From the Editor

Abstract

Welcome to Legal Reference Services Quarterly. In this issue, we focus on three critical issues in the realm of legal information and law libraries. Law librarian, Jingwei Zhang, presents and discusses her study on chat reference services offered in academic law libraries in the US during the pandemic in her article, “User-Engaged Virtual Reference Service: A Survey of Chat Reference in Academic Law Libraries”. Zhang also suggests cost-effective tools that academic law libraries could use to think about putting these services in place. An essential component of democracy is open access to public information. On the other hand, a lot of government materials are unavailable to the public because they are labeled as classified information. “When the Goalposts Move” by Rebecca Chapman gives a thorough history of executive orders and their trends in the classification of government information. In the thoughtful conclusion to her article, the author discusses the important roles that law librarians may play in moving this important debate forward, both in theory and in practice. The column “Librarians as Model Thinkers” continues to explore data in the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom pyramid. The discussion centers on how librarians and legal-information scholars may help promote replicability in empirical legal research by improving data accessibility, drawing on our collective expertise in metadata creation.