Law Library Benchmarks 2018-19 Edition (ISBN No:978-157440-484-5 ) – “The report looks closely at the current policies and plans of North American law libraries in many areas, focusing especially on plans for information spending, with specific data on databases, books, reporters, eBooks, directories, magazines, newspapers, and other information vehicles. It also gives detailed information on how a sampling of law librarians view the information use training and other policies of major vendors of legal information.  They also discuss their plans for information purchases in the future.  The report includes a highly detailed segment on what librarians are doing in the area of artificial intelligence, including data on use of products from many specific AI vendors, and librarians’ perceptions about how they view AI and how it is viewed by top non-library management in their organizations.  The report also gives trend data on overall library budgets. This biennial study of law firms presents data from 42 law libraries in the USA and Canada.  Data is broken out by type of law library (corporate, university, courthouse, other) and by number of librarians employed, and for US and Canadian law libraries.
Just a few of the 120-page report’s many findings are that:

• In 2018, the average size of budgets at the law libraries sampled is expected to be $2,105,677 an increase of about 5% over the prior year.
• Print materials accounted for a much higher percentage of the materials budgets of the Canadian law libraries sampled than the American ones, with 66% earmarked for print, compared to 36.2% in the U.S.
• Law firm libraries are more likely than university libraries and courthouse libraries to say they will spend more on Bloomberg Law in the following year.
• 26.7% of law libraries in the sample with more than 3 full time librarians felt that the use of artificial intelligence in legal information searching was an “absolutely critical” technology right now.”