The Washington State Law Library in 2021
2021 was a difficult year for the Washington State Law Library. Our hopes in a vaccine that would end the pandemic and allow us to reopen the Main Reading Room to the public did not come to pass. We miss the steady flow of visitors to the Temple of Justice, with their questions about law, the building, and the judicial branch, but recognize that our historic building has an HVAC system that is unsafe during this crisis. The general public continues to call and email but they cannot visit, one more symptom of the pandemic’s impact on access to justice.
Despite these challenges, we are proud that our library never fully closed during the pandemic. By busily helping our virtual visitors with their legal information needs, we have done what we can to help address the growing access to justice needs during the pandemic. The number of virtual visitors has risen since 2019 even as our overall number of visitors dropped.
We continue to serve the courts and state government, doing in-depth research for the Supreme Court on projects like the Washington State Supreme Court Gender & Justice Commission’s Gender Justice Study. In 2021 we taught advanced legal research webinars for the Supreme Court, Court of Appeals, Access to Justice Commission, and Washington Defender Association. We have also had a significant increase in mail from incarcerated patrons who struggle to access the legal information they need due to the pandemic.
The pandemic has caused us to adopt a different model of reference service, concierge librarianship, where we respond to calls and emails by scanning and sending pages, mailing books, and narrowing down research questions for patrons. This model focuses on the patron and their needed information rather than the patron and their use of our books, effectively transferring some of the work from the patron to the librarian. It has increased the time we spend per question from an average of 17 minutes per question in the months before the pandemic to 55 minutes per question in 2021. Curbside circulation on Tuesdays and Thursdays has been a huge success and we will continue it after the pandemic.
We continue to retool for the digital age and build bridges between our historic, heavily used print collection and the internet. Many titles are simply not on the internet. Others are behind pay walls that make them inaccessible to all but the wealthiest law firms. We are beginning to build up the skills and technology necessary to start digitizing key Washington resources like historic briefs and legislative bills. We are exploring new ways of collecting, including eBooks and digital subscriptions. We successfully transitioned to a new catalog that provides our patrons with updated features including control over account notification settings and simplified holds placement. Our blog has been a resounding success in helping people learn about legal issues and new books.
2022 promises to be a year of more change. We are moving with the Supreme Court out of the Temple of Justice in the summer, taking our librarians, reference computers, scanners, and about ten percent of the most heavily used volumes in our collection to an office building, likely in Tumwater, for a period of up to two years. The Temple of Justice needs to have its HVAC system, along with plumbing and lighting, completely renovated to help the building last another century. Moving our offices and securing the rest of the library’s collection with waterproof covering will occupy much of the first half of 2022. We will post dates, pictures, and more information as we progress and will broadly share the details in the coming months. (RM)
