AALL Session Recap: Bringing the Law Library to the Community: Access to Justice with Remote Services

by Amy Small

As someone (no doubt like many others out there!) who had to rethink how our library served our patrons during the COVID-19 pandemic, I was interested to hear about the different ways other public law libraries approached this problem. The “Bringing the Law Library to the Community: Access to Justice with Remote Services” session on Sunday gave a great look at creative ways of expanding services beyond library walls.

The speakers were Cat Bowie of the State of Oregon Law Library and Karen Westwood of the Anne W. Grande Law Library (Hennepin County, Minnesota). Catherine McGuire from the Thurgood Marshall State Law Library in Maryland moderated and guided the speakers through a discussion of their projects. Cat and Karen’s projects showed the great range of potential for remote library services – state vs. county, large scale vs. targeted and local, and those inspired by a long-term need vs. an immediate crisis.

Cat’s project with the State of Oregon Law Library was put into place before the COVID-19 pandemic. She had found that her library had an inefficient and time-consuming system for handling reference requests from people incarcerated in Oregon’s prison system (referred to as “adults in custody”). The adults in custody weren’t getting the information they needed in a timely manner, plus the staff at her library were overwhelmed with the work the requests required. To address these problems on both sides of the library walls, Cat approached the Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) with the idea of building an intranet with legal resources for adults in custody. Inspired by Scandinavian models of rehabilitative incarceration, the goal was to empower the adults in custody to research for themselves. The intranet idea was crucial – DOC would not allow adults in custody to access the internet, which of course precluded them from using many of the research tools we take for granted at the library. Through careful discussions with various stakeholders and the adults in custody themselves, they implemented a system that built on the library’s expertise and leverage-scale in procurement contracts to allow the adults in custody to conduct their own research. As someone whose own library confronts similar issues of inefficiency with our inmate reference service, hearing about this program was amazing!

In Minnesota’s Hennepin County, Karen was presented with the opportunity to put a kiosk in her library during the COVID-19 pandemic to help patrons attend either remote court hearings or meetings with legal aid attorneys. Karen was the first to admit that she was skeptical of the project at first. She didn’t think that people would have the technological savvy to use the kiosks efficiently and that it just plain wasn’t a productive idea. However, she decided to “suppress her inner skeptic” and give it a chance. As the kiosk project has both succeeded and evolved with time, Karen has been impressed at how much it’s been used by people in her community. Karen’s story highlighted a valuable lesson – sometimes you need to be open to new ideas and seize opportunities when they arise. While Karen’s project was on a smaller scale than Cat’s, it showed the very real impact that even small changes can have on the people that we serve. A new system or idea doesn’t necessarily have to be huge to be valuable!

After the speakers talked about how they have introduced remote services, attendees were given the chance to talk in small groups about how we might do something similar. It was fun to hear the different ideas that the presentation sparked and to see how different aspects of Cat’s and Karen’s projects spoke to us in different ways.

I thought this session was a terrific encapsulation of the conference’s theme of “Advancing Justice for All.” The push towards remote services brought on by COVID-19 has made accessing justice more possible for populations who may have been formerly left out: those who are incarcerated, those who live in rural areas, and those without access to technology. The variety of the projects discussed was inspiring – no matter the library or situation it finds itself in, there may be new and creative ways to better serve our patrons. All it takes is identifying a problem, finding the opportunity to address it, and maybe just suppressing your inner skeptic a little bit!