Faculty Services
The Biddle Law Library has a full range of services to support the teaching and research needs of the Penn Law faculty.
Every faculty member has a librarian liaison who is here to help you with your research, teaching, and publication needs. Wonder whether your request is appropriate? We can’t say “yes,” until you ask!
Research Services
Research/Reference: Your library liaison is also your research librarian. Our librarians handle a wide variety of research requests, ranging from those requiring a quick answer to an extensive examination of issues and resources. No request is too small or too large.
Faculty Document Delivery: The library will obtain whatever books, articles or other materials you want. If a book or article is not available in the Biddle Law Library, we will retrieve it from other campus libraries, obtain it through interlibrary loan, or purchase a copy. We will deliver materials in print or electrically, according to your preference, and we will also pick them up from your office for return once you have finished. You may send your materials requests to your library liaison or to fdd@law.upenn.edu.
Current Awareness: Your library liaison will monitor your teaching and research interests and notify you of new resources and services that may be of interest to you. Services offered include routing of journals issues; new publications notifications via SmartCILP, Biddle New Acquisitions notices, and table of contents services from other disciplines; and recent developments alerts via Westlaw and Lexis Nexis, Google News, and the like.
Research Assistant Training: If you hire a personal research assistant to help you, your library liaison can work closely with your assistant to provide training on relevant material, help develop research strategies for your projects, and provide general guidance.
Biddle Summer Research Fellows: Every summer, we hire Penn Law students as research fellows to offer additional assistance with short-term projects, under supervision by Biddle librarians. Requests for Research Fellow assistance can be made through your library liaison or by contacting Tim Von Dulm at tvondulm@law.upenn.edu.
E-Resources Access: We can assist you in both accessing and using the many electronic resources Biddle subscribes to. For account set-up, lost passwords or training on Westlaw, Lexis Nexis, and Bloomberg products, contact Mariah Ford at mford1@law.upenn.edu. For help with other e-resources, contact your library liaison or Shenika McAlister at smcalis1@law.upenn.edu.
Publication Services
Publication Support: We can help you in the final stages of your scholarship by proofreading your articles, completing the footnotes, and putting them in the proper citation format required by your publisher. Please contact your liaison librarian or Tim Von Dulm at tvondulm@law.upenn.edu to discuss your upcoming publication needs.
Scholarship Repositories: The library posts all faculty working papers and articles to the Penn Law Legal Scholarship Repository, SSRN and other relevant repositories and digital archives. You may send your papers to Bill Draper at bdraper@law.upenn.edu for posting.
Instructional Services
Classroom Support: Your library liaison can provide a wide range of services to help you with your classes, including identifying reading materials for the class, creating a research web page listing relevant research sources for students’ papers and class projects, and providing research instruction on specialized topics and research tools.
Course Reserves: We offer closed reserve services to ensure that the students in your courses have access to necessary materials. Your library liaison is pleased to discuss your course reserve needs with you, including whether you would like copies of the course textbook to be purchased and placed on reserve.
Purchasing Services
Purchase Recommendations: We routinely buy databases, books, and journals based upon faculty suggestions. If you are developing a new research interest, we will also review our current holdings and work with you to insure that the collection has what you need. Please contact Merle Slyhoff at mslyhoff@law.upenn.edu concerning any materials you would like to be added to the collection.
Personal Copies: Sometimes faculty wish to buy books or journals for their personal collections. We can order these for you and arrange to have them paid from your research account. Please contact Jeff Grillo at jgrillo@law.upenn.edu for assistance with personal copies.
If you have any other questions or suggestions on how we can support your teaching or research – whether or not you believe it is a “library” service – please don’t hesitate to let your liaison librarian know. You may also always contact Paul George, Associate Dean and Director of Biddle Law Library at pmgeorge@law.upenn.edu.