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Improving your law library’s collection

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As Queensland’s leading law library, we are extremely proud of our collections, which we’ve been building and looking after since our foundation in 1862.

With more than 90,000 distinct titles in our physical spaces as well as our extensive online resources and heritage items, taking care of our collections is no mean feat. To help with this important work, we recently welcomed our new Principal Librarian Collections, Katie Haden, to the library.

Katie brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in the library sector and collections management to SCLQ and we are thrilled to have her on board. We interrupted her busy schedule to enable her to share with you more about her role and the role of the library Collections team.

What did you do before joining Supreme Court Library Queensland?

KH: I was the National Systems Librarian at the Attorney-General’s Department Library, based in Melbourne at the Australian Government Solicitor. Before that I was a library systems and collections discovery support specialist at OCLC, which is a large global vendor in the library sector.

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What does the collections team do, and why is it so important to the library and library users?

KH: We support knowledge discovery by delivering innovative collection solutions for Queensland’s law library. We specialise in creating, maintaining, and providing access to the library collections, encompassing the main books and periodicals collection (including law reports, journals, and legislation), our electronic collections, our CaseLaw collections (including the official unreported judgments of Queensland courts and tribunals and the Queensland Sentencing Information Service), and our legal heritage collection.

Our goal is to make our collections even more accessible and discoverable; we create metadata records, update digital links, publish judgements, digitise and restore heritage items, and purchase items that will be accessed by library users all over Queensland. It’s a big job, but we are very passionate about it.

What are you and your team working on at the moment?

KH: We are looking to the future! We’re in the middle of some big behind-the-scenes technical projects to help us describe and maintain our collections more efficiently, including a new library management system and catalogue – this will help our library community find resources more easily and even discover resources and information they might not have known about.

We’re also planning to create more records and digitised objects for our heritage items so they are visible in our online catalogue and collections to enable them to be accessed and explored remotely.

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Visit catalogue.sclqld.org.au to browse the collections.

Did you know?

We offer free training and support in accessing and using our collections. Contact us (sclqld.org.au/contact-us) for help with searching the library catalogue and using the most relevant resources for your legal research.

This story was originally published in Proctor June 2020.

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