Rethinking the Role of the Court Library for Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

The library of the Constitutional Court of Korea adopted open-shelf system since 1994. The library is opened to the public and anyone with their identification card can visit and use every resource of the library. Moreover, these days to promote the Sustainable Development Goals we are planning to even go forward by offering access to the legal information we introduce for the public. The publication “Decisions of the Constitutional Court of Korea” contains selected decisions from the last year. In the library website we introduce the publications with the indexed decisions. However, last year to promote acknowledgment of these legal decisions we reorganized our library website and introduced the “Decision Commentary” page. The librarians research the academic papers including commentaries of the decisions, index those papers and couple up the collected commentaries with the Decisions. The main purpose of this project is to introduce the public, the critics alongside the Decisions. Likewise searching critics before you go to the movie theatre, through this project the public can comprehensively understand the decision thanks to the academic analysis linked to the decisions. As a court library we are continuously searching the way to provide the public not only just the original information produced by the court but also the information derived from the original information with defined relationship. Since the establishment of the library we aimed to support constitutional adjudication and research activities which were focused to the legal professionals mainly, but recently we are also aiming to support the public users who are interested in the Court. By introducing varied opinions of the decision the public will be able to have balanced opinion which will lead to understanding their constitutional rights.

Keywords: court library, decision, case, commentary, legal information, constitutional court