The Electronic Card Catalog

Joni Lynn Cassidy

President, Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc.

The cost and effort of cataloguing and automating your law library may seem, on first consideration, to be a frivolous expense. That is until you look more closely at the day-to-day benefits of providing your attorneys and support staff with quick and uniform access to the materials housed in your library and throughout the firm.

Start with the bottom line: Law Library Journal annual Price index for publications can give an excellent perspective on cost. According to the Fall 1994 issue, the mean cost per title for loose-leaf services is $891.41. The same amount covers the cost of cataloguing and processing, 45 unique titles. An average law firm library of 1,000 titles can be fully catalogued, processed (preparing the item for circulation and shelving) and shifted into correct classification number order for the cost of 24 loose-leaf services. When you've invested so much money to purchase the books and other research tools themselves, cataloguing is a small price to pay to be able to find them when you need them.

Here's another way to do the math. If one attorney, billing out at $150 per hour, wastes 7½ minutes looking for a title because he/she has to scan the shelves or do office searches to determine if the library owns it and then to locate it, the cataloguing has paid for itself. By way of emphasizing the time wasted on such searches, a librarian at the Social Law Library in Boston recently said that it can take up to 2 hours to find a title in the uncataloged Section of their collection.

Besides the obvious timesaving factor, there are other advantages to having your collection catalogued and available in electronic format. Cataloguing creates an inventory to be used for insurance and replacement purposes. Using an outside contractor for machine-readable cataloguing affords the firm the opportunity to maintain an off-site copy of its records for the purposes of disaster planning. Tax consultants agree that an on-line catalogue should be considered a tangible asset of the firm, as are the library materials themselves. Since the catalogue is a value-adding asset for the firm, the expense of creating such an index tool could be considered a capital investment.

By definition cataloguing is the process of examining a book, pamphlet, periodical, audiobook, videotape, CD-ROM product, software package, or remote access computer file and analyzing its subject content for the purposes of assigning an appropriate classification number and subject headings. Most law collections use the Library of Congress Classification scheme and Library of Congress Subject Headings as their standard.

Those elements, together with a complete description of the item in hand, are recorded in a standard format dictated by rules developed by the American Library Association and its international partners.

The application of Library of Congress Classification numbers will bring like and related subject materials together on the shelf, facilitating easy browsing by the library user. That classification scheme can be manipulated by a skilled catalogue librarian to better allow attorneys and support staff to research effectively and efficiently. A profile can be created for the library that aids and accommodates the focus of the firm's practice. For instance, a firm where all the estate planning work is done by the tax attorneys will want their trusts and estates materials to be shelved near the tax materials. An experienced catalogue librarian can make that happen.

The process of automation moves all that information into electronic format so that it will be accessible via computers, perhaps on each attorneys desk. The end result will be an automated library system, such as you use in your public library or university library. This database will include records for all the materials housed in the library and throughout the firm.

But how do you go about finding an experienced catalogue librarian who can build a high quality database for you that meets national bibliographic standards so that your automated library system can interface with the electronic universe at large? Since only a small percentage of library school graduates concentrate on cataloguing and only a few catalogers focus on law as a subject specialty, you may want to outsource your library's cataloguing and automation to a contract cataloguing company. Shop for a company with proven expertise in your subject area. Benefits to law firms of outsourcing, or outtasking, include the opportunity to try new ideas, add expertise without adding people to the payroll, benefit from the problem-solving and solutions implemented at other firms, and access a central source for services and personnel.

Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc. provides cataloguing and other technical services on a contract basis to law firms, corporations and special libraries through out the United States and Europe. Their state-of-the-art New Jersey law libraries include Riker Danzing Scherer Hyland & Peretti, Pitney Hardin Kipp & Szuch, McCarter & English, LeBoeuf Lamb Leib & MacRae (Newark office), and Chub Insurance.