Selecting and Acquiring Legal Resources

• Author: Ted Tjaden
• Profession: Faculty of Law and Faculty of Information Sciences University of Toronto
• Pages: 236-247

CHAPTER

9

SELECTING

AND

ACQUIRING

LEGAL

RESOURCES

A

INTRODUCTION

Up

to

this point,

this

book

has

focused

on how to use

legal resources.

For

some legal

researchers,

this

will

suffice

since

the

focus

of

their

work

is

hands-on legal research. Other lawyers

or

legal researchers,

however, will need

to

choose

or

recommend

for

acquisition particular

legal resources

for a law

library,

be it as

part

of a

small

law

firm

or

per-

sonal collection

or as

part

of a

larger organization.

Very

little

has

been

written

on how to

acquire legal

resources.1

While

it

helps

to

have

a

good working knowledge

of

legal resources when deciding what

to

acquire, there

are

certain things that many lawyers

or

legal researchers

may

not be

aware

of on

this

topic, matters that

often

fall

within

the

expertise

of a law

librarian. This chapter

is

therefore

aimed

at

lawyers

or

other legal researchers

who

need

to

make decisions about selecting

and

acquiring legal resources. Information

is

provided

on the

following

topics:

deciding between print

and

electronic resources

criteria

for

selecting material

for a law

library

See,

e.g..

Douglass

T.

MacEllven

&

Michael

J.

McGuire,

"Law Firm Libraries"

in

Legal

Research

Handbook,

5th ed.

(Toronto:

Butterworths,

2003) 407;

and the

resources

listed

at the end of

this

chapter.

236

1