With more than 600 law schools and a national emphasis on legal education in the past few decades, Chinese law librarians have been working diligently to address the needs of their constituents. Increasing underemployment of Chinese law grads and too many Chinese law schools have brought new challenges. To coin Chinese law and governance expert Carl Minzner in his article, “The Rise and Fall of Chinese Legal Education,” “[L]aw was hot. Now it's not.” Sound familiar? As American law librarians are also in the midst of dealing with the transformation in the legal profession and legal education, we should ask what we can learn from our Chinese law librarian counterparts. How are they adapting to their rapidly changing environment?
We were privileged to attend the Third International Conference of the Chinese and American Forum on Legal Information and Law Libraries (CAFLL) held June 2013 in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the world-Shanghai. The conference theme focused on collaboration, information access, and partnership (cafllnet.org/annual-conference), providing the perfect opportunity to discuss issues, exchange ideas, and learn what Chinese law librarians are saying about their profession. To our surprise, during the conference proceedings, tours, exhibit hall breaks, and lavish banquets, the conversational topics were amazingly similar to those bandied about water coolers in U.S. law libraries. It didn't take a translator (though we thank the many kind people who helped translate) to recognize the common buzzwords:budgets, staffing, skills training, technology, etc. The following is our perspective on some of the hot topics in Chinese law librarianship based on our general experience in China and at the CAFLL conference. When we discuss law libraries in China, it is important to keep in mind that, unlike in the U.S., the term “law library” in China refers primarily to the academic setting; court and law firm libraries are still relatively rare.
Funding
With the growth of legal education in China, new law school buildings are cropping up, some of which include nice law libraries. In 2010, Tian Jianshe, a law librarian at the Legal Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, conducted a survey of the library collections of the law schools/departments of universities in Beijing. Of the 33 Beijing law schools included in the survey, 17 had a law library.
But do these new buildings/libraries mean anything for the practice of Chinese law librarianship? To summarize the remarks of one of the CAFLL keynote speakers, Professor Xu Xiaobing, vice dean for international programs at Koguan Law School of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, new law libraries and law school buildings in China are superficial. While there is a general recognition that law libraries in China are important, in practice, they are not. Xu noted that law libraries provide necessary books and resources to support the law schools' educational endeavors. Moreover, they play a central role in educating law students, similar to a laboratory in the science disciplines. Still, Chinese law libraries lack funding for personnel and information resources. This situation exists despite China's 2011 plan to restructure legal education over the next decade through its Outstanding Legal Personnel Education Scheme.
The new program will focus on training law students in skills, exposing them to interdisciplinary and global topics, and preparing students to serve legal institutions in the western regions of China. But according to Xu, nowhere in the plan are law libraries mentioned. He suggested that the Ministry of Education develop standards for law libraries and specify how funds will be allocated to meet this ambitious training program.
Standards/Rankings
So far, neither the Chinese government nor the Chinese Bar Association has set up any standards for establishing a law school/department in China. This may have contributed to their growth-estimated at about 624 law schools and 450,000 students by Wenhua Shan in his 2013 Legal Information Management article, “Legal Education in China: The New 'Outstanding Legal Personnel Education Scheme' and its Implications.” Most of these 624 law schools/departments are undergraduate programs. In 2012, the Chinese Ministry of Education issued Administrative Rules on Establishing Undergraduate Programs for Higher Education, but the rules address the contents of the application and the approval procedures rather than set standards for founding undergraduate programs (including law). Because there are no standards for establishing Chineselaw schools, there is no accreditation process and no accreditation standard requiring a Chinese law school to have its own law library. Chinese law schools without a law library rely on the lawcollections of the main university library.
As for rankings, our co-author, Wei Luo, in his book Chinese Law and Legal Research, writes, “[l]ike everywhere in the world, trying to rank Chinese law schools is controversial. Although theMinistry of Education of the PRC does not rank the universities in China and opposes any rankings, in recent years, three researchers of the Guangdong Management Research Institute . . . attempted to rank universities, colleges, and major programs including law schools/departments in China. Their ranking of Chinese higher education institutions has become quite popular.” Although law schools are mindful of the rankings so as to attract top students, they do not necessarily have an impact on law libraries.
To address issues in legal education, the Chinese Ministry of Education set up a Steering Committee for Higher Legal Education in 2001. The committee consists of several government officials from the Ministry of Education and about two dozen famous Chinese law professors and deans of the top law schools. The committee meets annually to discuss how to improve legal education and has produced a core law school curriculum: Jurisprudence, Chinese Legal History, Constitutional Law, Administrative Law, Administrative Litigation Procedure, Criminal Law, Criminal Procedure Law, Civil Law, IP Law, Commercial Law, Economic Law, Civil Procedure, International Law, and International Economic Law. At CAFLL's inception, several of our Chinese counterpart members participated on the steering committee and were eager to learn how law school and law library standards are set in the U.S. Over the years, CAFLL has continued to share knowledge of the ABA standards for American law schools and law libraries with Chinese legal educators and law librarians. Today, the topic remains of keen interest to CAFLL participants.
Staffing
In addition to funding, Chinese law libraries have staffing challenges. For example, most library directors do not have specialized library training or experience, nor do they manage day-today library operations. As law library director appointments are based on seniority within the law school, a director's main teaching and research interests may not be in the field of law librarianship or legal research. Nevertheless, law faculty appointed to oversee law library operations may find the experience professionally rewarding. For example, International Law Professor He Xiaoyong, the new library director of East China University of Political Science and Law, had his library staff create a customized international law collection and database to support his law school's international research and training.
In terms of non-director personnel, except for the five former Ministry of Justice-affiliated law schools (China University of Political Science and Law, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, East China University of Political Science and Law, and Northwest University of Political Science and Law), most law school libraries only have one or two librarians with permanent appointment status. So the turnover rate for library personnel is very high. Additionally, there is simply not enough staffing capacity to provide value-added services to faculty and students. For example, as of March 2013, Tsinghua University School of Law had 52 faculty members, 399 undergraduate students, and 1,141 graduate students, but the law library had only one professional librarian assisted by two permanent and four contract library technicians. Although CAFLL speakers identified the importance of such value-added services as institutional repositories, indexing and knowledge creation, technological applications, and information literacy training, due to lack of staffing/funding, the main functions of Chinese law libraries are perceived to be collecting, processing, and circulating legal materials.
Legal Research Instruction
Law Subject Librarian Yuan Ye of Koguan Law School at Shanghai Jiao Tong University presented the topic The Development of Information Literacy Education in the Professional Legal Education System. She recommended that Chinese law schools emphasize skills training for law students, especially legal research and information literacy. Although information literacy courses are offered at the university, these are not specific to legal topics. She identified four problems in law student legal research: overconfidence in legal research skills, oversimplified research techniques (e.g., a tendency to rely on Google and Wikipedia rather than specialized legal databases), inability to evaluate the quality of resources found, and no opportunity to take specialized legal research courses. She suggested that legal research be regularly incorporated into the Chinese law school curriculum, noting Libguides, blogs, and embedded librarianship as avenues for expanding law student exposure to legal research.
The dearth of legal research courses is confirmed in a 2008 survey conducted by Professor Yu Liying, director of Tsinghua University School of Law Library, who we also interviewed recently for updated information and whose knowledge of law librarianship in China contributed greatly to this article. In this survey, Yu found that there were only six law schools offering a legal research class, which include the former Ministry of Justice-affiliated law schools (China University of Political Science and Law, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Southwest University of Political Science and Law, and East China University of Political Science and Law)and two law schools from national universities (Tsinghua University and Xiamen University). Also, since 2010, Zhejiang University School of Law has offered an elective course on legal research. The debate about whether or not to add a legal research course into the formal curriculum has been discussed at conferences and events on the regional, national, and even international level (including CAFLL) but has yet to be implemented.
As for the Chinese law schools that do offer legal research instruction, their approaches are as varied as those of law schools in the U.S. For some, law librarians teach independent legal research courses, while others co-teach with career faculty or guest lecture on research techniques as an additional component to a substantive law course. Law schools without formal legal research courses offer various types of legal research training, including orientations on using library resources, information literacy instruction, and/or specialized training on Chinese and foreign law databases.
Foreign Resources
Chinese law librarians frequently mentioned the need to access foreign and international legal literature, especially for Chinese law students and faculty who are researching international legal topics. Students may cite old material, using secondhand quotations, because they do not have access to the original citation. They cannot see the context of the original foreign/international source. Chinese librarians noted that gift books from foreign libraries, while well intentioned, tend to be out of date.
Online information can help fill the gap, but availability is limited. For example, one speaker, David Dai, deputy general manager of Wells, presented the topic Research on the Current Situation and Trends of Introduced Law Databases in Universities in Mainland China. In his analysis of foreign legal databases in China, he indicated that only the top Chinese law schools are able to offer foreign law databases. Factors affecting the availability of foreign databases include whether the law school is composed of faculty with overseas training and exposure to foreign resources and whether the law school has a high enough status within the university to secure the necessary funding.
Given China's new legal education plan to train global lawyers, the need for foreign and international legal materials will likely grow. According to Duncan Alford, associate dean of the University of South Carolina Law Library and consulting director of the law library at Peking University School of Transnational Law in Shenzhen, challenges to obtaining foreign material include “the cumbersome and slow acquisitions process. By law, all foreign material must be purchased through an export-import company-a 'middle man.' This causes delays because a third party is involved. It may be a technique to review and censor material also. Thus far, we (STL) have not had an issue with censorship. Also, foreign currency restrictions and controls can slow down the purchase of foreign materials.”
Chinese law librarians perceive foreign materials, whether in print or online, to be expensive to purchase and suggest collaborating on group purchases. They also want to learn from American colleagues the best practices for negotiating with foreign legal vendors. Judging by the number of legal vendors who exhibited at the conference, publishers are keenly interested in meeting the demand for foreign resources in China but are mindful of the complexities of the Chinese legal information environment.
Collaboration
Like in American law libraries, there is tremendous interest in collaboration among Chinese law libraries in, among other areas, collections, library management, and teaching legal research. Chinese law librarians have made progress. For example, in 1983, under the guidance of the Ministry of Justice, the academic libraries of five large law colleges/universities and three two-year law colleges established a committee for collaboration. Every year, the librarians from these eight libraries meet to discuss areas of collaboration and to share research findings. Since 2000, many top Chinese university law school libraries have begun attending the meetings, according to Professor Zeng Ersu in a 2010 CAFLL presentation, The Evaluation and Development Trends of Law Libraries at Chinese Universities.
There is no national law library association in China due to the Chinese government's control over the establishment of nongovernmental organizations. This has hampered the development of Chinese law librarianship and collaborative activities at the national level. There is collaboration at the regional level, however. In 2010, the Beijing Association of Law Libraries and Legal Information Research was founded as a chapter of the Beijing Law Society. The association membership includes academic law libraries, law firm libraries, government agency law libraries, and court libraries. The association holds an annual meeting and various smaller meetings/workshops in Beijing. The Beijing Association has coordinated closely with the biannual national meeting of law school libraries mentioned above. The themes of the 2012 biannual meeting were (1) building and sharing law library special collections and (2) adjusting library service strategies. CAFLL provides an additional forum for further collaboration, with regular support and participation from such organizations as AALL and the International Association of Law Libraries.
Technology
Like American law libraries, evolving technology and its impact on Chinese law libraries over the past few decades has been unprecedented and omnipresent. Although the general university libraries have taken the lead on technological developments and automation, the effect on Chinese law libraries can be seen in three areas.
First, library automation and technology is expanding traditional library services and functions to include“virtual” and “remote” operations. Chinese law libraries have adopted high-tech tools for handling reference and circulation, providing services often found in Western law libraries. For instance, “the mobile library” is increasingly popular among Chinese law students who utilize mobile devices to access library resources and services. Chinese law libraries are also making use of virtual reference services and blogs.
Additionally, they would like to use technology as a platform for creating institutional repositories. Top research institutions in China have been very active in developing their own institutional repositories. There are about 30 Chinese research institutions listed in OpenDOAR, a United Kingdom-based repositories in the future. Institutional repositories and open access to scholarship are definitely on the radar of Chinese law librarians. But they inevitably face the same resource challenges as American libraries do in expanding services and meeting patrons' rapidly changing technological expectations.
Second, new information technology has transformed both the structure of legal knowledge and the channels of its dissemination. Major Chinese legal publishers are migrating large amounts of legal content from print to electronic, including primary legal documents, journal articles, and treatises. The database content and search capabilities continue to improve. Moreover, as discussed above, because of international collaboration, Chinese law librarians have been able to acquire foreign law materials from prominent legal publishers. The availability and scale of electronic legal resources has gone a long way in helping Chinese law librarians provide high-quality information services to patrons. At the same time, law librarians are needed now more than ever to assist patrons in identifying and selecting appropriate resources from the overwhelming number of choices available and to provide instruction on effective research processes.
Last, the advancement of technology has brought remarkable opportunities for Chinese law librarians to learn from their colleagues around the world and share their own experiences. It has also helped Chinese law librarians to better understand the status and responsibilities of librarians in other countries and to work toward enhancing their roles and compensation within their institutions, especially considering their unique qualifications (many hold graduate and even doctoral degrees in law), their contributions to legal scholarship, and their expertise in technological innovation.
What Lies Ahead
These topics, though influenced by conditions specific to China, are eerily familiar. What lies ahead for law librarians in these two countries? We wish we had a crystal ball. It is clear that we have much to learn from each other in addressing common issues and challenges. The next CAFLL conference will be held in the United States in 2015. The date and location have yet to be announced. It promises to be another excellent opportunity to exchange ideas, collaborate, and promote the accessibility of legal information and the education of legal information professionals in the United States and China. More information about CAFLL is available at cafllnet.org.
About the Author
Kara Phillips (phillips@seattleu.edu ), Collection Development Librarian/Associate Director, Seattle University Law Library. Phillips is chair of the CAFLL Publicity Committee and a current CAFLL board member.
Wei Luo (luo@wulaw.wustl.edu), Director of Technical Services/Lecturer in Law, Washington University School of Law Library. Luo's responsibilities include reference and teaching legal research. He is chair of the CAFLL Translation Committee and a current CAFLL board member.
Joan Liu (liuj@exchange.law.nyu.edu), Head of Acquisitions and Serials/Associate Curator, New York University Law Library. Liu is former chair of the CAFLL Education Committee and a current CAFLL board member.
(本文已發表在美國的法律圖書館協會，原文請點擊http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Publications/spectrum/Archives/Vol-18/No-3/china.pdf)