Many of you are aware of the amazingly helpful CRIV Tools available under the Advocacy > Vendor Relations section of AALL’s website. Jacob Nunnally and I found one of those tools to be unfortunately quite outdated while we went through the CRIV webpages for updates this past year: Vendor Contact Information. CRIV’s Vendor Contact Information originated as the Legal Publishers List created by Rob Richards, then technical services librarian of the University of Colorado Law Library.[1] In the January 30, 2002 CRIVGram, Sara Gilligan announced that the list, which began in 1997 with 168 publishers and imprints, would move to the CRIV webpage with roughly 500 publishers.[2] As we were revising this page, I kept wondering how a page about legal vendors could be more helpful than the current directory-like information. We settled on updating links to the main vendors websites and removing the contact links primarily.
Still, as an acquisitions librarian I have long been interested in the history of scholarly publishing, especially now in legal publishing. I kept coming back to the idea of a brief chronicle of the legal/scholarly publishing industry, with a graphical timeline of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) à la Marshall Breeding’s visualization of Library Technology Guides vendors’ M&A.
In my search for anything similar to this I found Erwin Surrency’s A History of American Law Publishing,[3] Mary Munroe’s The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition (preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), and various articles generally summarizing recent M&A, speaking for open access, or elucidating how consolidation affects law library acquisitions. Most of the resources providing M&A details on legal publishers are older, with articles largely following current trends, such as the topic of open access. Mary Brandt Jensen described creating publisher sun circles to graphically represent publisher M&A in “Who Owns What Now? – Law Publisher Genealogy.”[4] Additionally, Marshall Breeding has company data through his M&A tracking of library technology, for instance: ProQuest and parent company Clarivate, Elsevier, and parent company RELX, and Sage.
I will plug away at this research and see what comes of it. In the meantime, I am delighted to see an AALL 2024 program coordinated by Caroline Walters: “A History of Legal Publishing: Let’s Review the Past to Safeguard Our Future” on Tuesday, July 23, 2024 with Richard Leiter, Jean O’Grady, Steve Roses, and Vincent Vessalo on the panel, and Ajaye Bloomstone moderating.
[1] Rob Richard, “A Legal Publisher’s List: Librarians Cooperate to Discern the Corporate Affiliations of U.S. Legal Publishers,” Legal Reference Services Quarterly 17, no. 1–2 (1999): 25.
[2] Sara Gilligan, “CRIVGram: Legal Publishers List Moves,” Law-Lib, January 30, 2002.
[3] Erwin C. Surrency, A History of American Law Publishing (New York: Oceana Publications, 1990).
[4] Mary Brandt Jensen, “Who Owns What Now: Law Publisher Genealogy,” Against the Grain 10, no. 2 (April 1998): 54, https://doi.org/10.7771/2380-176X.2838.
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