Dominion Over the Fiche: Adding Microform Titles to an Online Catalog

Microformatted materials are essential resources in academic law libraries “because of the sheer volume of older materials that must be kept available to the occasional user due to the nature of legal research and its reliance on voluminous precedential material.”* There are other attractions to collecting legal materials in microform: space savings, out-of-print replacement, and backup for high-use materials. Building collections with microform titles can also be significantly less expensive than obtaining those same titles in hardcopy. It has been estimated that in 1981 Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) publications cost about 17% of the same titles in hardcopy.* Even though microform costs have risen over the years,) microforms still generally represent a savings over the cost of their hardcopy counterparts. There can be additional savings in terms of staff time since the selector is freed from time-consuming searches for out-of-print titles. However, there are “hidden costs” associated with collecting microforms that should not be ignored, such as equipment, storage cabinets, and staff time necessary to adequately maintain the collection.) For years debate has swirled about the topic of providing bibliographic access to microforms. All types of libraries have grappled with this issue. This article is an account of how two law librarians from diverse backgrounds, one from public services and one from technical services, joined forces to begin a classification project. The fiche tale unfolds: The College of Law at Georgia State University (GSU), opened in the fall of 1982, is located on an urban campus in the heart of Atlanta. The law school is academic home to over six hundred students, enrolled in both full and part-time programs. The GSU Law Library opened with 36,162 hardcopy volumes that had been collected over a ten year period by the William Russell Pullen Library (the main campus library) in anticipation of the opening of the law school. Also included in the original collection were the United States Supreme Court Records and Briefs on microfilm, even though their number was not reflected in the opening count.