Committee Reports 2001-2002

Archives Committee

The Committee Chair continues to gather and organize SANDALL materials. Items added to the archives include materials in paper format (including meeting minutes, agendas, newsletter issues, handouts from the fall institute and brown bag luncheons, and documents from the survey done by the Long Range Planning Committee, etc.), and a videocassette recording of Project LEAP information.

Submitted by Margaret McDonald, University of San Diego Legal Research Center
Chair, SANDALL Archives Committee

Constitution & Bylaws Committee :
Thanks to great planning by earlier board and committee members, there were no changes in the Constitution or By-Laws and not much activity for this committee during this past year.

The only event was in February, when the SANDALL Board made the following clarification of the bylaws:

Nominations Process. Article 9, § e of the current by-laws reads:

"Receipt and Counting of Ballots. Election ballots shall be received by the Nominations Committee thirty (30) days before the annual meeting. The Nominations Committee shall then tabulate the results and report the names of the new officers to the Chapter. Following the reporting of the election results, the committee shall destroy the ballots."

It provides no specific guidelines on where the tabulation occurs and how long to retain the ballots. It was proposed that the written policy be amended to clarify the two issues as follows:

A. The members of the Nominations Committee each year may not have access to an appropriate private space for the counting of ballots. If this occurs, the Nominations Committee should contact the President so that an appropriate location can be secured for the tabulation of ballots.

B. The ballots will be held in a secure location for 10 working days after the election results are reported by the Chair of the Nominations Committee to SANDALL members via the SANDALL list serv. The ballots shall then be shredded.

Since this is a procedural clarification, there is no need to change the by-laws.

The clarification was published in the February 2002 SANDALL News.

Respectfully submitted,
Barbara Glennan

go to top

Grants Committee
Jean Willis, Chair, Ruth Levor and Carmen Brigandi worked together as the SANDALL Grants Committee for 2001/2002. We advertised for and received applications for both grants provided by SANDALL. Grant recipients were announced via the listserv, in the newsletter, as well as on the website.

SANDALL provided three grants this year. One paid for the registration fee for attending the SANDALL workshop, and this was provided to Bob Richards of Luce, Forward. Two grants to cover the costs of registration for the SCALL Institute were awarded to Sheila Corman, San Diego County Public Law Library, and to Mary Sexton, University of San Diego.

Members are encouraged to apply for these grants, and we now have an electronic grant application form available on the website.

Respectfully submitted,
Jean Willis
Chair, SANDALL Grants Committee

go to top

Internet
Early in the SANDALL year the Web Committee and the Internet Special Interest Group merged to form the Internet Committee with two groups: the Internet Resources Group (IRG), headed by Kim Kane, and the Web Page Development Group (WDG), headed by Webmaster Carol Hyne. This structure seems to be working well.

The WDG had a busy year keeping the Jobs and Events pages up to date, and adding new links to resources put forth by the IRG. We also kept the Membership Directory page current, posted minutes from the Board meetings and links to the electronic version of the newsletter. Stylistic changes were made to many web pages to give the site a more consistent look.

While these changes were readily apparent to users, most of the committee activity took place behind the scenes to improve functionality and consistency. This included reorganizing the web site file structure, establishing and implementing file naming conventions, deleting duplicate, outdated and irrelevant files from the host server and performing link checks. We also cleaned the html code of all the web pages thereby reducing file size by as much as 60% in some cases.

Respectfully submitted,
Carol J. Hyne
Chair, SANDALL Internet Committee

go to top

Internet Resources Group (IRG):
This year we renamed the Internet Special Interest Group (SIG) the Internet Resources Group (IRG). The meeting format changed from monthly meetings to e-mail contact between members. The IRG now consists of SANDALL members who e-mail links to the chair for inclusion in the HotLinks! email.

I want to thank everyone who has provided URL's for the HotLinks! e-mail. I also want to thank the newsletter editors for including the links in the newsletter. And thank you to Carol Hyne for uploading them to the SANDALL webpage.
-Kim Kane

go to top

Newsletter
Amy Moberly and Sheila Corman took over as co-editors of SANDALL News when Barbara Glennan resigned in August 2001. Ruth Levor continued as business manager. Four issues of the newsletter have been published so far this fiscal year. Issue no. 5 will be published following the business meeting. We would like to thank everyone who contributed news, articles and other features. We also thank our advertisers for their continued support.

Respectfully submitted,
Sushila Selness (Chair, Newsletter Committee)
Amy Moberly and Sheila Corman (Co-editors)
Ruth Levor (Business Manager)

go to top

Nominations
The Nominations Committee would like to thank the members of SANDALL who agreed to run for office. The slate of candidates was announced to the membershipon March 11, 2001. The 85 ballots were mailed to the membership on April 4, 2002. Forty two percent of the ballots were returned by the May 8, 2002 deadline. The elected officers for 2002-2003 are:

President - Tracey M. Pardo, Cooley Godward LLP
Vice-President - Sushila Selness, USD Legal Research Center
Secretary - Sheila Corman, San Diego County Public Law Library
Treasurer - Owen G. Smith, USD Legal Research Center

I would also like to thank the other committee members, Valerie Railey, US Courts Library and Mary Sexton, USD Legal Research Center for their work on this committee.

Patricia A. Bermel, Chair, USD Legal Research Center

go to top

Programs

As Vice President, I was also assigned to Chair the Programs Committee for the chapter. We had several major programs throughout the year interspersed with smaller brown bag type programs. Here is a short summary of the programs. The four major events, Fall Workshop, Holiday Party, Spring Social and Annual Meeting are discussed first. Info on the brown bags is after that.

Fall Workshop-
This annual workshop was held on Friday, November 2, 2001 from 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the Broderick room of the San Diego County Bar Association Building. Sponsored by LEXIS, this workshop was entitled "Going for the Gold: Winning the Race for Competitive Intelligence." The workshop addressed questions such as "What is competitive intelligence? Where can I find it? Is it free? Can I get it in time for it to be useful?"

Fees were $35 for SANDALL/ SCALL / NOCALL members, $45 for non?members, and $25 for students. The fees included costs of registrations, program, handouts, continental breakfast, buffet lunch, beverages, and parking.

The first speaker was Cynthia L. Shamel, President of Shamel Information Services (http://shamelinfo.com/). She has over ten years of experience in the information industry and she gave an excellent and informative presentation about the definition of competitive intelligence (CI), steps in competitive intelligence gathering, how to set up a long range plan to gather CI and sources to locate CI information. Shamel took us through some for-pay databases as well as free resources on the 'Net.

Julie Webster-Matthews was the second speaker. She is the LEXIS Librarian Relations Consultant for California, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming. At her previous job as a law firm librarian, she was responsible for managing all aspects of library operations and providing extensive research and reference assistance for 100 attorneys and other legal staff. In her one hour presentation, Ms. Webster?Matthews discussed the difference between competitive intelligence and competitor intelligence. She also took us on a virtual tour of LexisNexis's new databases called Company Dossier and Smartlinx and discussed how to minimize costs while maximizing information collection.

Kathleen Moll gave the third presentation. She has worked in the information industry for over a decade as a corporate librarian, project manager, and most recently as an Account Executive for Dialog, San Francisco. Moll started at Dialog as an information consultant over two years ago providing training to corporate customers. She demonstrated Dialog's new database entitled "Dialog 1". It is a separate database from Dialog and provides "one-stop shopping" for CI information by combining many for-pay databases into one database.

After lunch, Tony A. Harvell gave a presentation on specialty search engines available for business and financial information. Currently the Head of Collection management at University of San Diego's Copley library, Tony has many years of experience as a business reference librarian. He also regularly teaches classes on search engines.

Denise Carter is an Individual Consultant in TIAA?CREF's Los Angeles Office and has been with the company since 1997. As an Individual Consultant, her responsibilities include conducting workshops, giving seminars and providing individual guidance in an effort to educate TIAA?CREF's participants on a wide range of financial topics. She has been in the financial services industry for almost five years and holds a BA in Psychology and Criminology from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an MBA from the University of Denver. She is currentlypursuing the Certified Financial Planner certification. She led the group through some basic financial planning and how to get information from different financial databases.

Through a combination of LEXIS funding ($1,000) and registration fees, we collected $1,855 for this workshop. Expenses included room rental ($350), podium rental ($45), parking ($240), breakfast and lunch and gratuity and sales tax (960.93). However, with 26 people attending the workshop, we covered all our expenses and netted $274.08.

Holiday Party-
The holiday party was held on the 6th of December 2001 from 3-5 p.m. at the Horton Grand Hotel, a Victorian style hotel in downtown San Diego. This party, sponsored by Westlaw, featured Horton's famous afternoon tea. This included petit fours cakes, finger sandwiches, scones with butter, cream, and homemade preserves and English Breakfast tea. We held the party on this date so that the it would not conflict with either Hanukkah or Christmas. We awarded doorprizes throughout the party. For doorprizes and decorations, we spent roughly $200. We purchased 5 poinsettas for centerpieces which we gave away as doorprizes, a $20 gift certificate to Amazon.com, a $20 Blockbuster gift certificate, a wine and cheese basket (made by Mary), brunch for two at the Horton and two one pound boxes of See's candies.

West said they'd underwrite up to $1,000 for the party. SANDALL had to put down a $300 deposit, but that was refunded to us when West contributed their sponsorship and then West settled the bill with Horton (roughly $700). We did allow West reps to say a few words at the beginning of the party, but for the most part they were content to mingle and chat. Cost for members was $5 and $7 for non?members. 44 people attended. We covered all our expenses and made $62.48.

Spring Social-
This event was held Tuesday, May 21, 2002 from 4 to 6 p.m. at Redfish, a Cajun-themed restaurant located in the Gaslamp Quarter at 731 5th Ave. This was sponsored by the Daily Journal and we enjoyed $2 beers (18 different kinds of beer), $3 hurricanes, hot wings, louisiana eggrolls, sweet potato chips, blackened chicken and fried green tomatoes.

The board met for a board meeting from 3 to 4 p.m. where we discussed the transition of the old board and the new. We sat on the large outdoor patio. Around 25 people showed up, including the representatives of the sponsor of the event, Ray Chagolla and Andrea Torres. We visited and munched and generally had a great time. Total cost was $150 and the Daily Journal donated $500, so we cleared $350.

Annual Meeting-
The annual meeting will be June 7th, from noon to 1:30 p.m. at the law firm of Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton. Steve Whiteside, the law librarian there, has graciously agreed to host us in the large conference room on the 21st floor.

The address of Sheppard Mullin is:
501 West Broadway
San Diego, CA 92101?3598

Our speaker this year is AALL Past President Bob Oakley. He is a member of the AALL Executive Board, and Director of the Law Library and Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, DC.

Food will be catered by Mama Gucci's. We will have a meat entree and a veggie entree, salad, fresh sourdough bread, fresh cookies, and drinks. Please let me know if you have any special dietary requirements.

Brown Bags-
October 26th, 12:00?1:00 p.m., California Western School of Law, Room 2F. Sponsored by West, and hosted by Cal Western School of Law, we all got together to hear Dennis Ayers, Technology Manager for West Group, speak to us about how new technologies are changing and simplifying on?line research. He discussed ways to find free information about the West databases before you go on?line to search, which cuts down on expenses. He also demonstrated a way to stack many commands to find certain cases and print them. One of the most interesting items demonstrated was the wireless feature that allows users to access WestLaw via their palm pilot. There was also some questions and answers that took place after the main presentation.

January 9th, 2002, San Diego County Public Law Library (1150 Front Street, San Diego, CA), 12:00? 1:00 p.m. Topic was Legal Education Awareness Program (LEAP) and speaker was Martin Kruming of the Daily Journal Corporation and San Diego Commerce. This is a program aimed at informing and enticing high school students into careers in law. This video was produced to acquaint teenagers with the jobs of law librarians, paralegals, administrators, clerks, and legal secretaries.

February 7th, 2002, Public Defender's Library, noon to 1 p.m. The topic was "Writs and Appeals: A Public Defender's Perspective" and the speaker was public defender law librarian Carolyn Price and Public Defense attorney Gary Nichols, star of the Writs and Appeals division of the Public Defender. He discussed his specialty and what the Public Defender's office can and cannot do and Carolyn gave us a tour of the Public Defender's library. Two library school students, Karen Reilly and Liza Blue, attended the brown bag.

March 14th, 2002, San Diego County Public Law Library (1150 Front Street, San Diego, CA), 12:00? 1:00 p.m. Topic: "All you ever wanted to know about paralegals...and more!" This was a joint presentation by the San Diego Paralegal Association's past president Dawn Yandel and the current SDPA president Stephennie Tieri. They discussed various paralegal programs around town (which are good, which are not so good), the top 10 questions to ask paralegals when interviewing them, and what the requirements are for paralegals now (and what law changed them).

April 12th, 2002, Cooley Godward LLP, 4401 Eastgate Mall, San Diego, CA 92121?1909 (in the UTC area), 12:00-1:00 p.m. Topic: ""A Basic Patent Search in 20 Minutes or Less"? presented by Tracey Pardo, law librarian for Cooley Godward LLP. Tracey has been a member of SANDALL for 4 years and is the Library Manager at Cooley Godward. She has been there for 6 years. She currently serves 85 attorneys. Cooley specializes in several areas of law: Corporate/Securities, Intellectual Property, and Employment.

go to top

Special Committees & Liasons

AALL Government Relations Committee Liason
FROM: Joan Allen-Hart
It has been my pleasure to serve as the chapter contact for government relations activities for the second year. This consisted primarily of serving as a liaison for SANDALL with the AALL Government Relations Committee and the other two California chapters. There were four GRC activities which we participated in this year:

1. In July, SANDALL Secretary Sushila Selness attended the Legislative Advocacy workshop held during the AALL annual meeting. This was the second year that SANDALL was represented at the workshop.

2. The three California chapters sent a jointly-written letter to all California ABA delegates, asking that they approve the resolution to oppose UCITA, which was placed before the House of Delegates during the ABA 2001 Annual Meeting in August. The letter-writing campaign was coordinated by AALL and other professional library organizations, as well as other concerned groups, in response to the efforts of the publishing industry's aggressive lobbying for passage of UCITA in a number of state legislatures. The campaign was partially successfully: rather than voting on the resolution at the annual meeting, the ABA Board of Governors decided to appoint a separate working group to study UCITA and issue a report with recommendations. While not enthusiastically supportive of the issues raised by the library community, the report, issued in early 2002, recommended that UCITA be drafted.

3. SANDALL also cosponsored the second annual Law Librarians Legislative Day workshop in Sacramento on March 12th, with NOCALL and SCALL. This full day event included legislative advocacy training in the morning and culminated with visits to some of the legislators' offices in the afternoon.

4. Finally, in April, SANDALL, joined by the other California chapters, demonstrated support for the county law libraries by formally opposing AB 2648, introduced by North County Assembly Member Mark Wyland. This bill would have removed the requirement that counties provide facilities and maintenance of the facilities for county law libraries in California, a law that has existed more than 100 hundred years. The opposition to AB 2648 was so strong, with many individual librarians and others writing letters to the author and the Assembly Local Government Committee, that Wyland amended the bill on May 6th, altering the most offending language. The amended bill was approved and sent over to the Senate, where the outcome is as yet uncertain.

In closing, I would like to recommend that the 2002-2003 SANDALL Board consider establishing a standing Government Relations Committee. Although we are a small chapter with the continual problem of having enough volunteers, I believe it is time for SANDALL to take this step, given the importance of coordinated activity when issues affecting law libraries and access to legal information arise, and the chapter is asked to participate in advocacy, with its sister chapters in California or in coordination with AALL.

go to top

Long Range Planning Committee
The Long Range Planning Committee spent its first year in existence doing the following:

Holding a meeting at USD; attending committee members were Nancy Carter, Karla Castetter, Charley Dyer, Ruth Levor, Phyllis Marion and Valerie Railey. At this meeting, the committee brainstormed about how we could formulate a vision for SANDALL's future without input from its membership. Therefore, we resolved to create a member survey.

The survey was compiled and edited by the committee and distributed to the membership via the SANDALL Newsletter. About 1/3 of the membership responded. The results were tabulated by Ruth Levor and disseminated to the SANDALL list serv. Among the salient points: members wanted the treasury spent on getting quality speakers at the Fall Workshop, and more grants for deserving members to attend a variety of professional events. Some wanted the Board to create a Vision Statement and/or Strategic Plan.

A Town Hall Meeting to discuss these issues was advertised but cancelled due to low response.

Respectfully submitted:
John Adkins, Chair

go to top

LEAP (Legal Employment Awareness Project) Task Force Representative
From: Pat Lopez

For the past two years, I have been participating in Martin Kruming's Task Force as a representative of SANDALL. The primary purpose of the task force is to "inform and entice" students into the legal profession. To that end, the Task Force, now called LEAP - Legal Employment Awareness Program, consists of representatives from the SD County Bar Association, the Association of Legal Administrators, the SD Legal Secretaries Association, SANDALL, the SD Paralegal Association, legal marketing and technology consultants, legal staffing agencies, San Diego Superior Court, and SD City Schools.

Martin did a presentation at a Fall SANDALL brown bag to allow us to view the final product - a 17 minute video production. The video clearly demonstrates to the students that there is more to the legal profession than just the role of attorney. Many members of SANDALL volunteered to allow a student to job shadow them for part of a day in February 2002. Thanks to everyone who participated.

In late October 2001 we had a large reception at the County Bar Association introducing the video. It was very well received. The project has now moved on to Phase II - to the placement offices in various high schools and to their placement counselors. Students interested in legal employment will be matched with someone in a law firm or law library so they can get a real feel for what could be their future. Remember we will always need volunteers. Thank again to all who participated.

go to top