Law Library Student Survey

The Law Library conducted its 2025 student survey in March and received 180 responses. Participants included students from the JD, Flex JD, LLM, MLS, and SJD programs. Among JD respondents, class years were fairly evenly represented: 37% were 1Ls, 36% were 2Ls, and 26% were 3Ls.

When asked about their primary reasons for visiting the Law Library in person or online, the top response was to study or work in a quiet environment (156 responses), followed by using a printer (124 responses) and using a group study room (114 responses). Top reasons for visiting the Law Library online included booking a study room (128 responses), using library databases (124 responses), and accessing online study aids (91 responses). Respondents could select multiple options for these questions.

Survey responses were again overwhelmingly positive. For each question, a majority of respondents reported being “very satisfied” or “mostly satisfied” with the Law Library’s space, services, and resources. Most questions had very few “dissatisfied” or “very dissatisfied” responses. Additionally, 168 students said the Law Library is either “very important” or “somewhat important” to them; no respondents said it was unimportant.

Student comments ranged widely, as is to be expected, but several consistent themes emerged. As in previous years, it’s important to note that the number of comments was much lower than the number of survey responses, so the quantitative data is likely more indicative of overall student attitudes. Nonetheless, recurring themes in the comments include:

• Students are generally very appreciative of librarians and library staff and find them responsive, helpful, and knowledgeable.The students who use our resource sharing services are very appreciative overall.

• Students would really like more study rooms and better sound-proofing for those spaces.

• Students had a number of complaints about the study room reservation system/user interface.

• Students dislike the old wooden chairs in the library, finding them uncomfortable for long study sessions.

• Students requested more upper-level textbooks in the course reserves collection.

• Several students mentioned missing Quimbee.

For complete survey results, see the report linked above. (Note that student comments are not included in this public version of the report, but all students comments were reviewed and are being taken into consideration by the Law Library as we plan for future improvements.)

The law library is working on implementing the following improvements in response to student feedback from the 2025 survey:

Underused services:

• Create a flyer advertising lesser-known library services; post in all study rooms and around the law school.

Library trainings:

• Encourage faculty to make librarian-led research trainings optional for students who have already attended one.

Course reserves:

• Consider purchasing additional copies of casebooks for high-enrollment courses.

• Research storage solutions for the expanded course reserves collection.

• Promote awareness that the library accepts donated textbooks for course reserves.

Study rooms:

• Pilot a program to stock all study rooms with dry-erase markers.

Future survey planning:

• Consider adding a question to next year’s survey about student perspectives on security and keycard access.