Supporting Faculty Research: A Direct Role for the Library

The primary mission of the University of Michigan Law Library is supporting faculty research and teaching. For most of the library\u27s history, that support was indirect, aimed at building a collection that would meet present and future faculty needs. In the 1980s, however, it became clear that the law library\u27s collection would never again be able to meet all faculty needs, or all student needs; law was no longer an isolated discipline, and we would need to supply information from many sources and in varied formats. The University of Michigan Law Library has had a faculty document delivery system for more than twenty years. Dubbed Phone Page after its single-purpose phone line with an answering machine, the service was by the mid-1980s delivering 3,000 to 5,000 items annually to faculty offices. Between a quarter and a third of those items were from libraries other than our law library