FCIL Newsletter, October 1998
v. 13, no. 1
From the Chair
Maria Smolka-Day
The FCIL-SIS has been very busy since the last issue of the Newsletter.
Fortunately, this Newsletter, although very important, is not the only
form of communication with members who cannot attend the Annual Conference.
Last Spring we started our own Internet listserve moderated by Mila Rush.
In combination with our Web Page (http://www.lawsch.uga.edu/fcil/fcil.html),
edited skillfully (together with this Newsletter) by Anne Burnett, it has
served us well in preparing for our Special Meeting in Anaheim. Both the
Special Meeting and the regular Business Meeting were quite productive
this year (see Minutes inside this Newsletter). In addition to our regular
activities we discussed broader issues relating mainly to our position
in the Association and the relations between Special Interest Sections
generally and FCIL in particular and various bodies of the AALL. This discussion
resulted in the FCIL Statement on Programming and Scheduling, which we
addressed to Jim Heller, this year's President, and sent to other AALL
officials. The Statement, reprinted in this Newsletter, has been available
on our Web Page since early August. The publication was then announced
on the listserve. If any of you haven't received any mailings from the
list, please make sure that your name is on the membership list, and that
your e-mail address is correct. We hope not to clog your mailbox with unnecessary
mail (and subscribers to INT-LAW know Mila's abilities to keep discipline),
but the listserve will increase our ability to communicate between issues
of the Newsletter.
Those members who did not attend the Anaheim conference will find in
this issue a lot of information about it in the minutes of both the Special
and Business meetings, reports from working groups and committees, and
in the Statement. I would like to stress here just a few issues.
As mentioned above there was a lot of dissatisfaction, expressed both
before and during the Conference, about our inability to influence effectively
programming and scheduling of events addressing our special interests during
the annual meeting. Due to intensive communication within the SIS Council,
as well as with representatives of the Annual Meeting Program Selection
Committee, with the AALL President and the Board, we hope that next year's
programs and schedules will meet our needs better than last year's did.
The AMPSC has selected six FCIL SIS-sponsored programs for the next Conference
in Washington, D.C., including one all-day workshop. Please see the report
of the Education Subcommittee in this issue for details about the selected
programs. We also hope that committee and working group meetings will be
closer to our traditional schedule. Looking farther ahead we felt that
our SIS should plan its activities with a perspective longer than one year.
We might also think about new forms of actions in addition to what we traditionally
do. We felt that the section needs a strategic plan. A group of volunteers
enthusiastically responded to this idea, and I was able to create the Strategic
Planning Committee, consisting of Charlotte Bynum, Gail Partin, Jack McNeill,
Amber Lee Smith, Tracy Thompson, Dan Wade, Stefanie Weigman and chaired
by Margareta Horiba of Tulane Law School. The Committee's mandate is to
prepare for next year's Business Meeting a draft of a five-year strategic
plan for discussion and adoption at this Meeting. The Committee's work
will succeed if it has plenty of input from as many members as possible.
Therefore, I want to encourage you to share with them your thoughts and
ideas about our future directions, our place in the Association and our
specific needs as a group. Contact Margareta (phone 504-892-8866) or any
other member of the Committee. If you still want to join them, they will
welcome your help.
There were many initiatives and ideas coming from various committees
and working groups in Anaheim. I hope that many of them will be pursued
during this year. The proposal of potentially general interest for many
of us came from the Electronic Issues Working Group. You might already
know about the AALL/Law Library of Congress Digital Law Task Force. Its
concerns, articulated at the last Convention during the program, "Here
Today, Gone Tomorrow: The Archivability of Electronic Records," deal
with the permanency of electronic records, especially those documents and
publications which are distributed only electronically. Our Electronic
Issues Working Group discussed these problems and came up with an initiative
to compile a list of documents (or their categories) of permanent importance
for international law research. Preservation of such documents should be
treated as a first priority. By preparing such a list we would use our
expertise and directly contribute to the general AALL Task Force of great
importance. Let's make sure that this initiative is not forgotten. Each
of us working with international documents can add something to this project.
During the next few month we will start preparing for this project. Let
me know if you would like to get involved!
The initiatives of our working groups lead me to the last issue I would
like to discuss, namely, making these groups more "permanent"
or "structured" by maintaining a membership list of some sort.
The groups (maybe just some of them) would keep a list of "core members"
who would be interested in maintaining some contact, conducting some activity,
or just exchanging information and help during the year. Working group
meetings would still be open to everybody, since some people might want
just to participate in an annual exchange of ideas without further commitment.
It would, however, give a better chance of working on projects put forward
at the annual meetings. Let me know if there is any interest in pursuing
this idea, or if you think this is not a good idea, and why. Let me know
if you are a person interested in joining in a particular working group.
If you want to contact me over the phone, please note that my listing
in the 1997/98 AALL Directory is wrong. My correct phone number is 215-898-7442.
I hope to hear from you soon.
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