LEGISLATION CREATES POSSIBLE SOURCE OF NEW FUNDS FOR PUBLIC LIBRARIES…

March 28, 2007

        New legislation (HB 273) has just been adopted by the Ky. Legislature that may provide a source of funding which would allow County Law Libraries to fund for the local Public Library online law library resources for the benefit of your library patrons.  

   Each county in Kentucky is allowed to collect a fee for each court case filed in your county, and that money goes to your local County Law Library.  In 2005 that funding was greatly expanded.

KRS 172.110 requires that the County Law Library resources be made accessible six days a week.  The Circuit Clerk is designated as the Librarian of the County Law Library.  We have noticed that most Circuit Clerks offices are closed on Saturdays, and thus are not in compliance with KRS 172.110.  One solution to this access problem is for the County Law Library to purchase our online service and place it in the public library for use by the general public.  Since most public libraries are open at least six days a week, we believe this will solve their problem and at the same time build good will for the County Law Library by benefiting the public in your community.

The new legislation expands the locations in which County Law Library resources may be placed, and this specifically includes the local public library.

    Under an arrangement that some County Law Libraries have worked out with their local Public Library, the funding is provided by the County Law Library and the Public Library provides access to their public computers through which the patrons can log on to www.lawreader.com and access our services.

Each Kentucky county by law has a County Law Library.  In most counties there is a board of trustees made up of local lawyers.  This board includes your local County Attorney.  In counties which have not elected to have a committee to operate the library, the responsibility for the County Law Library falls on the local Fiscal Court.   

The persons who run the County Law Library are called “Trustees”.  

See Section (4) of KRS 172.200 which states:

“The trustees shall exercise their absolute discretion in the purchase of books, pamphlets, periodicals, and other materials…”

   Your local Circuit Clerk is charged with collecting the law library tax, and can tell you the name of the treasurer to whom this tax is paid each month. The Clerk is required by KRS 172.180 (3)(b) to keep a record of all payments to the County Law Library.

   If you are interested in expanding the research resources provided by your library, you may contact the Trustees of the County Law Library and see if they are willing to provide the funding.  

We have noted that public librarians have found that the Trustees have generally been favorable to providing funding for the Public Library, when they became aware of the newly amended law which allows them to place part or all of their resources with the Public Library. 

The Trustees are not required by the new law to share their resources with the Public Library, but are permitted to do so. The Trustees have the discretion to grant or deny your request.  

  We believe it is entirely reasonable to presume that in the future the legislature will be checking to see how well the County Law Libraries have used their resources.

   If your local County Law Library elects to assist you, we would like you to be aware of the resources provided by LawReader.   We provide a national case law data base which includes all the court decisions of the 50 states, all Federal appellate courts, the statutes of all states, thousands of legal forms, and a special section of materials for non-lawyers developed by LawReader at the request of our Public Library subscribers. This includes a divorce kit, materials on child custody, child support, and adoption, legal rights if you are in a car wreck, or arrested, unemployment compensation, worker’s compensation, and procedures for open meetings and open records rights. No other online service provides more Kentucky focused legal resources.

 On LawReader you can find the decisions of the Ky. Court of Appeals and Ky. Supreme Court within hours of their release.  We provide legal dictionaries, and a 950 topic Law Digest with over 52,000 sub topics. We provide the entire Ky. Revised Statutes with some 80,000 annotations. There are many, many more features offered, but they are best explored by visiting our site.

   If you elect to add our program, we will assign passwords to each of your designated public computers, and thereafter your patron just logs on to LawReader and does not have to enter any passwords. The computer will remember them automatically.

    If you have any questions about this process or about our resources please give us a call or e-mail us. We have based our license fee on anticipated usage by calculating the population and caseload of each county. This means that our site license is within the means of every library.  If you call we can quickly provide you with information about the fee required to implement this program in your county.

IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS CONTACT:

Stan Billingsley

LawReader, Inc.

314 7^th. St.

Carrollton, Ky. 41008

(502) 732-4617

E-Mail: Firstjudge@aol.com

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