ALL-SIS Committee Annual Reports

2009–2010

ABA / AALS LIAISONS ALL-NEW / MEMBERSHIP ARCHIVES
AWARDS BYLAWS CALI
COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT CONTINUING EDUCATION CONTINUING STATUS / TENURE
DIRECTORS' BREAKFAST FACULTY SERVICES LEGAL RESEARCH & SOURCEBOOK
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS MIDDLE MANAGERS' FORUM NEWSLETTER
NOMINATIONS PROGRAMS PUBLIC RELATIONS
STATISTICS STUDENT SERVICES TASK FORCE FOR THE REVIEW OF ABA STANDARDS FOR LAW LIBRARIES
U.S. NEWS RANKINGS TASK FORCE WEBMASTER

ABA/AALS Liaisons

 

ALLNEW/Membership

The ALL-NEW ALL-SIS Subcommittee has been merged with the membership committee. This past year, we have been preparing for our event at the 2010 annual conference in Denver. The event will be a "meet–and–greet/discussion" session where newer librarians will be able to speak with experienced academic law librarians about. There will be up to 6 discussions going on at the same time, and each attendee has the option to join a discussion. The group has identified discussion topics and is currently recruiting discussion leaders. We will meet at the Annual Meeting to finish planning our event and to focus on the transition for next year. The Chair would like to thank all of the members for their work this past year.

Archives

The archivist position has been merged with the Web Committee.  This new committee has been given a new and expanded charge: to identify the types of material especially to be archived and to coordinate the contents of the archives with what is available on AALLNET.

Awards

It is my pleasure to announce, on behalf of the ALL-SIS Awards Committee, the recipients and winners of several ALL-SIS grants and awards for 2010. But, first I would like to thank each and every one of you who applied for a grant or nominated a colleague for an award. We had many deserving applicants and nominees this year, and all of them were deserving of recognition. Nevertheless, the people receiving grants or awards this year are as follows:

Each of the ALL-SIS award and grant recipients will be recognized at our ALL-SIS Reception and Awards Ceremony on Sunday, July 11, 6:30 - 9:00 p.m., Hyatt Centennial Ballroom AB.

The ALL-SIS Awards Committee was a phenomenal group this year, and I'd like to publicly thank each of the committee members for their hard work. This year’s Awards committee consisted of: Ron Wheeler, Chair (Georgia State University College of Law Libray); Ruth Levor, Vice Chair (University of San Diego Legal Research Center); Deborah Darin (Loyola University Chicago); D.R. Jones (Univ of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law); Carol Roehrenbeck (Rutgers Law School - Newark); Linda Sobey (Florida A&M University Law Library); and Jason Sowards (Wake Forest University).

Ron Wheeler
Chair, Awards Committee

Bylaws

 

CALI

Over the past year, the ALL-SIS CALI committee was expanded from 6 members to 8 members. This year’s members are: Sue Altmeyer, Dragomir Cosanici, Beth DiFelice, Shaun Esposito, Joseph Gerken, Susanna Leers, Kris Niedringhaus (Chair), and Tawnya Plumb. This growth demonstrates ALL-SIS’s continued and growing commitment to the high quality of CALI’s legal research lessons and maintaining a strong relationship with CALI.

Since August 2009, the Legal Research Community Authoring Project Advisory Panel (LRCAP), made up of the ALL-SIS CALI committee members, reviewed 11 (eleven) new lesson proposals, submitted by 13 (thirteen) authors/co-authors.

Since June 2009, we've added the following 11 (eleven) legal research lessons to the CALI Library.

We have 17 (seventeen) lessons currently in progress.

In 2009-2010 CALI authors reviewed and revised when necessary over a dozen lessons.  Additional authors are revising their lessons for Fall 2010.

We expect to have 100 legal research lessons completed or with the CEB/LRCAP for review by AALL 2010.

Collection Development

Courtney Selby, Past-Chair, and Kerry Skinner successfully submitted a program proposal to the AALL Program Committee.  The program, Collection Development Tools: From "Tried and True" to "Spiffy and New”, will be presented on Tuesday, July 13, at 2:30 pm.

A link was also placed on the ALL-SIS webpage to the collection development policies listed on the TS-SIS webpage, and vice versa, as stated in the projects listed in the minutes of last year’s meeting.

Making library collections “student-centric” and donating and recycling materials continue to be hot topics for discussion.

The committee also continued updates to the new acquisitions RSS feeds page: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/colldev/acq _rss.asp. These are links from law libraries only – not from university presses or other publications.

Courtney Selby and Patricia Fox solicited updates and new collection development policies from law libraries during the year. About 191 libraries were contacted for this project.

Speaking of updates, Karen Nuckolls solicited topics for this year’s Collection Development Roundtable.  The winner is: Reviewing, Revising/Updating Your Collection Development Policy:  When? How Often? It is programmed for Tuesday, July 13, at 9 am.

Paul Moorman, Vice-Chair, will succeed Karen as Collection Development chair in Denver.

Continuing Education

 

Continuing Status/Tenure

 

Directors' Breakfast

 

Faculty Services

This year’s Faculty Services Committee has hosted two listserv discussions, made plans for our Meeting and Roundtable at the AALL Annual Meeting in Denver, and made a good start on the Committee’s new charge:  developing a Faculty Services Toolkit that will serve as a resource for faculty services and other law librarians who plan, provide, and supervise a faculty support services in academic law libraries. Committee member Creighton Miller has also undertaken the updating of our Committee web page resource list, “Library Faculty Services Information on Law Library and Law School Web Sites,” a project to be completed by July.

Forum Discussions

Members of the 2009 - 2010 Faculty Services Committee (Toni Aiello, Chair; Suzanne Thorpe, Vice Chair; and members Barbara Kallusky, Julie Graves Krishnaswami, Connie Lenz, Cynthia Lewis, Creighton Miller, Donna Nixon, Julieanne (Juju) Stevens, and Barbara Traub) met twice by conference call to plan and coordinate this year’s work. We have hosted two successful forum discussions, “Overcoming Challenges of Marketing Library Services & Resources to Faculty,” conducted January 26 - 27, 2009, with Cynthia Lewis as forum coordinator, and “The Emergence of 24/7 Faculty Services?”, a May discussion which posed the question of how the advent of mobile devices, laptops, and Web 2.0 have affected expectations for faculty services in academic law libraries. For the first time, the Committee decided to extend a forum discussion over three days, Friday, May 6 through Saturday, May 8, 2010, in order to make participation convenient for librarians working weekend schedules or needing more flexibility. While the response was excellent and the information and ideas shared were valuable and wide ranging, the scant activity on the Saturday argues in favor of going back to the Committee’s previous practice of scheduling most listserv discussions for Tuesday-Wednesday or Wednesday-Thursday dates. Summaries of both discussions will be posted to the Committee’s web site, in addition to the threads of both discussions in archived content.

Faculty Services Toolkit

A Toolkit sub-committee composed of Suzanne Thorpe, Connie Lenz, and Juju Stevens has developed a substantial outline of a Faculty Services Toolkit that will be a continuing project of the Committee and feature of our web pages. The Toolkit will consist of four major sections:  Organizational Structures and Job Descriptions for Delivery of Faculty Services; Faculty Services (covering types of services being provided by librarians, examples, explanations, and descriptions); Administrative Details (sample policies, procedures, and forms, request and reporting systems, and other service methods); and Marketing Services and Resources. Each section will include links to relevant resources and bibliographies in addition to sample materials. The success of the project will depend on submissions from librarians and institutions well beyond the Committee, so watch for future Committee requests for sample documents for our Toolkit.

AALL Annual Meeting Denver Programs

The Faculty Services Committee Meeting will be held on Sunday, July 11, 2010, from noon to 1:15 p.m. All are welcome, so please join us and share your input and ideas. The Faculty Services Roundtable will take place Monday, July 12, from noon to 1:15 p.m. The Committee has planned discussion groups on (1) introducing WestlawNext to faculty; (2) meeting the challenges of faculty needs, demands, and skill development for classroom, communication, and current awareness technology; and (3) developing and supporting faculty repositories. If you have an additional discussion idea or a new hot topic you would like to suggest, bring it to the Committee Meeting on Sunday. We hope many as possible will be able to join us for this year’s Roundtable.

In addition to the Meeting and Roundtable, an ALL-SIS sponsored “alternative” program, “ReMapping Faculty Services Support:  New Models for Cooperation and Collaboration” will focus on faculty services. This program will take place Monday, July 12, from 8:45 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. Panelists, including Committee members Toni Aiello and Cynthia Lewis, “will explore different models of providing faculty services, the pros and cons of each model, and strategies to find the right balance between providing faculty research support, teaching, and other library duties with constrained budgets, a smaller staff, and the push to be more proactive in legal education.”

Toni Aiello
Chair, Faculty Services Committee
Deane Law Library, Hofstra University School of Law

Legal Research & Sourcebook

The Legal Research and Sourcebook Committee worked on the following items this year:

A subset of the committee worked diligently on a thoughtfully crafted draft of a survey on legal research technology. It was presented to the ALL-SIS board twice and is being further modified at present.

Another subset of the committee worked on the legal research roundtable for the 2010 AALL conference to be held in Denver. The group discussed and decided on topics for the roundtable, finalized those topics and is presently recruiting for the final positions open for note takers and moderators.

Contributions to the sourcebook were solicited via email but were unsuccessful.

Amy Levine
Chair, ALL-SIS Legal Research and Sourcebook Committee
June 1, 1010.

Local Arrangements

 

Membership

 

Middle Managers' Breakfast

 

Newsletter

The 2009 - 2010 Newsletter Committee consisted of Leah Sandwell-Weiss, Chair; Sue Kelleher, Texas Tech University School of Law Library; Yasmin Alexander, Deane Law Library, Hofstra School of Law; Jennifer Allison, Pepperdine Law School; Steven Robert Miller, Indiana University School of Law - Indianapolis; Lauren Schroeder, University of Houston, O’Quinn Law Library, and I-Wei Wang, UC Berkeley School of Law Library. Our Board Liaison was Margaret Schilt. Our three regular issues this year were published on September 10, 2009, February 5, 2010, and June 2, 2010; the election issue was published on March 19, 2010.

Highlights of this year’s issues included:

The big news this year is that the Executive Board accepted our proposal to purchase indexing software and hire an indexer in order to retrospectively index nearly 30 years of the Newsletter. Yasmin was instrumental in making this happen and I would like to thank her for her hard work, as well as thank the Executive Board for providing the funding for this long sought after project. You can read more about this project in Yasmin’s article in this issue of the Newsletter.

I would like to thank all the committee members for their hard work and their articles. We wouldn’t have had a Spring 2010 issue without their contributions.

I’d also like to thank all the ALL-SIS members who submitted articles this year for publication, including former committee member David Lehmann, Toni Aiello, Katie Brown, Michelle Cosby, Karen E. Kalnins, Karen A. Nuckolls, Lee Peoples, Lisa Peters, Jean M. Wenger, and Ron Wheeler. I’d also like to thank Beth Adelman and Margaret Schilt for their support and advice this year.

Finally, I’d like to thank everyone for their support over the past 10 years I’ve worked on the Newsletter. I began as the web editor under Shaun Esposito with the Fall 2000 issue and became the full editor with the Fall 2004 issue. When I started, I was a new law librarian who really didn’t know many people in our profession. I’ll be forever grateful for the opportunities to meet and work with the leaders in our profession the editorship has provided me.

In particular, I would like to thank Shaun, who asked me to help him put the Newsletter up on the web 10 years ago and who still faithfully proofreads each issue for me after all these years. Carole L. Hinchcliff, Michael J. Slinger, Suzanne Thorpe, Michelle Wu, Filippa Marullo Anzalone, and Beth Adelman, the ALL-SIS Chairs for the years 2004 - 2010, provided support and encouragement. And the Newsletter wouldn’t exist without all the committee members and writers who’ve written for it. I hope you all will continue to write for the Newsletter and to support Barbara Traub as she takes over the editorship for 2010 - 2011.

Leah Sandwell-Weiss
Chair & Editor, ALL-SIS Newsletter

Nominations

 

Programs

The ALL-SIS Program Committee received a large and varied group of program proposals for the upcoming Denver Conference. So many deserving proposals created a dilemma for the programming committee, Uwe Beltz, Paul Callister, Michele Finerty, Darla Jackson, Faye Jones, Rosemary LaSala, and I. After careful review the committee forwarded its recommendations to the AALL Annual Meeting Program Committee for review and consideration. A total of ten ALL-SIS sponsored programs were accepted:  eight AALL programs, one AALL workshop, and one ALL-SIS program.

AALL Workshop:

W-3  From Novice to Knowledgeable:  Newer Directors Tell What They Had to Learn.
Date & Time: Saturday, July 10, 12:30 - 5:00 p.m.

A panel of newer academic library directors will outline the skills they felt were most valuable to them in securing a director’s position and then thriving in that role. Panelists will discuss: budget management, change management, personnel management, project management, collection development and others. Participants will have an opportunity to select a skill they would like to explore and work in small groups to develop a learning plan for this skill.

AALL Programs:

A-1 The Bluebook:  An Open Discussion among Editors and Librarians
Date & Time:  Sunday, July 11, 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.

This program will feature an open discussion among law librarians and the editors of The Bluebook. By answering questions posed by the moderator, the editors will explain the rationale behind Bluebook rules, while the librarians will discuss issues they face as they assist users with The Bluebook. The program is not intended to make the editors change the rules “for us,” but, instead, to make all users of the Bluebook better informed as they work with their editors and students.

A-2 Mile High Summit on Training:  Are Things Coming to a Peak?
Date & Time:  Sunday, July 11, 1:30 - 2:45 p.m.

Librarians have debated this issue for years. Now, with the economy putting pressure on law firms and law schools, the talk about who and how to train law students to become practicing attorneys is becoming action. Law firms have announced in-depth training programs where the incoming associates are paid less but enrolled in intensive training on practicing laws. Law schools have added practice-oriented courses, and some have instituted lawyering programs. There have even been suggestions of unpaid apprenticeships. This program will examine how the current economic crisis has shifted the focus on how to train associates. Panelists will discuss the challenges facing law firms and law schools and identify opportunities for librarians to map their future and be a part of these revolutionary changes.

B-1 Developing Leaders:  Inside, Outside, and Together
Date & Time:  Sunday, July 11, 3:00 - 4:00 p.m.

Librarians need to be able to identify abilities in themselves and within developing members of the profession that will allow them to be effective leaders. The three parts to leadership development are:  1) “The Inside,” which means to know yourself. Examining the concepts of emotional intelligence will provide tools to better understand your leadership abilities and potential. 2) “The Outside,” which means how we relate and use our abilities within our groups and organizations. 3) “The Together,” which means it takes a village to raise a leader. Mentoring and feedback are vital to the development of one’s own abilities and those around us. This panel discussion/discovery session will provide ample opportunity to discover and interact with the presenters.

C-4 Communicating with Patrons - The Best of the Best
Date & Time:  Sunday, July 11, 4:15 - 5:15 p.m.

Communicating with students is a challenge academic law librarians face daily. Our competition is the students’ downtime, lunchtime, web time, and time with friends. What’s the best way to reach them? What works beyond the lure of free food? The ALL-SIS Student Services Committee will hold a “contest,” asking members to submit examples of their successes in communicating with students. The committee will choose approximately six top examples that will be presented at an informal poster session. Attendees will be able to drop by any or all of the sessions and see what worked, ask questions, and walk away with fresh ideas on communicating with students. All examples would be presented at the same time, and attendees could stop by as many as they wanted to in the allotted time.

E-2 The Boulder Statement:  Creating a Signature Pedagogy for Legal Research Education
Date & Time:  Monday, July 12, 10:00 - 10:30 a.m.

Law schools are currently considering redefining their curriculums to respond to the highly influential 2007 Carnegie Report which advocates enhancing the signature pedagogy of legal education, the Socratic Method, with an experience that better integrates skills instruction. Legal research is a fundamental legal skill, one the bench and bar routinely indicate law schools do not teach well. As legal research professionals, law librarians should respond to the Carnegie Report by examining legal research education. This presentation explains how law librarians can contribute to curricular reform by leading the way with the development of a signature pedagogy for legal research, based on the Carnegie Report’s recommendations. The panel will provide an overview of the Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education, the need for a signature pedagogy of legal research, and how this statement can assist in advancing legal research instruction in law schools.

F-3 FOIA Requests and Preservation:  An Emerging Collection Development Model for the Virtual Library
Date & Time:  Monday, July 12, 10:45 - 11:45 a.m.

Many law libraries are looking to develop distinctive digital collections of materials that aren’t available through commercial publishers. Collecting documents secured through FOIA requests offers a unique opportunity for these institutions. As government secrecy has increased, the number of FOIA requests has escalated, making procuring previously restricted government documents for public use an important goal. Law libraries are poised at the intersection of scholarship, freedom of information, preservation, and collection development, standing in a pivotal position to help scholars and practitioners access this hard-to-find content. This program will present a cross-section of perspectives on building, contextualizing, publicizing, and preserving a digital archive collection of materials secured through FOIA. Discover how these declassified documents in digital formats can be collected, archived, and made accessible for current and future research

G-1 Navigating Your Way to the Classroom:  Law Librarians Teaching New Law School Classes
Date & Time:  Monday, July 12, 4:00 - 5:15 p.m.

The 2007 Carnegie Report on Legal Education calls for significant changes in legal education, including greater emphasis on practical skills development. This could potentially result in greater teaching opportunities for law librarians. The speakers, three librarians who teach upper-level legal research courses, will discuss how they bring “real life” into their classrooms through their lectures, exercises, classroom discussions, and assessment tools. Using a foreign and international legal research class as a case study, the first speaker will guide participants through the necessary steps to design, obtain law school approval of, and implement a course. The second speaker will prepare participants to design a syllabus, including learning goals, and assignments that will measure students’ success at achieving those learning goals. The speaker will also address the need to consider students’ various learning styles when creating assignments. The final speaker will identify the skills and practices necessary for building one’s credibility as a professor, thereby creating an effective classroom presence. This program will help other librarians develop their own legal research course.

K-2 Collection Development Tools:  From ‘Tried and True’ to ‘Spiffy and New!’
Date & Time:  Tuesday, July 13, 3:30 - 4:00 p.m.

With every new year and each new technological marvel, the work of librarians engaged in collection development has the potential to get more complex. We are barraged with publication announcements in our e-mail inboxes, our print mailboxes and on our fax machines. Many of us also have contracts with book jobbers, subscriptions to products designed to help with collection development workflow, and a number of other individually devised schemes for locating and acquiring the right materials for our libraries, while eliminating the items that don’t fit our collections. With so much information at our fingertips and so many possibilities before us, now is the perfect time to review both the fundamental “tried-and-true” tools of collection development, as well as some of the newer tools that hold great promise for streamlining our workflow to get the most comprehensive and relevant information. This program will touch on a few of the most widely used traditional tools for collection development, some of which include Books in Print, WorldCat, acquisitions listservs, and slip/approval plans. It will then move on to some of the new and exciting possibilities offered by Web 2.0, like RSS feeds for new acquisitions and collection development blogs. Participants’ input on their favorite tools they currently use will be gathered and shared.

ALL-SIS Program:

ReMapping Faculty Services Support:  New Models for Cooperation and Collaboration
Date & Time:  Monday, July 12, 8:45 - 9:45 a.m.

Panelists will explore different models of providing faculty services and the pros and cons of each model. Panelists will discuss strategies to find the right balance between providing faculty research support, teaching, and other library duties with constrained budgets, a smaller staff, and the push to be more proactive in legal education.

Please come out and support the ALL-SIS Programs in Denver and begin thinking about the proposals for the 2011 Philadelphia Conference.

Kathleen McLeod
Chair, Program Committe

 

Public Relations

The Public Relations Committee included Mila Rush, University of Minnesota Law Library; Kristina Alayan, University of Washington student; Lisa Junghahn, Harvard; Karen E. Kalnins, Oklahoma City University Law School; and Josepha (Joey) Roberts, Florida Coastal School of Law. 

During the year, the Committee prepared for the 2010 Annual Meeting, where the PR Committee is responsible for promoting ALL-SIS both at the CONELL Marketplace and in the Exhibit Hall.  The Committee has engaged more than 14 volunteers to staff the table in the Exhibit Hall.  In both places, the Committee will distribute program information, brochures, reusable shopping bags imprinted with the ALL-SIS logo, and informational bookmarks about ALL-SIS. 

A focus for the year was the development of transition documentation, to facilitate the transition for the incoming chair.

The Committee will meet during the Annual Meeting to discuss the transition of new members and priorities for the upcoming year. 

Margaret (Meg) Butler
International Law Reference Librarian &
Professor of Legal Research
New York Law School
212-431-2148
margaret.butler@nyls.edu

Statistics

The ALL Statistics Committee received an updated charge this year. In September, the following was language was added as a result of interesting conversations on the ALL Listserv regarding how libraries are measured:

Review the ALL-SIS Statistics Committee 2009 Supplemental Annual Questionnaire (Draft dated 6/30/08) at: http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/statistics/all-sis_survey-063008.pdf; solicit membership input regarding modifications to the survey and integrate those modifications into an updated draft; evaluate the survey for validity and reliability; administer survey to a test group of the ALL-SIS membership; administer survey to the ALL-SIS membership; analyze the results and publish analysis on the Statistics Committee website.

History and background on the 2009 Supplemental Annual Questionnaire was provided to the Committee by Jonathan Franklin. Via email, the Committee discussed underlying problems with a 2007 survey, upon which the Questionnaire was based, as well as what goals and outcomes of the Questionnaire should be. Several members suggested that the Committee reevaluate the goals of the 2009 Annual Questionnaire and then see how the individual questions address the established goals. The Committee will meet during the Annual Convention to continue these discussions.  The Chair would like to thank the members of the committee for all their thoughts and suggestions during the past year.

Student Services

 

Task Force for the Review of ABA Standards for Law Libraries

The Task Force for the Review of ABA Standards for Law Libraries has previously issued its report.

U.S. News Rankings Task Force

 

Webmaster

As ALL-SIS Webmaster for 2009-2010, I did the following:

Respectfully submitted,
Sara Burriesci, ALL-SIS Webmaster

Previous Committee Reports

ALL-SIS Annual Reports to AALL

 

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