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SACAD: Scholarly Activities

Abstract

Legal self-help centers across Kansas allow access to legal information for self-represented litigants in civil court cases. However, there is a lack of these centers in rural areas. In areas where this resource does not exist, libraries, which already serve as a trusted community-centered hub, can help provide legal information and resources. This project aims to identify best practices in increasing access to legal information and survey key staff including self-help center staff, court staff such as court clerks and judges, and librarians, to help inform our integration of legal self-help services into public libraries. By executing a short anonymous survey for those professional groups, we can identify what is working, and what is not in existing self-help centers and libraries. This will allow for analysis of critical gaps in access to legal information and ways that it can be filled, specifically in rural areas in Kansas. Findings will be shared in aggregate only and used to create a practical toolkit for court–library partnerships and to guide a small pilot with simple usage tracking. The data collection and analysis for this project are in progress and implementation of pilot libraries is set to begin in 2026 in collaboration with the Kansas Judicial Branch.

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Ziwei Qi

Department/Program

Criminal Justice

Submission Type

in-person poster

Date

4-13-2026

Rights

Copyright the Author(s)

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