ALL-SIS Committee Annual Reports

2004–2005

ARCHIVES AWARDS CALI
CENTENNIAL COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT CONALL / MENTORING
CONTINUING STATUS / TENURE DIRECTORS BREAKFAST EDUCATION
FACULTY SERVICES LEGAL RESEARCH & LEGAL RESEARCH SOURCEBOOK LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS
MEMBERSHIP MIDDLE MANAGERS BREAKFAST NEWSLETTER
NOMINATIONS PROGRAMS PUBLIC RELATIONS
RELATIONS WITH CALR VENDORS STATISTICS SUPPORT FOR LAW JOURNALS
WEBSITE Previous Committee and ALL-SIS Reports

Archives Committee

The ALL-SIS Archives Committee was charged to complete the following tasks during 2004-2005:

The following individuals served on the Committee: Mark Podvia, Chair; Maxine Grosshans, Nancy Strohmeyer, Arturo Torres and Ann Ribstein.

A detailed manifest of the ALL-SIS archival holdings, the preparation of which was the Committee's first charge, can be found at http://web.library.uiuc.edu/ahx/aall/ccard/sgroup.asp?RG=85&SG=1. It appears that nothing has been added to the ALL-SIS holdings since 1996.

In response to the second charge, the Committee drafted the following Archives Policy Statement for the SIS:

The Archives of the Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section of the American Association of Law Libraries (ALL-SIS) includes material which illuminates much of the Section's history. These non-current records, papers and publications are preserved because they contain information of administrative, legal, fiscal or research value. In order to perpetuate and augment our archival holdings, a policy must be established for collection of records from SIS officers and members. To this end, the following policies and guidelines are suggested:

  1. All documentary materials, regardless of format or characteristics, which are received, created, or maintained by ALL-SIS officers, whether elected or appointed, in conducting business for the SIS are considered SIS records.
  2. All material of enduring value, when no longer in current use by the officer to which it pertains, shall be transferred to the SIS archival collection. The SIS officers shall be the judge of which records are in sufficient current use to be retained, and will judge what, if any, restrictions should be placed on access to these records once the records are retired to the Archives.
  3. The kinds of records which should be preserved in the Archives include, though this list should not be taken as all-inclusive:
    1. SIS meeting minutes, all documents produced by the SIS and its members in the course of conducting its/their business, including but not limited to task force reports and the like;
    2. all publications of the SIS;
    3. policy statements or statistical reports of any office;
    4. correspondence relating to policy making;
    5. letters of noted persons received in pursuit of SIS business;
    6. member and officer bios and related documents;
    7. photos and other memorabilia.
  4. Because it is sometimes difficult for individuals to judge the value of records in their custody, no SIS records that appear to meet these requirements should be disposed of or destroyed.
  5. Records in electronic format shall be transferred to print or microfilmed for preservation purposes.
  6. Proper archival practice requires that records should be kept in the order in which those records were originated. To this end, groups of records should be retired periodically to the Archives, and individuals in the SIS should make an effort not to send individual items to the Archives in a piecemeal fashion if those individual items were actually part of a larger collection of materials.
  7. The person in charge of the Archives will take suitable measures to preserve, arrange and describe the records of the SIS and shall provide information about them, copies of them, and/or the documents themselves as required for the business of the SIS or for research purposes. Preservation of records can include placing records in acid-free file folders and boxes, and taking any other necessary steps to prevent deterioration of the records over time.

In response to the fourth charge, the Committee Chair maintained contact with the Chair AALL Archives Committee. As of the time this report was submitted that committee had not yet formulated a revised archival policy for AALL.

In response to the fifth charge, the Committee Chair has drafted an article for the newsletter. Submission of that article for publication is pending, awaiting the release of the AALL Archival Committee's report.

As the report of the AALL Archival Committee was not yet available, the ALL-SIS Archival Committee was unable to act on its third charge, that of actively gathering additional archival material for the collection. It is hoped that progress will be made on that charge during 2005-2006.

Respectfully submitted,

Mark Podvia, Chair

Awards Committee

The ALL-SIS is very pleased to announce the 2005 winner of the Frederick Charles Hicks Award, the ALL-SIS Outstanding Article Award, and the inaugural ALL-SIS CONELL Grant.

Barbara Bintliff, Nicholas Rosenbaum Professor of Law and Director of the Law Library at the University of Colorado in Boulder, Colorado is the 2005 recipient of the Frederick Charles Hicks Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Law Librarianship. The award recognizes distinguished, sustained service to academic law librarianship, and is named in honor of Hicks, the first great American law librarian/scholar and the first academic law librarian to serve as president of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL).

Prof. Bintliff was nominated by Carol Bredemeyer, Assistant Director for Faculty Services at the Chase College of Law Library, Northern Kentucky University, and by James Duggan, Professor of Law and Director of Information Technology at the Southern Illinois University School of Law Library. In their nominations, Prof. Bintliff was praised as “one of our profession's most outstanding librarian/scholars.” In a distinguished career, Prof. Bintliff has been Chair of the ALL-SIS, President of both the Southwestern and Colorado Associations of Law Libraries, and was AALL President in 2001-2002. She has published over three dozen articles, book chapters, book reviews and other publications, and has a similar number of professional presentations throughout the nation. Most recently, Prof. Bintliff was elected Chair of the University of Colorado's Faculty Assembly and has been a respected public voice for the Assembly as it confronted two highly public campus controversies. As was noted by Carol Bredemeyer, “[Prof. Bintliff's] reasoned responses have cast a positive light on our profession.”

Nancy M. Babb, Cataloger and Senior Assistant Librarian at the Charles B. Sears Law Library, State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law is the recipient of the 2005 ALL-SIS Outstanding Article Award. The award recognizes section members for contributing to the enhancement of academic law librarianship through publishing. The winning article was judged on the quality of writing, effectiveness of communication technique, and relevance to law librarianship.

Ms. Babb's winning article, “Cataloging Spirits and the Spirit of Cataloging” was published in 40(2) Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 89 (2005).

Joy Hanson, Reference Librarian at the Duke University School of Law Library, is the inaugural recipient of the ALL-SIS CONELL Grant. This grant program was established in order to provide a newer academic law librarian with the opportunity to attend the AALL Conference of Newer Law Librarians, and benefit from the networking and service opportunities that CONELL provides.

Ms. Hanson is a 2004 graduate of the Indiana University School of Library & Information Science–Bloomington. Since assuming her job at Duke Law Library in June 2004, Ms. Hanson has already become active in the profession with service on the AALL Citation Formats Committee, the SEAALL Placement Committee and the Duke Libraries' Professional Affairs Committee.

The 2005 ALL-SIS Awards committee consisted of James Milles (SUNY-Buffalo), Sally Wambold (University of Richmond), and George Pike, Chair (University of Pittsburgh).

George H. Pike
Director, Barco Law Library and
Assistant Professor of Law
University of Pittsburgh School of Law

CALI Committee

ALL-SIS/CALI Legal Research Community Authoring Project Advisory Panel

This CALI Authoring project began during summer 2000. As of April 2005, CALI has forty-five legal research and writing lessons. This year the Authoring Advisory Panel included the following members: Nancy Johnson, Chair, Kris Niedringhaus, Sara Kelley, Pat Fox, Kit Kreilick, and Brian Huddleston. As of July 2005, Sara Kelley will be the new Chair. We function as the Legal Research Advisory Panel for CALI and work with CALI's Director of Curriculum Development/General Counsel, Deb Quentel.

The CALI Legal Research Topic Grid is on the CALI website at: http://www2.cali.org/fellows/grids/LegalResearch.html. We are currently accepting proposals for lessons and will begin another round in late June. Once an author completes a lesson proposal, the authoring group reviews it. Additionally, we review new lessons and provide feedback to the authors.

Our new effort this year focused on accepting proposals for state legal research lessons. A few teams submitted their lessons and they will be available this fall. We want to encourage other state teams to submit proposals and eventually have lessons for all states.

During next year, we want to encourage authors to submit proposals for substantive legal research, i.e., tax, environmental law, etc. We would also like to review proposals on international legal research topics.

The legal research authoring project has been very successful. We look forward to recruiting new authors to the project. Authors will be available at the CALI booth in the Exhibit Hall at AALL to answer questions and provide encouragement. We also look forward to feedback from librarians who use the lessons.

Respectfully submitted,

Nancy Johnson, Chair

Centennial Committee

Charge: Ms. Hinchcliff charged our committee to plan and carry out activities to contribute to the AALL Centennial Celebration in 2006. She also charged the committee with writing an article celebrating one hundred years of “firsts” in academic law libraries.

Committee members worked together to find ways to celebrate and highlight the critical role of academic librarians in the development and organization of AALL over the past ten decades. While we think it is wonderful to celebrate the centennial, we also want to take the opportunity to recognize the outstanding contributions of academic librarians throughout the past 100 years, to review their accomplishments, and to build upon them to enhance our academic library and information service today. At year's end, we have accomplished the following:

  1. Margaret Christiansen and Christopher Knott wrote “Milestones in Academic Law Libraries: Law School Libraries ‘Among the First’ Great Feats in Last 100 Years,” to be published in the July 2005 issues of AALL Spectrum.
  2. Developed list of “firsts” for academic libraries which will eventually be published in our newsletter. Nan Adams is maintaining the list.
  3. Reviewed activities of other professional organizations celebrating noteworthy anniversaries to get ideas of interesting activities which we might adapt for our own celebration. Kumar Percy suggested this useful strategy.
  4. Contacted Carol Billings, chair of the AALL Centennial Committee to let her know of our activities and interest in being involved in the celebration of our parent organization.
  5. Compiled “reminiscences of change” or personal stories of librarians with 25 or more years experience about changes they have observed in librarianship during their careers. Rick Donnelly suggested this initiative and is maintaining the reminiscences.
  6. Developed a master list of potential activities for next year's celebration.

During the next few months we anticipate reviewing activities already suggested by members and creating a final plan culminating in a fitting celebration of academics in law libraries for 100 years.

Collection Development Committee

During the past year, the Collection Development Committee completed work on a directory of collection development contacts in academic law libraries. Connie Lenz, Deborah Jefferies, Gary Yessen, and Helen Wohl all put in a tremendous amount of effort toward this project. The directory has been posted on the ALL-SIS web site, and it is password protected.

The Committee also conducted a preliminary survey of organizational structures for collection development in academic law libraries. A brief article about the Committee's findings appeared in the Summer 2005 ALL-SIS Newsletter. Two Committee members plan to conduct further research based upon the preliminary results of the survey.

The Committee submitted a short article, written by Shaun Esposito, to the Fall 2004 ALL-SIS Newsletter about its very successful roundtable discussion at the 2004 Annual Meeting on the topic of coping with budget cuts. This discussion will be revisited and explored further at the collection development roundtable in San Antonio.

Building on the success of last year's roundtable discussion, the Committee developed a program proposal for the 2005 meeting (program I-4): Shrinking Budgets and the Long-Term Impacts on Library Collections. Three Committee members (Beth DiFelice, Connie Lenz and Douglas Lind) and two additional speakers will be involved in this program.

The Committee is currently working on identifying and linking to all law library collection development policies available in electronic format. Upon completion, this list will be posted on the ALL-SIS website. It is expected that this project will be completed in the coming year.

CONALL/Mentoring Committee

Charges:

  1. Set up CONALL event for 2005 — This year's CONALL is scheduled for 5:15 p.m. to 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday July 19, 2005 at St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio before the ALL-SIS Reception and Awards Ceremony and is generously sponsored by West Publishing.  Buses to CONALL will load at the Commerce Street Exit of the Marriott Rivercenter Hotel at 4:45 p.m.  The objective of CONALL is to give newer academic law librarians a chance to meet each other, attend the ALL-SIS reception as a group, and learn about issues of interest to newer academic law librarians.  Towards this end, the Committee plans for CONALL to be a fun and light-hearted affair starting with an icebreaker, followed by a question and answer session, and then a walk together to the reception at St. Mary's University School of Law.  Newer academic law librarians and their mentors are encouraged to attend.
  2. Set up mentoring opportunities during 2004-05 — This was done by the individual mentors in working with their mentees during the past year.
  3. Work with AALL Mentoring Committee on appropriate activities — This year, following last year's successful collaboration with the AALL CONELL/Mentoring Committee, we followed the same procedure where all applicants could go to the AALL website to apply. The AALL committee then forwarded all applications to the appropriate library-type SIS. The AALL Committee had improved its processes this year for forwarding and sharing the applications, which made the work of our committee simpler and more efficient. Our SIS committee received 38 applications from mentees and 44 volunteers to be mentors, with 3 additional mentors recruited. Our Mentoring subcommittee collaborated and matched all the mentees with appropriate mentors, based on preferences stated, such as job class, region and ethnicity. In addition, our committee recruited several mentors to make better matches for subject-specific or geographic needs, as stated by the mentees. We express our gratitude to all who volunteered to be mentors. The AALL committee took the responsibility for notifying all the applicants regarding their matches. They have a “Meet Your Match” event scheduled for Sunday evening in San Antonio.
  4. Work with Public Relations Committee to promote CONALL event and mentoring opportunities — This year's PR Committee publicized the need for mentors to volunteer through the AALL Mentoring Committee website. We asked that they encourage more minorities and technical services librarians to volunteer and that effort was very successful. We had more volunteers than need this year!
  5. Develop proposal for grant program for new academic law librarians to attend CONELL — A proposal was submitted in March and immediately approved and implemented by the ALL-SIS Awards Committee. That committee has selected the inaugural winner for this award, Joy Hanson. According to the award, this person will be a member of this committee for the coming year. Congratulations to the Awards Committee and to Joy!
  6. Submit one column to the Newsletter — The Committee submitted two articles to the ALL-SIS newsletter:  “Successful CONALL at Harvard Law School” (Fall, 04) describing the 2004 CONALL at Harvard Law School and “Are You a New Academic Law Librarian?” (Summer, 05) announcing CONALL for this year and providing details about this year's event at St Mary's University School of Law.

Recommendations for next year:

  1. Appoint the previous year's “junior” co-chair as the incoming “senior” co-chair and appoint a newer member as this person's co-chair.
  2. Continue the practice of having some carry-over committee members. It is essential to have some “institutional memory” in this committee to keep the critical activities of CONALL and the mentor matching going smoothly.
  3. Continue the practice of appointing some committee members who are new to the profession. The inclusion of the CONELL award winner is a great way to add to this committee.
  4. Encourage the Committee to establish a work-group of at least one experienced and one new member for matching the mentee/mentors. The turnaround time for matching is rather short and comes at a very hectic time of the academic year. It will help to have at least one experienced person on this working group to carry forward the great procedures that we developed and used this year.

Respectfully submitted,

Marian F. Parker
Paul Moorman
Co-Chairs, 2004-2005
June 10, 2005

Continuing Status/Tenure Committee

Brian Huddleston and Patti Monk, Co-Chairs
2004-2005 Report

The Continuing Status/Tenure ("CST") Committee has spent the past year gathering information from law schools in order to make its ongoing survey/summary a thorough “state of the profession” resource about the employment status of non-director academic law librarians. The web page is now located at the ALL-SIS home page http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/cst/

We currently have information for 141 law schools. According to the ABA web page at http://www.abanet.org/legaled/approvedlawschools/approved.html as of February 2005 there were 190 law schools approved by the ABA to grant J.D. degrees. Nine of these law schools are provisionally approved. For those 140 law schools that the committee has data, the employment status for non-director law librarians breaks down as follows:

For historical comparisons, a survey conducted in the mid-1980s found that 33.3% of law school libraries had a tenure track for their rank and file librarians, and 66.0% had some other employment arrangement (they didn't break down the non-tenure schools into continuing status and employment at will, and one responding school left that question blank, which is where the other 0.3% percent went).

In 1987 the SIS proposed a resolution in support of tenure that was passed by the association at its annual business meeting that year. A survey comparable to ours had been conducted at about the same time. The statistical trend since 1987 show a increase in tenure track positions. Nineteen law schools have been accredited or provisionally accredited since the 1987 resolution was passed. Of those nineteen, five, 26%, are tenure track; seven, 37%, are continuing status; and seven, 37% are employment at will schools.

The association cannot do much more than encourage schools to consider tenure or continuing status for their librarians. After all the data is in, another resolution in support of tenure may be in order.

The CST committee is also collecting tenure track documents. In addition Brian Huddleston has been working on a bibliography and intends to add information on the status of directors to the web site.

Directors Breakfast

Report: Coordination of Directors Breakfast & Program – San Antonio
By: Spencer L. Simons
Date: June 9, 2005

  1. 5/20/04 – Accepted assignment from Carole Hinchcliff.
  2. Consulted with Sally Wise, Filippa Anzalone, and several other directors on history of event and common formats.
  3. 10/20/04 – Selected breakfast menu; buffet at approx. $32 per person.
  4. 10/21/04 – Email to lawlibdir listserv requesting suggestions for discussion topics. Corresponded with various submitters of suggestions.
  5. 1/6/05 – Announcement of Breakfast & Program and request for topic suggestions at law library section meeting at AALS annual meeting, San Francisco. Spoke to Dan Martin about coordination of publicity.
  6. 1/28/05 – Followed up with email to lawlibdir listserv requesting topic suggestions. Corresponded with various submitters of suggestions.
  7. 3/28/05 to 3/31/05 – Chose most popular suggestion, ABA standards and electronic resources, and discussed with Kim Clarke, Judith Wright, and Steve Hinckley. Judith Wright and Steve Hinckley agreed to lead discussion at program.
  8. 4/1/05 – Sent message announcing program topic and reminder to register.
  9. 4/13/05 – Coordinated with Dan Martin on his announcement.
  10. 4/15/05 – Faxed equipment specification forms.

Finances: No funds have been expended on coordination activities.

Education

The Education Committee began investigating the following projects:

  1. create a clearinghouse web site of academic research guides
  2. foster local academic brown bag sessions on selected topics and then share summaries via list
  3. create a web page on ALL-SIS page for non-law librarians to go to for basic legal research tips/resources

These projects will continue in the coming year.

Merle Slyhoff

Faculty Services Committee

The Faculty Services Roundtable of the Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section held its first meeting on Sunday, July 11, 2004, at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Raquel Ortiz, Head of Reference Services at the Boston University Pappas Law Library, and Janet Katz, Senior Reference Librarian & Faculty Services Coordinator at the Harvard Law School Library, co-chaired the meeting, which was attended by nearly 60 librarians. BNA provided refreshments.

Based on the great interest in faculty services, Carole Hinchcliff, 2004-2005 chair of the ALL-SIS, appointed the following Committee to guide the activities of the Roundtable:

The Committee met twice by conference call, in December and in May.

Activities

Survey

At the 2004 meeting, the assembled librarians agreed that conducting a survey of law library faculty services was a good way to begin the work of the Roundtable. The following librarians formed a group coordinated by Raquel Ortiz to draft and distribute the survey:

The survey opened on March 23, 2005, when the survey group sent an e-mail announcing the survey to 192 academic law librarians and linking them to the SurveyMonkey instrument. The survey was comprehensive, including 111 questions covering eight major types of faculty services offered in law school libraries: current awareness; research assistants; faculty liaison programs; curriculum support; research and writing support; document delivery and interlibrary loan; faculty training; and staffing and marketing of faculty services. The original deadline of April 22 was extended to April 29. As of April 20, there were 99 responses.

Online Discussion Forum

The Committee established ALL-FSR@aallnet.org, a listserv for Roundtable communications. By March, there were over 100 members. We expect discussions about program topics for AALL 2006 to begin soon.

At AALL 2004, we discussed setting up working groups on topics of interest. Requests on ALL-SIS for expressions of interest did not produce many, but we hope that discussion of the survey results on ALL-FSR and the meeting in San Antonio will arouse more interest.

Upcoming Activities

AALL 2005

Because the 2005 Program Committee accepted neither program proposed by Roundtable member, the Committee is planning a mini-program of substance for our Roundtable gathering, Sunday, July 17, 5:30 - 6:30. We will present best practices in four topics of high interest as expressed by librarians who responded to the survey: faculty liaisons, research and writing support, current awareness, and faculty training. The Committee will also report on the survey and other Roundtable activities in a future issue of the ALL-SIS Newsletter.

Faculty Services Web Page

Sara Sampson is working on a Faculty Services web page for the ALL-SIS site. Plans for site content include links to law library faculty services pages and a clearinghouse of materials and information about faculty services.

We are grateful to Carole Hinchcliff and Sally Wise for acting quickly so we were able to get on the program with a formal first meeting last year. We thank Suzanne Thorpe for her assistance as ALL-SIS Board Liaison to the Committee. We especially thank Carole for her guidance and support during the year and look forward to the same from Michael Slinger when he and a new Faculty Services Committee take the reins.

Respectfully submitted,

Raquel M. Ortiz, Co-Chair
Faculty Services Committee

Head of Reference Services
765 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston University Pappas Law Library
Boston, MA 02215
EMAIL: rmortiz@bu.edu
PHONE: 617-353-8855
FAX: 617-353-5995

Janet C. Katz, Co-Chair
Faculty Services Committee

Sr. Reference Librarian & Faculty Services Coordinator
Harvard Law School Library
Langdell Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138
617.496.2126
katz@law.harvard.edu

Legal Research & Legal Research Sourcebook

The ALL-SIS Legal Research Committee currently consists of two subcommittees: the Legal Research Workshop Sub-Committee and the Legal Research Sourcebook Sub-Committee. The full committee membership is:

Anne Cottongim, Christine Hepler, Christopher Vallandingham, Gail Partin, Jennifer Murray, Louise Tsang, Lynn Murray, Mary Ann Neary, Pat Parker, Wendy Scott, Bill Taylor, Rheas Ballard Thrower, Robb Farmer, Rosalie Sanderson, Sara Kelley, Virginia McVarish, and William Mills.

Reports of the sub-committees:

I.    Legal Research Workshop Sub-Committee

The primary task of the legal research committee was to organize and promote the Advanced Legal Research Roundtable for the annual meeting in San Antonio, to be held on Sunday, July 17th from noon - 1:15pm. The format of the informal program will be small group discussions led by a moderator. The following committee members have volunteered to serve as discussion moderators and note takers: Rosalie Sanderson, Pat Parker, Louise Tang, Susan Herrick, and Sara Kelley. After the roundtable, we hope to prepare a summary report of the discussions for the ALL-SIS Newsletter.

To stimulate dialogue, the committee has compiled a list of talking points for participants' consideration. This list includes new issues not addressed in previous roundtables as well as “hot” issues that have engendered valuable discussion in past programs. This year, the talking points are organized into four main topics: Course Materials and Teaching Methods, Course Content, Electronic Research, and Evaluation.

To promote the roundtable, Diane Murley posted the list of talking points to the ALL-SIS Legal Research web site and linked the program description to the ALL-SIS San Antonio Annual Meeting, Program and Events web page. In addition, Wendy Scott submitted an article about the roundtable for the Summer, 2005 issue of the ALL-SIS Newsletter. Ann Cottongim will set up a display at the ALL-SIS PR table in San Antonio to promote the Sourcebook and the Roundtable.

II.    Legal Research Sourcebook Sub-Committee

The Legal Research Sourcebook Sub-Committee changed the name of the Sourcebook from Advanced Legal Research Sourcebook to Legal Research Sourcebook. This name change is intended to make the Sourcebook more inclusive in its content.

The main focus of the sub-committee was the migration of the Sourcebook from a website driven product to a database driven product. Each committee member was assigned a discrete task. Lynn Murray developed the Sourcebook Licensing Agreement. Bill Mills researched security concerns regarding the Sourcebook's content. Kathy Hall and Susan Herrick led the development of the new website for the database. Louise Tsang, Bill Taylor and especially Sara Kelly undertook the huge task of developing the database itself. Gail Partin and MaryAnn Neary assisted with public relations for the Sourcebook which included email blasts, newsletter contributions, an article in AALL Spectrum and a spot in the AALL Executive Director's “From the Desk of ...” email.

The Sourcebook migration to a database format is now complete. The new format will be launched at the AALL Annual Meeting.

Respectfully Submitted,

Jennifer S. Murray
Wendy Scott

Local Arrangements Committee

Robert Hu, Chair

The annual SIS reception will be held at St. Mary's Law School at the Sarita Kenedy East Law Library from 6:30 - 9:00 p.m.

Membership Committee

ALL-SIS Membership Committee Annual Report

Committee Charges

  1. Establish liaisons to TS-SIS, CS-SIS and RIPS-SIS — This year the following Committee members served as liaisons:
    • Mahnaz K. Moshfegh, TS-SIS
    • Dragonmir Cosanic, CS-SIS
    • Laura Cadra, RIPS-SIS
  2. Work with CONALL/Mentoring Committee on appropriate activities — Victoria Williamson was responsible for working with the CONALL/Mentoring Committee.
  3. Update membership brochure — This charge was not acted on, since the membership brochure was updated by the Membership Committee last year.
  4. Put together a “Welcome Kit” for new members to the SIS and work with AALL Headquarters to identify new members to the SIS. In April 2005, a “Welcome Kit” was forwarded to the ALL-SIS Board for consideration. This proposal was completed by Victoria Williamson and overwhelmingly adopted by the members of the Committee. The “Welcome Kit” proposal included the following:
    • Welcome letter from the ALL-SIS Chair
    • New Member Information Form (Member Profile), which new members will need to complete and return to ALL-SIS Membership Committee Chair. We can then create and maintain a database of new members' profiles which can be used as a source for writing up brief bio-profiles of new members to be published in the ALL-SIS Newsletter (of course with permission from the new member).
    • Contact list of ALL-SIS Officers & Committee Chairs
    • ALL-SIS FAQs
    • Calendar of Events – including programs to 2005 AALL Conference
    • ALL-SIS Events Flyers
    • Sample copy of ALL-SIS Newsletter
    • Promo items e.g. ALL-SIS notepad & pen
  5. Work with Headquarters to welcome potential new members to the SIS — Victoria Williamson and Marjorie E. Crawford worked with Headquarters and were successful in obtaining a list the latter part of April 2005. Consequently, a welcome was forwarded by e-mail with the work of the Committee under Charge #8 listed below. For the future, the Committee needs to have the list of newer members from Headquarters at the beginning of the Committee term. The list provided by Headquarters this year included some names of older members in the list compiled of newer members. Therefore, the Committee recommends that the ALL-SIS should continue to work with Headquarters to ensure that the information provided on the newer membership list is accurate.
  6. Work with ALL-SIS Newsletter Committee to write short profiles of new members to the ALL-SIS for the ALL-SIS Newsletter — Victoria Williamson worked with Elizabeth Adelman to write a column on several newer members. Newsworthy information on other new members not selected for the featured article was submitted to the Newsletter Committee to be included in the “Member News” column.
  7. Other projects that the Committee has identified as useful — The Committee worked on a project to identify prospective new members from the list of academic law library directors and the membership of the Foreign, Comparative & International Law SIS. Moreover, Mirela Roznovschi, Chair of the Foreign, Comparative & International Law SIS, suggested that the ALL-SIS should cross-post on the listserv a membership appeal and an announcement of SIS programs for the annual meeting.
  8. Submit one column to the ALL-SIS Newsletter — A New Member Spotlight Column was written by Victoria Williamson for the Summer 2005 issue of the Newsletter. A list of newer ALL members was compiled in order to identify the names of possible individuals to include in an article on newer members in the ALL-SIS Newsletter. This list was divided and each member of the committee forwarded a welcoming e-mail message to the newer members soliciting biographical information for the New Member Spotlight Column.

Lastly, the Committee recommends that the ALL-SIS should heighten awareness of the SIS by establishing liaisons to students enrolled in library and law schools. As a possible incentive to increase student memberships, the Committee further recommends waiving or reducing the membership fee for student members. The Co-chairs of the ALL-SIS Committee thank Laura Cadra, Dragonmir Cosanic, and Mahnaz K. Moshfegh for their productive and collective service on this Committee this past year.

Middle Managers Breakfast

The 2005 Middle Mangers Breakfast is scheduled for 7:00 a.m. Tuesday July 19th. The breakfast will be held at the Marriott Riverwalk San Antonio. BNA is generously underwriting the breakfast this year. After conferring with Kammie Hedges of BNA, the limit on the number of attendees was lifted and 174 individuals registered to attend this event. Each attendee was required to pay a $10.00 registration fee. This year's speaker is Professor Tracy McGaugh of the South Texas College of Law. Professor McGaugh's presentation is entitled, “The Stranger in the Stacks: How to Negotiate the Generation Gap in the Library.”

Respectfully submitted,

Amy B. Osborne
Middle Managers Breakfast Organizer.

Newsletter Committee

The 2004 - 2005 Newsletter Committee consisted of Leah Sandwell-Weiss, Chair, Beth Adelman, Sara Kelley, Debora Person, Colleen Williams, and Board Liaison, Carole Hinchcliff. Leah was the new newsletter editor, replacing Shaun Esposito after four years of great service. Since Leah had been the newsletter web editor, she was familiar with the process of putting together the newsletter and getting it up on the web. The committee met during the annual meeting to discuss ideas for new columns, agree on some assignments, and set the publication schedule for the year. We decided to try to have more member news, profiles of law librarians, and possibly columns on patron experiences and developments in legal education. We agreed to continue publishing three issues a year: the first week of September, the first half of February, and the first half of June. We also had one conference call in November to discuss our second issue. Our issues were published on September 1, 2004, February 18, 2005, and June 1, 2005, so we were able to meet our schedule.

We continued publishing the newsletter in both html and PDF formats, however, we changed the look of the PDF version by using Publisher to format the newsletter. This gave the editor greater flexibility in laying out the newsletter and allowed the use of larger fonts.

The Fall 2004 issue contained several articles reporting on presentations given at the annual meeting and committee assignments and charges. The Spring 2005 issue contained articles on the upcoming annual meeting, the last Trials & Tribulations column, and articles on new ideas in legal education, handling entertaining patrons, and writing for AALL. The Summer 2005 issue contained several articles about programs and activities at the upcoming annual meeting and articles on mobile computer labs, proposed changes to the ABA standards on requirements for library directors, and a new column highlighting new ALL-SIS members.

The editor/chair would like to thank all the committee members for their hard work and their articles. Beth collected the Member News for all three issues and wrote Reflections on the 2004 CALI Conference for the Fall 2004 issue and Workshop Provides Insight for New Library Managers for the Spring 2005 issue. Sara began a new column entitled Developments in Legal Education; her first two entries were The End of the Traditional Bar Exam? in the Spring 2005 issue and Does Law School Cause Lawyer Misery? in the Summer 2005 issue. Debora wrote an article about the “Catch the Web” Presentation for the Fall 2004 issue and another on Handling the Entertaining Patron for the Spring 2005 issue. Colleen volunteered to edit a new column entitled Tales from the Trenches, however, we've had no submission for this column yet.

The editor/chair would also like to thank the ALL-SIS members who submitted articles for publication, especially Bob Hu for the many pieces on San Antonio; Barbara Bintliff for her piece on proposed revisions to the ABA Standard on Law Library Directors; Carol Parker for her article on mobile computer classrooms; and Jennifer Murray for her last two Trials and Tribulations of a Law Librarian columns. Finally, she'd also like to thank Carole Hinchcliff for her support and advice.

Nominations Committee

James E. Duggan, Chair

The 2004-05 ALL-SIS Nominations Committee (Margaret Maes Axtmann, University of St. Thomas, Schoenecker Law Library; Timothy L. Coggins, University of Richmond School of Law Library, and James E. Duggan, Chair, Southern Illinois University School of Law Library) solicited nominations for Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect and Executive Board Member via the ALL-SIS listserv, Law-Lib and the ALL-SIS Newsletter. The committee considered all nominations received by the January 17, 2005 deadline. After careful consideration, the committee selected the following nominees:

For: Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect

For: Executive Board Member

Susan Lewis-Somers, ALL-SIS Secretary-Treasurer, announced the following election results via the ALL-SIS listserv on April 26, 2005: Suzanne Thorpe was elected Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect and Carol Bredemeyer was elected Executive Board Member.

The committee would like to thank all those who submitted nominations for the committee's consideration, and thank the selected candidates for agreeing to run. I would also would like to thank Margie Axtmann and Tim Coggins for their hard work this year as committee members, and Susan Lewis-Somers, who was an excellent ALL-SIS Board liaison to the committee.

Programs Committee

The ALL-SIS Program Committee is pleased to report that 7 out of the 33 programs sponsored or co-sponsored by the SIS were accepted for the 2005 Annual Meeting. This represents an improvement from the 2004 meeting when the SIS had 3 program proposals selected. Competition was tight as a total of 195 program proposals were submitted to fill only 58 program slots during the Annual Meeting. Programs sponsored by the ALL-SIS selected for the 2005 Annual Meeting include:

  1. Creating & Using Interactive Electronic Legal Research Lessons
  2. Room at the Top: Strategy Tips from the Hiring Squad
  3. Shrinking Budgets and the Long-term Impact on Library Collections
  4. Mexican Americans and the Law
  5. Publishing Outside the Law Library Box: Opportunities Beyond Law Library Publications
  6. What is a Core Collection Anymore?
  7. Strength, Problems, Opportunities & Threats: Analyzing the Dynamics of a Successful Library Organization

Committee members worked quickly and diligently under tight deadlines. Committee members include: Emma Cuesta, Ruth Levor, April Schwartz, Eric Young and Committee Co-Chairs Ajaye Bloomstone and Lee Peoples.

The Program Committee announces the following additional program put together immediately before the San Antonio meeting by the Committee:

Is the New Bluebook New?, 18th Ed. by Tracy McGaugh, Assistant Professor of Law at South Texas College of Law. Tuesday, July 19th from Noon - 1 pm, Location TBA.

This year the Committee will operate under a new structure designed to capitalize on the skills and talents of committee members and produce the best quality program proposals possible. A Sub-committee chaired by Ajaye Bloomstone has been created and charged with developing possible program ideas for the Committee to develop, seek participants for and propose to the AMPC. The traditional Committee will continue its function of ranking proposals and submitting them to the AMPC. The Committee will also work with program proposers to develop and improve their proposals before submitting them.

The Committee and Sub-committee will open up their regularly scheduled meeting time in San Antonio to the SIS membership for a brainstorming session on program ideas for the St. Louis meeting. The Committee will also answer questions about the program proposal process and will share suggestions for creating successful program proposals.

Committee members have been following the work of the TS-SIS's Ad Hoc Committee on the Annual Meeting Program. The Ad Hoc Committee was charged with addressing recurring questions about the scheduling, selection and content of annual meeting programs. The Ad Hoc Committee formulated summary recommendations and the AALL Board voted to allow SIS's to schedule educational programs in addition to the AMPC selected annual meeting programs. The ALL-SIS Program Committee will work to develop a slate of these additional educational programs to be presented at the Annual Meeting in St. Louis.

Public Relations

Phill Johnson, Chair

  1. The primary activity of the committee throughout the year has been to organize materials to be displayed on the section's table in the vendor hall at the annual meeting in San Antonio. Displays on the table will include brochures regarding the section, handouts promoting ALL-SIS programs, and instructions regarding transportation to the reception. The committee has also been working to promote both the programs and the reception that the Academic Special Interest Section will be hosting in San Antonio. The 2005 ALL-SIS Awards Reception will be held on Tuesday, July 19, 6:30pm - 9:00pm, at St. Mary's Law School, with the awards ceremony beginning at 7:30pm. Committee members will continue to work to ensure attendees have transportation information to the reception. Information regarding this year's winners will also be displayed on the table in the vendor hall.
  2. Announcements regarding ALL-SIS programs and the reception will be posted to the ALL-SIS listserv during the first week of July. Announcements regarding ALL-SIS programs and the reception will be listed in the AALL San Antonio Newsletter that will be given out in conference registration packets.
  3. The Academic Section will be represented at the CONELL Marketplace on the Saturday preceding the conference. Members of the committee will be available to answer questions, provide advice, and to give brochures to new law librarians.
  4. Committee members will periodically staff the ALL-SIS table in the vendor hall.

Relations with CALR Vendors

Stephanie Davidson & Nancy McMurrer, Co-Chairs

Our Boston roundtable was well-attended by both ALL-SIS members and vendor representatives. Though attendance at our roundtable varies from year to year, we were fortunate to have more than 75 at our 2004 meeting. The Committee noted at the time that in addition to needing a larger room for future roundtables, we would like to ensure transit time for members between the end of the preceding program and the start of our roundtable.

Vendor representatives in attendance at our 2004 roundtable included staff from Casemaker, BNA, Loislaw and Hein, in addition to our long-time representatives from Lexis and Westlaw. The Committee noted at the time and has discussed over the past year the need to continue expanding the vendor participation to include other vendors who license resources to law schools. As our reliance on electronic resources grows, the issues with licensing, training and technical support become more complex, and the Committee will be addressing these issues with additional vendors beyond LexisNexis and West (the original focus of the Committee).

Committee members took detailed notes at the meeting, and these notes were placed on the ALL-SIS website as well as on the LAW-LIB discussion list, for the benefit of those who could not attend.

Over the past year, the committee has discussed the following issues:

In conjunction with Kim Clarke and the ALL-SIS Statistics Committee, we have been pursuing the issue of usage statistics from our legal information vendors with Peter Shepherd of Project COUNTER. Project COUNTER is an international initiative to facilitate the collection and distribution of usage statistics for electronic resources. COUNTER has released a series of draft and final codes that define the data that should be measured as well as the format of the report. Vendors who provide “COUNTER-compliant” usage reports include vendors such as Elsevier, Blackwell, Ingenta, Oxford University Press, Project MUSE, Thomson/Gale and H.W. Wilson.

Our discussions with COUNTER have focused on education regarding the needs of academic law libraries and helping COUNTER to identify vendors of particular interest to law libraries. The information exchange has been valuable and educational, and we hope to continue to offer our support in encouraging wider participation in COUNTER by the vendors we work with in our law school libraries.

The Committee's roundtable this year will be held on Monday (July 18) at 5:20pm in San Antonio. The Committee will invite vendor representatives who have attended in the past, with additions where appropriate. Our preliminary agenda includes the following:

Respectfully submitted,

Stephanie Davidson
Co-Chair

Statistics Committee

Kim Clarke, Chair

Members of the Statistics Committee 2004-05 are Celeste Feather, Jonathan Franklin, Wendell Johnting, Marguerite Most, Margaret Schilt, Chris Simoni, Barbara Szalkowski, and Sally Wise (Executive Board Liaison).

The Statistics Committee began a discussion regarding counting electronic resources, as a preliminary step to recommending questions for inclusion in the ABA Annual Report. A number of issues were considered by the Committee and alternative approaches from the Association of Research Libraries and the American Association of Health Sciences Libraries were examined but the Committee was unable to bring a resolution to this matter. It is recommended that this discussion continue next year.

Nancy McMurrer and Stephanie Davidson, the co-chairs of the Relations with Online Vendors Committee, and I corresponded with the executive director of Project COUNTER, an international venture focused on assisting database vendors to collect and disseminate usage statistics, about approaching legal database vendors to provide this valuable information. Subsequent to our initial communications with Project COUNTER, the AALL Executive agreed to become a member of the organization so the future role of the chairs of these ALL-SIS committees in this venture is unclear. For more information on Project COUNTER see http://www.projectcounter.org/index.html.

Support for Law Journals Committee

Kathleen McLeod, Chair of Support for Law Journals Sub-Committee of the ALL-SIS

During the 2004/2005 year, the committee did work on the following projects of activities:

  1. Lisa Peters, the 2003/2004 chair, sponsored and conducted a roundtable discussion at the 2004 Annual Meeting in Boston.
  2. The committee developed a survey to update and expand the original survey completed approximately 5 years ago. The purpose of the survey is to provide accurate information on the variety of services being provided by law school libraries.
  3. The survey was distributed via the ALL Listserve and responses were received from approximately 25 schools. This information is currently being compiled with the intent of updating the webpage. See attachment for the questions included in the survey.
  4. The webpage needs to be moved to the AALL website and hopefully, this will be completed prior to the convention.

Goals for the 2005/2006 year

  1. Contact the schools that did not respond. A committee member will personally contact each school which did not respond to the survey and attempt to obtain the information from them.
    1. The low response rate from the survey, limits the usefulness of the survey results. A greater response from a wider variety of schools will provide more accurate overview of the services provided.
  2. Roundtable at the 2005 conference.
  3. Complete the transfer of the webpage to the AALL website.

2004/2005 Survey

The support for Law Journals Committee of the Academic SIS is preparing to move its website to the ALL website and in preparation to this would like to update the current site. Please answer the following question in regards to your school.

1. Do you have a library liaison for your journals?

If yes, please provide the name and contact information for the liaison(s) and indicate which journals they are affiliated with.

2. We would like to post information on your library footnoting policies. Please provide use information. If you have this in a Word or Word Perfect Document please feel free to attach and we will separate.

Such as (but not limited to):

  1. Special circulation period for journal members;
  2. Circulation for photocopying privileges;
  3. Time limits that the journals may pull material and place in a designated area for the footnoting; activities
  4. ILL rules;
  5. Other.

Website Committee

The Committee members this year were: Diane Murley and Kit Kreilick, Co-Chairs; David Burch; Donna Gulnac; Kris Niedringhaus and Leah Sandwell-Weiss.

New web administrator Diane Murley has worked hard this year to reorganize the materials available on the web server into subdirectories, to make sure that all of the pages have links to them, and to make sure that the website is accessible to as many users and browsers as possible. She has also tried to obtain and upload updated content as quickly as possible.

As this report is being written, plans are underway to adopt the new SIS template devised by June Liebert last year, which will give us a site based on a style sheet that can be updated readily when it's time for a new look. Once the committee reaches consensus on the design elements, we expect to post a mock-up for membership comments prior to or shortly after the San Antonio meeting.

It is anticipated that we will eliminate the background graphic, design new graphical elements, and change the colors and fonts somewhat. One idea for the board to consider would be having a contest to design a more modern logo for the ALL-SIS banner.

Previous Committee and ALL-SIS Reports

 

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