University of Texas School of Law - Peregrinus Yearbook (Austin, TX)

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14 — Tarlton Law Library

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Many of the materials we receive in hardback are also available on computer. Its going to take a while to get everyone comfortable and computer literate. Whenever we achieve this we’ll be able to cut out some of the printed material. An example is you can do Sheppard’s more efficiently, quicker and up-to-date on the computer, but we still maintain a great deal of Sheppard's that run $10,000 to $15,000 a year. Q Where does the library’s problem with staff pay stand? A.' The funds we got from student fees are being used to maintain and enrich the collection, and none are being used to raise staff salaries. We still rank very poorly and it continues to be a primary concern, and its an area where we’d like to see The University provide adequate compensation for the professionals here. The access to the legal information is going to require a level of expertise which our lawyer librarians have. We won’t be able to teach the students to use it, nor will we be able to retrieve that information without that level of expertise. What steps are being made to ensure the legislature knows about the need lor these funds? ,4: On my level 1 have no contact with the legislature. My responsibility is to inform the Dean of these needs, and I do that through constant memos and comparative analysis of our salaries compared to the salaries of our peer schools. Our student body’s comments in a survey we’ve conducted have been extremely positive about the help and support our staff gives. Nationally, the University of Texas staff is noted to be the premiere library staff in the United States, and as such, anybody — Continued on page 15 photos by E. Clayton Brantly Tarlton I .aw Library — 13

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— Continued from page 13 at 1'exas can get a job and double their salary immediately. Asa result, we’ve been raided by other institutions, and I'm finding it difficult to get people to come and interview because of our low salaries. It is a serious problem and concern I have with relation to the future. Almost 50% of the leadership of American law libraries are people who received their training here at Texas, and that includes the directors of Harvard, Berkeley and Stanford. (X Were does UT rank in pay? A.' We rank about 109 or so, out of 175, in professional pay. In support help we rank about 149. And yet we are still the fifth largest academic law library in the country. (2 W here do you see the library going in si e? A: The ones ahead of us are Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Michigan. Those are schools that started 100 years ahead of us, so its dubious that we would pass them. We might surpass Michigan someday, but they have a very healthy and much better budget than us. But 1 don’t think, in terms of numbers, we’ll ever catch up with the others. However, in the numbers of contemporary materials and such that we’re acquiring today, we’re equal to or better than Harvard, Columbia or Yale. We have faculty who have done research or taught at Harvard that have said our collection is better than the Harvard collection, and that there were materials they were shocked Harvard didn’t even have that we have. And that goes for the faculty we've had at Oxford or Cambridge, and the leading institutions from all around the world. Tarlton Law Library — 15