The Challenges of eBooks in Law Libraries (and one very interesting real world solution)

On Jan. 24, 2013, Ellyssa Kroski, Manager of Information Systems, New York Law Institute, and Bess Reynolds, Technical Services Manager, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, presented "Going Digital – The Challenges of eBooks in Law Libraries" in a LLAGNY professional education and development program. They reviewed publishing industry, vendors and aggregators current offerings, licensing restrictions and pricing models (oops, AALL trouble maker alert -- too late for our professional association to censor an event that mentions pricing models a/k/a "pricing structures" this time). Ellyssa Kroski and Bess Reynolds also "tackled the current challenges and obstacles to be overcome by both private and academic law libraries interested in implementing an eBooks program" and "discussed what law libraries are doing to make eBooks available to their attorneys and patrons." Their presentation stacks can be viewed at On Firmer Ground. Highly recommended.

While not news to the NYC law library community, one very interesting development is that the New York Law Institute have made its collection of 56,000 eBooks available to NYLI members free of charge. Debevoise & Plimpton is the Institute's first eBook client to integrate the NYLI catalog module into the firm's OPAC. Any law library that uses EOS and is a NYLI member now can make the Institute's substantial collection of eBooks available to their library's users.

Also highly recommended. I don't know about you but one little Ohio county law library that uses EOS will be looking into the ways and means of becoming an institutional member of the New York Law Institute to access this collection -- and this despite many notable legal publishing houses being missing from the Institute's eBook collection publishers list because they either deny law libraries the ability to circulate eBooks or try to limit lending to non-integrated, not institutional-centric platforms. [JH]