Syracuse Law embraces hi-tech future
By Peter J. Wasilko
On Friday September 25th, 1998 Syracuse University's College of Law dedicated its new Winifred MacNaughton Hall. The completion of this state-of-the-art facility, coupled with major renovations to The H. Douglas Barclay Law Library and E. I. White Hall, marks a historic turning point in SU Law's 103-year history.
For many years the law school has recognized both the role of technology in shaping the law and the importance of law in advancing technology. Yet as such innovations at its Law Technology & Management Center and its Center for Global Law & Practice were preparing students to counsel hi-tech enterprise and to shape the new economy, its own facilities were lagging behind.
A New Beginning
Now, thanks to the generous support of countless alumni, the University, and many dedicated staff members, this imbalance has been redressed. In its new incarnation, SU Law is bright, airy, and welcoming while retaining a strong sense of dignity and tradition. Through a careful blending of form and function the redesigned offices, classrooms, and expanded clinical facilities offer numerous computer clusters and provide ubiquitous networking and power for portable users even within the lecture hall itself. The moot court facilities and many of the other spaces in MacNaughton Hall provide the sort of advanced Audio-Visual services advocated by the Courtroom 21 Project. In addition to preparing students to practice in a high-tech courtroom, these resources will allow faculty to make much more extensive use of videotaped feedback in clinical settings. As exciting as these developments are, by far the most dramatic changes at SU Law are taking place within the Law Library itself.
After the dedication ceremony, M. Louise Lantzy - Director of the H. Douglas Barclay Law Library and Professor of Law - explored the library's strategic innovations in a lecture on "Planning Our Future: Reengineering the Law library for the 21st Century". She was joined in the presentation by her colleagues Ronald Denby, Head of Academic Computing at SU Law, Jan Fleckenstein, Associate Librarian and Head of Library Information Systems, and Wendy Scott, Associate Librarian and Head of Public Services each of whom expanded on her remarks with examples of their own initiatives.
The Past as Prolog
The talk began with some history. When the College of Law moved to E. I. White Hall in 1954, its collection of 20,000 print volumes could be maintained by one librarian with the help of two full time assistants. The collection steadily grew though the 60's and 70's during which Professor John Horty began experimenting with the novel idea of putting public health statutes from all fifty states into a digital format. Horty's work captured the attention of the Ohio Bar Association which joined with Data Central Corporation in 1967 to develop the non-indexed, full-text, online, interactive, computer assisted legal research service that evolved into Lexis by 1973. Six years later, Syracuse University introduced its first online public access library catalog (SULIRS).
By 1985, the law collection had grown to 129,000 volumes under the care of four professional librarians and nine library assistants. That year the H. Douglas Barclay Law Library was opened paving the way for continued collection growth and an expansion of the library staff to four professional librarians with nine assistants. The library then had the resources to collect and offer access to microforms, A/V materials, CD ROMs, and other media. For students and faculty, computing at SU Law first arrived through dumb terminals connected to a Wang mini computer to provide access to SULIRS, word processing, and Lexis/Westlaw. These replaced earlier dedicated Qbiq terminals and made it possible to work with several distinct applications on the same hardware. By 1989, the number of computers had grown steadily from 29 to 206, laying the foundation for future innovations.
The Challenge of Re-engineering
As Louise Lantzy noted, "With the advent of desktop computers, local and wide area networks, and sophisticated telecommunication, a new paradigm has come into play. And the library is smack in the middle of this change. The digital information paradigm presents a new way to record information, to store knowledge, and to access it, and to retrieve information. The digital paradigm is creating a new idea of library, a new idea of what role the physical library building will play in the 21st centry, and a new idea of the roles information managers need to play in an age where the library is no longer the primary collector and disseminator and preserver of information."
Thus a number of factors have been driving the library to re-engineer itself in the 90's. Among them have been declining support for higher education, increased competition for shrinking resources, more vendors vying to provide new services, increased costs, immerging media, a need for non-traditional technological skills, requests for interdisciplinary information, and the impact of ubiquitous computing and networking. To meet these challenges, the library has identified nine essential elements in its reengineering strategy and tried to:
1) align its initiatives with the directions of the College of Law
2) cultivate leadership throughout the library
3) develop a creative innovative vision of the future
4) accept risk
5) provide for more flexibility in allocating its budget
6) maintain a dynamic organization
7) engage in strategic planning
8) conduct its own research and development
9) prepare itself to educate and train its staff and users in new technologies
Current Directions
Ronald Denby then took over the presentation focusing on the pervasive networking and computing environment being developed at the law school. He described a system built around high speed Ethernet networking in which a Unix workstation hosts the College of Law's web pages and Windows NT servers deliver a standard desktop to Pentium-class workstations through the complex. Another dedicated server provides access to CD-ROM-based resources. Users are provided with a standard desktop offering folders of student and faculty resources, the university's standard of Microsoft Office for personal productivity, Netscape Navigator for web access, and collaborative software to provide email, web conferencing, calendaring and scheduling that serve as a "glue" to hold the community together. For the future, he is looking to new iMAP and iCal standards for client/server internet-based email and calendar applications, Push technology from Pointcast to deliver custom news to the community, Real Time Video, an expanded role for the web, and "print accounting" so students will have a financial incentive not to print out everything they find on the net. Indeed, despite the potential for a paperless office, skyrocketing paper usage has become a very serious issue.
Jan Fleckenstein, then picked up with a discussion of how the university had replaced its home grown catalog, SULIRS with a system called SUMMIT that was built with a commercial web-based product called Voyager enabling users to access URLs directly from catalog records. She also addressed the roles of the library as a knowledge server, a collaborator in the development of new collections, an archivist, and as a gateway to licensed services. Most exciting of these possibilities are the ability of the library to scan in the legal writing of various alumni making them available to the world through the web. Other new possibilities include email notification of new additions to the collection and the eventual use of "smart tags" that will make checking out a book as simple as carrying it out of the library.
Wendy Scott, finished the departmental presentations by contrasting how many steps were needed to research a legal issue circa 1985 when one might have to consult a dozen separate physical reference sources ranging from online and card catalogs, treatise collections, ALR Indexes, multiple Reports, Digests, Pocket Parts, and Shepards with the ease and integration of today's computer-based solutions. This reality is embodied in the physical layout of the redesigned H. Douglas Barclay Law Library which now opens onto an Electron Research Center offering research modules to access the online catalog, internet databases, CD-ROM's, express email, and interactive tutorials on legal research methods featuring actual video of the available tools in use! In this environment the web serves as the primary gateway to organize, describe, and connect information resources so the same techniques can be applied across databases with easy cut and paste between research and office applications.
This technology has given the library greater visibility in the community through its web site and empowered the library staff to focus more on training, support and expansion for people not books.
Lessons Learned
At Syracuse Law, Louise Lantzy has made sure that "the focus of the Barclay Law Library is toward the future". Her work in embracing the new world of technology - with the support of the law school administration under the stewardship of Dean Daan Braveman and the guidance of her crack staff of expert "change crusaders" - offers a number of lessons for all of us in the law.
None of us are so good in what we do that we can afford to stop learning or to assume that business practices which bring us success today will do so tomorrow. As Louise Lantzy observed, "reengineering is a process by which an organization totally rethinks its mission and the roles it plays in the context of service and value..." By embracing high performance computing and networking, the law library has been able to go beyond providing old services more efficiently and create a new world of learning opportunities that bring the library to every desktop and make it far more sensitive to the individual needs of its users.
In this brave new world it no longer makes sense for law firms to tie up precious floor space with instantly dated physical volumes. The firm library should be totally virtual. Where specific resources are too expensive for small firms to justify, they should consider ways to pool their resources, perhaps under Bar Association leadership. However, as we budget for CD-ROMs, web-based services, and high speed reliable internet connectivity that will inevitably relegate the traditional looking firm library to a study space and stage set for meetings with clients, we must not short change the human dimension and fail to recognize the value of hiring skilled information management specialists like the staff at the Barclay Law Library.
As you begin to explore these issues in your own firm, you might want to pay a visit to Syracuse Law or contact the NYSBA's Law Office Economics and Management Department.
