Statutes and Limitations: Thinking Collaboratively About Print State Codes

One of the topics of conversation I have seen floating in the cloud as of late is the question of how best to achieve reduced expenditures for print state statutes without compromising the level of service we provide. More often than not, we are finding savings through cancellation of at least some portion of our print state statute collections. Most of the reports I have seen show a strong tendency for libraries engaged in such cancellations to maintain both the official and unofficial print codes from the library’s home state, along with a few other print codes from selected jurisdictions. Many libraries that have chosen this path have elected to fill the gaps in their collections through the use of interlibrary loan on an as-needed basis. In my own academic law library we have elected to cancel the majority of our print state statues, keeping only the official and unofficial statute sets for our own state, codes for a few states critical to our faculty scholarship, and annotated codes for New York and California.