MAUL: An OCLC Union List of Legal Periodicals

The Mid-America Law School Library Consortium is an incorporated association of eighteen academic law libraries formed in 1980 to promote cooperation among its members. The organization includes libraries in Arkansas, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Within the framework of the organization\u27s by-laws, the group engages in such varied cooperative activities as telefacsimile document delivery, collection development, staff exchanges, and union listing. The union list of periodicals on OCLC was authorized by the Consortium directors in June 1982. (Two libraries opted not to participate in the OCLC union list project, leaving sixteen involved.) The four-letter symbol chosen to identify the union list online is MAUL. Off-line union listing was an early activity of the Mid-America Consortium that helped fulfill its resource-sharing goals. A printed union list of microforms and one of looseleaf services have been produced, and a Canadian/Australian list is under development. In early 1982, the library directors of the Consortium became interested in the possibility of using the OCLC union listing capability to create a union list of periodicals. In order to do this, the Consortium had to select a single network through which to join. Eileen Searls, Director of the Saint Louis University Law Library and President of the Consortium, investigated the packages offered by the networks to which the various libraries belonged. Four net-works were possible choices: Amigos, BCR, ILLINET, and MIDLNET. At the Consortium meeting in Detroit in June 1982, the Board of Directors voted to join through Amigos. The Consortium\u27s initial contract with Amigos included one-time costs of $1,500 for training agents at two sites and$34 per hour for profiling. These costs were prorated. The Consortium pays the annual membership fee, which was $739 for sixteen libraries in 1983/84. Each library is billed for the charges associated with local data records directly by its own network. This venture was the first cross-network OCLC union list

Nursing Home Receiverships: Design and Implementation

The enforcement of legal standards governing nursing home care and safety involves complex determinations due to the precarious conditions of most residents and the vast shortage of nursing home beds. This is particularly true when residents must be transferred. This article advocates the interim measure of statutory nursing home receiverships to protect the health and safety of residents and the nursing home property while determinations regarding sanctions or compliance are being made. Section II examines the statutory receivership provisions of four states and explains why such an approach is best suited for the effective enforcement of standards while also protecting residents from life-threatening transfers and preventing facilities from closing. In Section III, the article documents the path of the Village Nursing Home in New York City from a substandard facility to a high-quality, community-based nursing home through a statutory receivership model. Finally, Section IV analyzes the Village Nursing Home example, identifying difficulties in the implementation of a statutory receivership and also the factors contributing to its success. The article concludes by identifying flaws of statutory receiverships. Through court orders, courts play an important role in providing a remedy to such flaws, but community participation and interest in nursing homes is also integrally related to ensuring nursing home care and safety

Local Government in Missouri: The Crossroads Reached

This article addresses the perceived inadequacy of the State of Missouri’s statutory tools to modernize local government. Some of the more extreme examples of conflicting and obsolete provisions in the laws affecting local government in Missouri are discussed. In many instances these obsolete statutes severely restricted the operations of municipalities. The article also looks at laws relating to special benefit districts, problems in county government, and the issue of home rule. Many of the concerns addressed in this article have to do with the overlap that exists among political subdivisions within a given area, such as counties, cities, and special districts. The article suggests that a solution must take into account the complex inter-relationships among these subdivisions in order to achieve coordination while preserving a truly local and representative system of government