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Middle Temple Law Library

This morning's adventure was to Middle Temple Library, a law library available to all members of the four Inns of Court - the professional associations for all barristers in England and Wales.

Middle Temple's Garden
As this is a private library we were fortunate to have Adam, the Training and Development Librarian, give us a sneak peek at the library space, the Benchers' room, and the impressive Middle Temple Hall. Staff were preparing for lunch as we toured around the Hall, laying place settings on many long tables situated in a large room adorned in notable Barristers' crests, suits of armour, and stained-glass windows. The whole effect was very formidable - not to mention delicious smelling!

Middle Temple Hall
The library is housed in the Ashley building, named for Robert Ashley, a passionate book collector who bequeathed his collection to the Temple in the 1640's, kick-starting the library we now see. While today the library holds about 250,000 volumes of British, European, and American law texts, Ashley's donation contained relatively few legal texts. Back in the day, a true gentleman had a well-rounded education and as such Ashley's collection is extremely varied. That said, Adam shared that the oldest book in their collection is a 12th-century law book.
The library
The library is organized according to the subject - a recent change that updated the previous system of organizing materials alphabetically by title. They are the only library of the four Inns of Court that have updated their organization system like this. Each of the four floors contains materials pertaining to different regions and legal systems. They now subscribe to many databases which allows them to limit the number of physical items they purchase, but they still retain back issues of periodicals in their basement in case a barrister needs to look at previous cases. 

 As a librarian, our guide runs several different programs on legal research training for barristers and provides library tours for new members. One interesting aspect of his job relates to advocacy. He goes to law classes to inform the students about the Middle Temple Library and encourage them to use the services available at the Inns of Court libraries. Adam said that he does this because he believes that if students use the institution they will continue to do so once they graduate, but if they don't then they may not use them once they are practicing lawyers. 

 Once our tour wrapped up we were encouraged to take a stroll through their gorgeous garden. All in all a great start to the day!

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