Keep the Law Library Accessible

From the University's very founding, Harvard's libraries have held a central place in defining the type of academic and scholarly community towards which we strive. The University's collection is the second largest in the world, second only to that of the Library of Congress. What's more, the over 14 million volumes in the collection are made accessible to all of Harvard's students, availing them of a resource few people can claim. Our library system is without doubt one of our greatest resources, treasures and privileges.

At the Law School, this may be a limited privilege soon, if renovation plans for the Langdell Law Library are approved this spring. Langdell is one of two libraries used by law school students for research and study. It houses over 800,000 books and also serves as a popular social gathering place for students.The extensive renovations, which would take place from June 1996 to August 1997, would make half of the collection--400,000 books--either completely unavailable to students, or place them in the Harvard Depository where they are accessible only by filling out request forms to retrieve them.

Stuart Rees, a law school student representative to the renovation committee, cited the difficulty this would cause first and third-year law students; first-years use Langdell as a central common area, and third year students who are required to write a large research project, would have no access to some of the library's more obscure comparative and older legal history books Moreover, Rees notes that a large external, worldwide research community, which utilizes Harvard's system, would also have reduced access to a resource upon which they have depended.

To alleviate the inconvenience, librarians propose increasing electronic access to library materials, and placing Harvard staff at other law libraries to send remote copies and faxes of legal documents to Harvard students. These are not viable solutions. Many of and Harvard's volumes are simply not found at other institutions nearby, and they are extremely difficult to obtain elsewhere. Students come to Harvard expecting to be able to use its resources fully. Another proposed solution calls for shuttle buses to run from the law school to Boston University's and Boston College's law libraries. Again, this solution ignores the fact that many of Harvard's volumes are unique; since Langdell is a member of the New England Law Library Consortium anyway, the B.U. and B.C. collections are already available to students. These solutions do nothing to address the diminishing of the Consortium's total resource base.

We urge Dean of the Law School Robert C. Clark not to approve the renovation plans until the library can guarantee greater access to all of Langdell's current reserves. But if Langdell Library does proceed with these renovation plans, the Law School must inform its applicants about the renovation and all of its implications.

Even renting out depository space at another institution and putting all displaced volumes in that depository would be preferable to complete inaccessibility. The current plan would weaken a library system that is the envy of the world. We owe it to our students and others who rely on this resource to keep it fully accessible.