Law library to be replaced with legal resource centre
Law Society exec believes new facility could increase access to justice
Jessica Davey-Quantick
Northern News Services
Wednesday, August 3, 2016
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
The M.M. De Weerdt Law Library is officially closing, but representatives from the Department of Justice say access to justice in Yellowknife will actually increase after its doors are closed - despite the fact the NWT will be the only province or territory without a physical law library.
The M.M. De Weerdt Law Library is slated to close. The materials within the library will be reallocated over the next few months. - NNSL file photo |
Last month it was announced the library, formerly open to both the public and the legal community, was closing. Cost and lack of attendance were sited as the reasons for the closure. The amount budgeted for library operations in 2015-16 was $223,000, but expenditures actually hit approximately $467,000. Most of those costs - around $367,000 - went to maintaining materials, supplies and subscriptions.
According to assistant deputy Justice minister Mark Aitken, this cost wasn't justified by the amount of use the library was getting.
"There probably wasn't a great deal of public awareness of the library and there certainly wasn't a great deal of public use of the library, consistently less than one per cent of the users of the library were the public and in fact last fiscal year there were six individual visits by members of the public in the entire year," he said.
"And consider that six visits doesn't necessarily mean six different people - if one person had visited three times, then there was only four people using the library that year."
When the closure was first announced, many members of the legal community in Yellowknife expressed frustration that low attendance could prompt the closure, explaining that attendance was tracked by a sign-in sheet many members of the bar neglected to sign when using the facility.
"I've heard that comment before, and I believe it's true - I believe that not every single person signs in. But there's no reason to say that they're signing in less now than they previously were," said Aitken. "So seven years ago, some people wouldn't have signed in. Seven years later, some people are not signing in but there's still decline year after year, almost every year, in the number of people who even enter the library."
He says a better way to track actual use of the resources is through the materials checked out from the library. Since 2011-12, actual number of books checked out of the library have declined by almost half. In that fiscal year, 753 books were checked out. By 2014-15, only 615 books were borrowed from the library. And by 2015-16, just 385 books were checked out. Meanwhile, there were 984 visits to the facility in the 2015-16 fiscal year. This breaks down to, according to an open letter from deputy minister of Justice Martin Goldney, a cost of almost $500 each time a user entered the library, and $1,200 for every book actually checked out.
Aitken says a resource centre geared towards public use will replace the library. It will be cheaper to maintain, he says, because it won't be staffed with a trained law librarian but with "an outreach court worker or a person who works elsewhere in the courts available to provide the assistance."
The resource centre, located on the first floor of the courthouse, will also be "relatively modest" with fewer hard-copy materials than the current facility.
"It will provide many of the services that the library can offer, but I wouldn't call it a library and I don't think it would be fair to the librarian and the existing users of the library to say it is the library," said Aitken.
Donna Allen, executive director of the Law Society, said even a modest facility geared towards the public might be a sufficient replacement for the library.
"If there's a better resource created, it would be very positive," she said. "I mean we know the public didn't access that library, so I'm not sure if it was ever a valuable public asset."
Allen said it's not enough to have a shelf full of books in order to educate the public on legal fineprint. She said the public generally needs help doing things like filing documents and navigate the system. A more user-friendly resource could help with that, she said.
Aitken agrees.
"I think we're actually making a lot of progress on access to justice," he said.
