Richard A. Danner

Influences of the Digest Classification System: What Can We Know?

Robert C. Berring has called West Publishing Companys American Digest System “the key aspect of the new form of legal literature” that West and other publishers developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Berring argued that Wests digests provided practicing lawyers not only the means for locating precedential cases, but a “paradigm for thinking about the law itself” that influenced American lawyers until the development of online legal research systems in the 1970s. This article discusses questions raised by Berrings scholarship, and examines the late nineteenth and early twentieth century legal environment in which the West digests were created and became essential research tools for American lawyers.

Strategic Planning for Distance Learning in Legal Education: Initial Thoughts on a Role for Libraries

SUMMARY Distance learning technologies will be used increasingly by law schools both to enhance learning within their existing residential programs and to reach new audiences. For law librarians, the questions involved in serving distance learners are a subset of the questions about the future of the law library that arise from changes in the legal information environment. This article discusses current distance learning alternatives for law schools, and the impacts of distance learning and other technological innovations on the future role of the academic law library in legal education.

Skating with Donovan: Thoughts on Librarianship as a Profession

ABSTRACT James M. Donovans article: “Skating on Thin Intermediation: Can Libraries Survive?” argues that librarians place more emphasis than they might on providing service to library users at a time when information seekers are relying less on intermediaries, and that over-emphasizing service to the detriment of other values diminishes the status of librarianship as a profession. The article presents two contrasting models of librarianship. This article discusses Donovans models and comments on the continuing importance of the service model to librarianship.

An Overview of Health Law Research and an Annotated Bibliography

This analysis and the following bibliography are designed to meet the needs of researchers attempting to locate information in the field of health law. The analysis is written from the perspective of law librarians, but the same information retrieval problems apply to health administrators, hospital and medical counsel, and academic lawyers interested in health law and administration.