 2012 Business Meeting. To prepare our recommendation, we expect to survey AALL members on the nature and scope of a significant anti-consumer problem.

We need your help at this critical moment to target a problem of longstanding concern. What anti-consumer grievance most concerns you as a law librarian?

For additional information including details on ways and means to communicate to the Caucus for this call, see the above linked post.

Do note the Consumer Advocacy Caucus is also soliciting specific examples about the kinds of problems consumers are experiencing with legal publishers by way of its Library Consumer Complaint Form. In the context of fair dealing concerns expressed in the law-lib message trail about West's add-ons/ancillary materials shipments (KeyRules, to be specific) earlier this month, Ginsborg posted the following message to law lib:

[The AALL] Consumer Advocacy Caucus would welcome your complaints about these kinds of problems with legal publishers. We aim to track as many complaints as we can. Doing so will help us reflect your concern as we collect evidence of unfair and anticompetitive business practices. We expect to use this evidence when we prepare our recommendations to the AALL Executive Board for government intervention.

[JH]