Authorl Jacob Nunnally, Assistant Director of Access & Collection Services at Hofstra University Law School Library
About six months ago, my supervisor proposed we rename our institutional repository and asked for suggestions. My first thought was, “What do other academic law libraries name their IRs?” So I created a spreadsheet that listed a handful of options.
As I continued digging into the question, I discovered Judith Simms’s excellent 2019 article “Trends in Use of Institutional Repositories for Faculty Scholarship in ABA-approved Law Schools,” published in Legal Reference Services Quarterly. This article inspired me to turn the handful of options I started with into an exhaustive list:
U.S. Law School Institutional Repositories — 2024.xlsx
I have not had time to analyze all the data, but a few findings I can share include:
• 24% of law school IR names include the “@” symbol.
• 37% of law school IR names include some form of “scholar” / “scholarship.”
• 36% of law schools refer to their IRs by various names (including what could be called secondary, or vernacular, references). This was an unexpected finding.
Next year, I will create a new tab in the spreadsheet for 2025 (and each subsequent year afterwards), so that over time the spreadsheet becomes a historical record we can look back on to track changes.
If you have any feedback about this project, I would love to hear from you! Reach out anytime by emailing me at jacob.i.nunnally@hofstra.edu.
Leave a Reply