I think we will have to take the welcome from the last six words.
The next item on the program is the President's address. I am not going to make any address because you would not be edified.
I would call your attention, however, to a few things which have appealed to me during the past year, and which, with suggestions which will come from the members present, will make perhaps a basis for our work during the coming year.
In my library, and I have no doubt in a good many of the libraries represented here, there have been calls for practice and form books, and perhaps for other local books of states outside of one's own state, and you have all probably experienced difficulty in getting proper information regarding such material. This need is coincident with the possibility of developing our Law Library Journal. It occurs to me that we might organize a committee to publish in our Law Library Journal, once a year, a list of local practice and form books, giving the title, author, number of the edition, date of publication, cost and publisher—the idea being to include in the list, not all the books, but the best books, and to place the choosing of that list in the hands of parties familiar with such books. If a list could be published every year it would be of considerable advantage.
Another suggestion has come to me—I think from Mr. Hewitt—that we put in the Law Library Journal, in some such way as described above, references to the court rules of the highest courts of the several states and any important local courts that are represented in the published reports. I do not refer to the text of the rules and the many amendments, but where they can be found, date of adoption, etc.
There is another matter which will come up at one of the sessions, viz., the movement for uniformity in the publication of session laws. You will hear more about that later, but it is worth our consideration. You all know the rather baffling way in which session laws are published; hardly any two states are alike, and the states change their methods from year to
year, causing a great deal of confusion and difficulty in finding material.
You are perfectly familiar with the chief work which this Association has accomplished, viz., the publication of the Index to Legal Periodicals and Law Library Journal. We can congratulate ourselves, I think, on a fairly successful year. The editorial work has been done very well, and the promptness of publication has shown some improvement. Mechanically, we have it on a better basis than ever before, and there is no reason why the publication should not continue and become actually self-supporting. Now, as you know, it only partially pays for itself. The Association pays a certain amount of the costs. We hope to increase the subscriptions among practicing lawyers, and plans have already been made for doing this.
We should, I think, take more pains with the Law Journal portion. We have not done with that all that is possible. Personally I think that the editor, working as he does at present—I mean by that, under his present contract and with the time at his disposal—can hardly be expected to do very much more; but we can make a good deal more out of the publication if we improve the Law Journal—make it more readable, so that people will subscribe for the Journal alone. I do not think you can say that anyone would pay $5 a year for what is in the Law Journal now. I wish that matter could be taken up later and discussed, and that steps might be taken to bring about an improvement in that respect.