Schmid Biblio-Links Selfies Available!
Mini-Golfers who preserved the memories at our photo booth at the end of the round can contact any library staff member and get their very own copy. And thanks to all who participated.
Recycled Printing?
Over the last few years, printing in the printer labs has declined to the point where we can offer students very low cost printing to all. But we ask that you all continue to be responsible about your print jobs. Please don’t print what you don’t need! Each week we recycle hundreds of pages of printing that is never picked up from the printers! The recycle bins in the printer lab is often filled with mistaken or unwanted print jobs! The library is committed to eliminating waste and being environmentally responsible about printing. Please help us!
Schmid Law Library Facts and Features (by Brian Striman, Head of Technical Services)
The Marvin & Virginia Schmid Law Library is a pretty complex enterprise.
For example, we process hundreds of subscription updates and continuations each month. Materials received are handled by a staff of 3 whose goal is to sort, check-in, mark, label, and route materials by days end after receipt. In addition, many of the materials received each day are crucial to ensuring that when an attorney, student, faculty member or public patron uses library materials that they are up to date!
You may often see Brian Hobbs, Schmid Law Library’s Circulation Supervisor, in his office or at the circ desk with a bunch of volumes on a cart and he’s taking pages out, and putting new pages in, because in addition to keeping the Circulation Desk staffed and operating, he’s also responsible for managing our loose-leaf subscriptions. Joyce Jensen, Cataloging Assistant, also does some filing in our tax library. Other library staff can often be seen in the stacks with handfuls of materials that are for updating bound volumes with pocket parts, or adding new volumes that come in as part of large set, or are adding softbound volumes that update the parent hard bound books.
Every law library has some kind of organizational scheme for its print collection. Many smaller law libraries, such as a county law library, may organize their materials by putting types of law resources in various nooks and crannies of their facility and arranging them by topic. However, the larger the collection, the greater the need to organize them in more logical, consistent manner, increases. Large law libraries organize their collections using various cataloging and classification schemes.
A typical “smaller” law library would be most likely have around 5,000-80,000 books, and a medium size would be around 100,000-300,000, with a larger law library being 400,000-800,000 volumes (your Schmid Law Library has nearly 450,000), and then the big boys will be looking at collections of 1,000,000 and up (like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and the Library of Congress Law Library).
In upcoming Sounding Blocks we will look at how law collections work and how various types of materials are handled and organized.