Law Library Digital Reference Services and Interdisciplinary Students

This paper evaluates the provision of digital reference services by academic law libraries to interdisciplinary students, who are not affiliated with the law school, but are researching within a legal area. By using an unobtrusive methodology, which involved presenting carefully developed reference questions to synchronous and asynchronous digital legal reference services, the research aimed to discover how receptive these services are to the information needs of non-lawyer patrons. Particular regard was paid to the types of resources that law librarians direct interdisciplinary patrons toward, and whether these are mainstream university-wide resources, open access resources, or specialist legal databases such as Westlaw and LexisNexis. The research assessed the completeness of reference transactions and applied these findings to the specific needs of interdisciplinary students