Harry S. (Terry) Martin III is the Harvard Law School’s Henry N. Ess III Librarian and Professor of Law. Appointed to his Harvard position in 1981, Martin was born in Connecticut and raised in Minnesota. He received his AB from Harvard in 1965, his JD from the University of Minnesota in 1968, and his MLS from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971. Earlier this year, he announced his plan to step down as the librarian of the Harvard Law School in June 2008. Following a sabbatical year, he will retire in June 2009. Terry Martin was interviewed for Library Notes on April 23.

LN
In 1981, you came to Harvard by a circuitous route: by way of Hartford, Minnesota, West Africa, Liberia, Pittsburgh, the University of Texas, and Georgetown. Can you synthesize your journey for us?

TM
My father was a French teacher. He kept getting new jobs. I was 15 before we repeated Christmas in the same house. Eventually we  settled in Minnesota, my mother's home. My father’s family had all gone to Carleton but I was the first to come to Harvard as an undergraduate.

After Harvard, I went to the University of Minnesota Law School, reconnected with my high-school girlfriend, and got married. This was during the Vietnam War, so there was a choice between joining the Army and going into the Peace Corps. My wife and I preferred the Peace Corps, so we spent two years in Liberia, where

I taught at the law school. I was assigned to teach a legal methods course, but the school had no law library. So I tried to set up a basic law collection.

I chatted with the dean of the University of Pittsburgh library school, who was a consultant to Liberia’s library system. He offered me a scholarship to go to Pitt, so I did. After library school, I surveyed  the available jobs and saw one at the University of Texas. I was hired after a phone interview, threw everything in a U-Haul, and we drove to Texas. Spent five years there. It was a very good experience, followed by five years at Georgetown—and then Harvard called me and I came up and looked.

At that point, [the Harvard Law School Library] was a vast, early-19th-century library—and it was already 1981. The place was un-air-conditioned, the roof leaked when it rained, and the collection was scattered over 30 different stack areas—from basements in dorms to attics of classroom buildings.

The catalog—it was actually the three catalogs—filled the main reading room. There were 12 or 13 different serial check-in systems. It was very primitive.

I returned to Georgetown, and thought, “This is nonsense.” Later, the Harvard dean called and asked, “Are you enjoying yourself at Georgetown? Is it still interesting for you? Could you see yourself getting bored in five years?”

Actually, I could. Then he asked, “Could you see yourself getting bored at Harvard?” I said, no, probably not. “Why don’t you give it a try?” So I said to myself, “I’ll give it ten years.”

LN
You’ve certainly exceeded that: you arrived 27 years ago. You’re a librarian and a professor of law. Was yours a dual appointment from the outset?

TM
Yes.

LN
Is that traditional in law libraries?

TM
It is. Since the ’50s, the American Bar Association, which is the accrediting agency, and the Association of American Law Schools have preferred that the libraries be run by a professor. Then they added on the requirement that the director of the library also have a library degree. That’s been the pattern. It’s now starting to break down a little bit as it’s difficult to maintain excellence in both fields.

LN
How does it play out in your role as teacher and librarian?

TM
I was very interested in law technologies, so, at first, I was teaching a course in advanced legal research. Later, I worked with a professor from Northeastern on a course on artificial intelligence and the law. When the time came to renovate Langdell Hall and make it primarily a library building, I didn’t teach very much for four or five years until the renovation was over.

My wife, who was working at an African art gallery, had been bringing home interesting legal questions, and I realized that nobody was teaching art law at Harvard, so I suggested it to the dean, who thought that it was a great idea. Art law touches on almost every area of the Law School curriculum: intellectual property, censorship, copyright issues, buying, selling, recovering, protecting art, restitution of looted art or art taken during colonial times.

And since at the Law School Library we have our own art collection, this was not unrelated to my day job, if you will. Dean Roscoe Pound—when he was dean from 1916 to 1936— thought there should be a museum of the law, and it should be at Harvard. But Pound was a collector, trained as a botanist actually, and I think he just got the collecting bug in his system. He was happy to spend money on portraits and wigs and seals as well as rare books and manuscripts.

LN
I knew about the rare books and the portraits, but not about the other cultural property.

TM
What we call the realia. We have the death mask of Oliver Wendell Holmes. We have the ammunition box that he used to carry his lunch to the Supreme Court. We have a nice jewel-encrusted sword from King Faad of Saudi Arabia. We have some of the physical exhibits used in the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Lots of interesting things acquired perfectly legally and ethically, but a few of them might raise questions today. We have a lot of Catherine the Great’s imperial library, because the Soviets sold it off. Now, the Russians would like it back, but you know, we paid good money for it and we’re going to digitize it so that everybody can get access to it.

LN
Who uses the treasures?

TM
Maybe a third of the researchers come from legal history, but the majority are people doing other kinds of historical research. The history of the Trans-Siberian Railway was written in our rare books room, for instance, from our complete run of the Imperial Gazette.

LN
In your retirement announcement, you said “The library has been transformed from a collection-driven institution to a service center.” Can you expand on that?

TM
When I came we had the biggest academic law collection in the world—almost as big as the Library of Congress. The collections were very rich, but weren’t particularly well organized. Just processing the materials, figuring out how to store them and how to find them was the focus. When you got a book for somebody, that was the end.

When we renovated Langdell, we closed the building for 14 months and moved most of the collection into storage. We closed down Special Collections and transferred everybody there into the interlibrary loan/document delivery unit. We set up a small, working library—the kind you’d find in a Wall Street law firm—in Pound Hall.

For that year, our job was to get people what they wanted. We couldn’t say, “You’ll find it in that purple book on the fourth shelf.” Instead, we took substantive questions and responded with information. That was a real turning point for us. As a result, we came to recognize that the collection was not just books and that people looking for books were opening conversations. We learned to transform those conversations into reference interviews. And now, we view the collection as a tool, where, in the past, we viewed the collection as an end in itself.

LN
Referring again to your retirement announcement, you’ve said that “A librarian must balance the need to develop resources and policies that support research, teaching, and services while recognizing the responsibilities of a great research university to the general world of scholarship.”

TM
We have a collection—and by collection I mean both analog and digital resources—that is broader and deeper than just the current needs of the people now at the Law School. The fact that we’re able to respond to broader scholarly interests is a major attraction for hiring top people. Dean Kagan has been very aggressively pursuing top people at other law schools, and some of those people are coming to Harvard because we have unique resources here. The library is a magnet—certainly in the areas of foreign and comparative international law and legal history. But we recognize that we provide legal information to scholars from other faculties and, by hosting visiting scholars and an active digitization program, to scholars around the world.

LN
What do you think that the next ten years will bring to the Law Library?

TM

When we first talked with Google about digitizing everything in the Harvard collection, I thought this would be wonderful. We’d get this done in five years, I’d retire, and everything would be online.

Well, it hasn’t turned out to be that way. We decided not to digitize anything in copyright—or anything that was too big, too small, too fragile, or too complicated. We took most of our rare books off the table. We are down to a very small percentage—maybe only 5% of the collection.

As far as legal materials are concerned, there are some very special problems when you’re trying to digitize the law. You can find the official code on a government web site or from from Lexis or from some free access sites. But are they all going to be the same? Have they all been authenticated by the state and backed by the state? If the code changes, how can you see what it was two years ago—the point at which your client is accused of violating the law—rather than the law as it is now?

In the analog world, it’s easy to keep these codes in book form and to identify them—though the research process at the front end is complicated. In the digital world, the research process is quite easy, but it sometimes can be hard to identify what it is exactly that you’re looking at. So there are issues in electronic publishing of official texts that are still to be worked out. But I’m pretty convinced they will be, and it’ll be interesting.

What I just don’t know is the role of government, commercial publishers, the role of do-gooders, the role of libraries, and how they exactly come together. It will be an intricate dance, and if you’re dancing with Elsevier, you can expect to get your toes stepped on, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be out there trying to take the lead.