• Cellar Map
• 2^nd-floor Map
• 3^rd-floor Map
• 4^th-floor Map
• 5^th-floor Map

The Library's Reserve Collection is located on open shelves in the Reserve Reading Room on the Third Floor.  The turnstile to this area is keyed to accept the identification cards of Columbia Law School affiliated individuals;  other readers who wish to use materials within this area should consult Circulation Desk staff.

On the left, or west side, of the RRR are the West Publishing Company case reporters, including the Supreme Court Reporter (S.Ct.), Federal Reporter (F., F.2d, F.3d), Federal Supplement (F.Supp., F.Supp.2d) and regional reporters. Additional copies of the federal and regional reporters are located on the south end of the Fourth Floor.

Across the aisle, on the right side, are "Permanent Reserve" items, i.e., materials in heavy demand, such as current hornbooks and nutshells and the Administrative Code and Charter of the City of New York. These are followed by the "Temporary Reserve" items such as required or collateral course reading, course evaluations, and materials for Moot Court. Consult the "Reserve Lists" option on PEGASUS's main menu or the blue, three-ringed binder at the Circulation Desk for more information on these items.

The next ranges hold the statutory and administrative codes of the fifty states and U.S. dependencies. (Session laws and superseded codes are available on microfiche on the Second Floor.)

At the north end of the room, all current (unbound) periodical issues, including law reviews and legal newspapers and newsletters, are shelved in call number order. Several bound periodical indexes, including the Index to Legal Periodicals (1789 to date), Current Law Index (1980 to date), Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals (1960 to date), and European Legal Journals Index (1993 to date), are shelved nearby.

These materials may not leave the Reserve Reading Room, but readers can copy portions of them using photocopiers near the entrance to the room.

Surrounding the reporters and the reserve materials are study tables and carrels; those on the west side of the Room are available for laptop computer use and are equipped for connection to the Law School's network. We do not permit use of laptops in other areas of the Room.

The initial move of materials from the basement to an off-site storage space is now finished. This material comprises pre-1979 legal treatises from the US and major common law jurisdictions. Before the move we culled from that group all items which had circulated at least three times in the last ten years. We are also keeping on site additional material which, although it hasn't circulated out of the library, would be awkward to use from an off-site facility, such as multi-volume sets and selected government documents.

We have also moved off-site one small sub-section of the International Law collection which had already been moved from the 2nd floor to the cellar as they were low use items. These are mostly older books on international relations peripheral to international law. As with the treatises, multi-volume sets and anything that has circulated 3 or more times will be kept on site.

The records in Pegasus clearly show which items are off-site. To request retrieval of a book, you can ask at the Circulation desk or fill out the Request Form for Items Located Offsite, a link to which can also be found by selecting "Pegasus, the Library catalog" in this website. Items requested before 3:30 P.M. are usually available the next day. You may call the Circulation Desk at 854-3922 to inquire as to whether your item has arrived.

In this initial stage, we have moved about 82,000 volumes, and this is all we will move off-site for the next two to three years. After that we expect to send roughly 10,000 volumes a year into the one-day retrieval storage program. This roughly matches our acquisitions rate.

The Greene Hall library space was designed to accommodate about 700,000 volumes. We now have over a million volumes in the collection, so you can understand why we've had to turn to off-site storage.