Introducing legal knowledge and process-based pedagogy into the LIS curriculum in China: essential or auxiliary?

Abstract

Despite the rapid development of the Chinese legal system and legal education for the past 30 years, most Chinese courts, law firms, and law schools still do not have established law libraries. Law librarians remain an undersized group, many of whom do not have proper educational qualifications on both LIS and law. This deficiency has inevitably affected the potency of legal education and practice.

This research suggests that several barriers to competent legal information services in China relate to the existing LIS curriculum for postgraduate education, which fails to place law librarianship as one of its goals. By surveying the curricular data from top Chinese LIS schools, it has been found that only a few courses on legal knowledge, no formal education for a legal information specialty, few training programs for full-time law librarians, and no professional pool for recruiting young law librarians, are offered. Some studies on opening up the curriculum to cope with more possibilities have been conducted, but no substantial changes have yet been made to the curriculum.

Furthermore, this research advocates for a more versatile and open LIS curriculum to provide an institutional education for law librarianship. It proposes using an American educational model and introducing a process-based legal pedagogy into Chinese legal education, as well as diversifying the LIS teaching methodologies.