Maryvon Côté

The Faculty of Law of McGill University decided to take an unprecedented step in 1999 in replacing the approach of training to undergraduate law students with the creation of a new legal education curriculum referred to as “transsystemic legal education.” This unique program, geared towards all undergraduate McGill Law students, consists of learning two legal systems, including civil and common law in a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. This article discusses how the law library at McGill had to break from a traditional approach of building a law library collection regarding the practice of Canadian law to acquire the scholarly material needed by professors and students. This meant a complete rethinking of the collection development profile with an increased focus on multilingual legal material from Europe and other legal jurisdictions worldwide, and could only be done with a good collaboration between the library and the faculty members.

The Faculty of Law of McGill University decided to take an unprecedented step in 1999 in replacing the approach of training to undergraduate law students with the creation of a new legal education curriculum referred to as “transsystemic legal education.” This unique program, geared towards all undergraduate McGill Law students, consists of learning two legal systems, including civil and common law in a comparative and interdisciplinary approach. This article discusses how the law library at McGill had to break from a traditional approach of building a law library collection regarding the practice of Canadian law to acquire the scholarly material needed by professors and students. This meant a complete rethinking of the collection development profile with an increased focus on multilingual legal material from Europe and other legal jurisdictions worldwide, and could only be done with a good collaboration between the library and the faculty members.

Since their inception, virtual reference services have evolved considerably and are now a significant component of library services in many types of library environments. The current paper reports on a study undertaken at a research-intensive academic library that analyzed and evaluated a decade-old virtual reference service. The main goal of the study was to obtain a broad and comprehensive picture of the current service, grounded in the actual day-to-day provision, usage, and organization of the service. The group of librarians involved in the study developed a feasible, efficient, and adaptable methodology for assessing and evaluating a virtual reference service. The developed methodology that combines qualitative and quantitative methods can be used and applied for a similar evaluation of the service in any type of library environment.