In 2024, the American Bar Association significantly revised its accreditation standards for law libraries and information resources. Academic law librarians needed a way to gather and engage in thoughtful, sustained discussion. The Iowa Law Collection Symposium emerged as a response to this need. The Symposium sought to bring together librarians exploring issues around defining fundamental missions, stewarding and curating collections, and exploring the impact on libraries’ ability to provide services when they are ever more reliant on licensing unstable content than owning physical collections. 

More than 50 academic law librarians gathered from around the country on September 20^th and 21^st and discussed five papers that had been competitively chosen by a Selection Committee made up of six academic librarians, most of which had significant publication records of their own. 

The Iowa Law Review Online graciously agreed to partner with the University of Iowa Law Library to host the papers of this first Symposium. Three of these papers have been published here as of July 2025. We are grateful to have a home for these works that does not censor the views of scholars.