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1 Legal Reference Services Q. 1 (1981)

handle is hein.journals/lgrefsq1 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL Upon its announcement, the Legal Reference Services Quarterly initiated a burst of lively interest, a fact which we hope may ease somewhat the understandable fears of those who are uncomfortable with the proliferation of new periodicals. Legal reference is a wide but very special field. By launching this periodical, we endorse the view that all librarians who do reference work with legal collections have special challenges and must demonstrate their special skills. Our immediate audience, of course, are those librarians who think of themselves as law librarians and who work with collections that cen ter around legal research. In addition, however, we will aim in this and future issues to meet the needs of all reference librarians who must deal with the increasing number of reference questions that involve the law or where the legal aspect must be shown as part of the complete reference answer. Our task in taking this view is, of course, immense because there can be no doubt that law and legal literature have gone through a veritable explosion of interest among all scholarly disciplines and also the public. All major academic disciplines, from thehumanities through the hard sciences, now take the socio-legal component into their scope of concern, In addition, newspapers, television, and the popular literaturk are now full of legal themes. From students needing help with legal reference books for their classwork to citizens who demand to know just what their rights are, any library will be faced with an increasingly larger demand for help with questions that involve the law. The goal of this journal is to assist, then, every reference librarian faced with those questions. It is intended as a forum for discussion and a gathering place for questions. It is designed to contain the type of article that can be of assistance in one's day-to-day work. This issue is our first attempt to illustrate that concept. Professor Les Peat, of the University of Vermont Law School, contributes an Legal Reference Services Quarterly, Vol. 1(1), Spring 1981 T 1981 The Haworth Press