ALL-SIS Committee Annual Reports

ABA Liaison

AALS Liaison

ALLNEW/Membership

This past year, the ALL-NEW/Membership ALL-SIS Subcommittee, planned and prepared for our annual roundtable at the 2011 conference in Philadelphia. The event will be a "meet–and–greet/discussion" session where newer librarians will be able to speak with experienced academic law librarians. There will be 6 discussions going on at the same time, and each attendee has the option to join whichever discussion(s) he finds interesting. The group has identified the discussion topics and has recruited discussion leaders. We have also created a brief survey to evaluate the event. We will meet at the Annual Meeting to finish planning and to focus on the transition for next year. Besides planning and promoting the roundtable, we have updated our ALL-SIS website and drafted an “ALL-SIS New Membership Kit” email to be sent twice a year to new ALL-SIS members. The email includes useful links to the ALL-SIS and AALL websites as well as information about the ALLNEW annual event. The Chair would like to thank all of the members for their hard work this past year.

Archives & Website

Submitted by Sara Sampson, Committee Chair

This year the committee prepared our website for the AALL redesign, investigated the state of our archives, and submitted a proposal for online archiving of the website. To date, this proposal has not been acted upon. The Webmaster has been in contact with AALL. The redesign of our website was delayed and has also not yet occurred.

We gathered information about AALL and ALL-SIS archives that may be helpful to the next committee chair.

The AALL Archives Policy is located at http://www.aallnet.org/main-menu/Leadership-Governance/policies/AssociationPolicies/policy-archives.html.

The ALL-SIS archives are part of the AALL archives. Details are available on http://www.library.illinois.edu/archives/aall/index.php.

An overview of the ALL-SIS archives (including what should be saved) is available at : http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/newsletter/26_1/ALLSISArchives.htm.

Awards

The Awards Committee received a relatively small number of applications for awards and grants this year. There were no applications for the active member stimulus grant and no nominations for the outstanding service award.

Committee members came to a consensus that we could conduct all of our business online. I uploaded the application and nomination materials to a University of San Diego site. The committee reviewed them and selected the following winners:

Frederick Charles Hicks Award
Margaret Leary

ALL-SIS Outstanding Article Award
Terry Ballard & Anna Blaine, The Changing Face of Current Awareness Reporting in Law Libraries (2010), New Library World 111 (3/4) 104.

ALL-SIS Regular Member Stimulus Grant
Deborah Darin
Ping Tian

ALL-SIS CONELL Grant
Irene Crisci
Jingjang Zhang

The awardees and grantees will be recognized at the SIS reception in Philadelphia.

A concern arose because one of the applicants googled herself and found her application materials on the web. Next year’s committee may want to use a more secure method of sharing the candidates’ materials.

Bluebook

Bylaws

CALI

This year’s committee members are: Sue Altmeyer, Dragomir Cosanici, Beth DiFelice, Shaun Esposito, Joseph Gerken, Susanna Leers, Kris Niedringhaus (Chair), and Tawnya Plumb. The committee has a strong commitment to the high quality of CALI’s legal research lessons and maintaining a strong relationship with CALI.

Since August 2010, the Legal Research Community Authoring Project Advisory Panel (LRCAP), made up of the ALL-SIS CALI committee members, reviewed approximately 19 new lesson proposals.

Since August 2010, we've added 20 (twenty) legal research lessons to the CALI Library.

We have 22 (twenty-two) lessons currently in progress.

During 2010-2011, 18 (eighteen) lessons were reviewed, and revised as necessary, by either the CALI Author or a CALI Reviser.

CALI has recently launched two new initiatives that provide opportunities for academic law librarians to contribute in new ways. At the CONELL Marketplace and AALL in July 2010, CALI rolled out the CALI Reviser Project. This project allows a law librarian to adopt an “orphaned” CALI lesson. Lessons may be orphaned because the original author has retired or no longer has the time to review, edit and update the lesson. This is a nice way to learn the CALI Author software and earns the Reviser a shared authoring credit (listed in OCLC). We’ve had an excellent response to the Reviser Project and have found it to be a useful vehicle for involving newer librarians. The ALL-SIS CALI Committee will staff a table at the CONELL Marketplace for a second time in Philadelphia.

Finally, a new initiative from CALI is the LibTour project offered via CALI’s Classcaster. The idea is to provide a brief audio “tour” of resources standard to most academic law libraries. Librarians can write a script and record the audio tour. CALI will then post the audio tour to Classcaster, create a QR code which students can scan with a smart phone, and create a letter-size poster that libraries can display near the resource in their library. The first LibTour was written by committee member Beth DeFelice on American Law Reports and can be heard at http://libtour.classcaster.net/. If the accompanying poster was displayed near the ALRs, a student could go to the shelves, scan the QR code with their smart phone and listen to the audio tour while standing with the materials. Alternatively, the QR codes could be incorporated in to online tours that a library might develop for Orientation or a Legal Research class. This is an exciting new project which also creates excellent opportunities for ALL-SIS members to become involved and author short works which will be valuable to libraries across the country.

Collection Development

This past year, the ALL-SIS Collection Development Committee helped develop and propose a program for the Annual Meeting, wrote an article about collection development related programs at the Annual Meeting, planned the Roundtable at the Annual Meeting, and updated the Committee’s webpages with collection development policies, contacts, resources, and law library catalog RSS feeds.

The Committee helped develop and work on a program proposal, submitted by current committee member, Jane Woldow, and a committee member from last year, Kerry Skinner, entitled Finding that Sweet Spot: Balancing Competing Factors While Maintaining a Core Collection. While this program was ultimately not chosen by Annual Meeting Program Committee, we learned a lot about the challenges law librarians face meeting user needs, while still maintaining strong core collections. We encourage efforts to propose a similar program on this topic for a future meeting.

To help publicize the various collection development related programs at the 2011 Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, the Committee wrote an article for the upcoming issue of the ALL-SIS Newsletter. These programs are on topics as diverse as evaluating electronic resources, managing budget cuts, partnering with membership libraries, understanding license agreements, negotiating vendor contracts, collaborative collection development, and e-books. While not all of these programs are specifically focused on academic law libraries, these programs will still likely be of interest to anyone interested in collection development issues regardless of library type.

The Committee’s Collection Development Roundtable will take place on Tuesday, July 26, 2011 from11:45 am - 12:45 pm in room 304 of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The title of the Roundtable is: E-Books, E-Resources, E-Readers, E-Nevitable: Has the Time Come to Officially Prefer Electronic Over Print Resources in Our Collection Development Policies?. We hope this topic helps stimulate an interesting and thought-provoking discussion about how our collection development policies can better manage and address the growing prominence of electronic resources in the legal information landscape.

In addition, the Committee worked on updating its webpages with collection development contacts, policies, resources, and law library catalog RSS feeds. By far, the most time-consuming webpages to update are the Directory of Collection Development Contacts in Academic Libraries (http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/secure/Colldev/index.asp [login required*]) and the Academic Law Libraries’ Collection Development Policies (http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/secure/Colldev/policies.asp [login required*]) webpages. Committee members, Lisa Junghahn and Eric Parker, took on this challenge and contacted over 200 academic law libraries requesting updates to the information. We thank them very much for their hard work on this project. To update the Collection Development Resources on the Web (http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/colldev/cdweb.asp) and the Academic Law Libraries’ RSS Feeds for New Acquisitions (http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/colldev/acq_rss.asp) webpages, the Committee sent an email to the ALL-SIS listserv asking for updates to these pages. We received helpful suggestions for both pages. Thanks to the speedy assistance of Creighton Miller, the ALL-SIS Web Administrator, all of the Committee’s webpages have now been updated.

The Committee is looking forward to its meeting on Sunday, July 24, 2011 from 12:00-1:15 pm in room 104(B) of the Pennsylvania Convention Center. At this meeting we will discuss plans for future programs and projects of the Committee.

Respectfully Submitted,

Paul Moorman, Chair
Donna Chow
Patricia Horvath
Lisa Junghahn
Cynthia Myers
Wendy Moore
Eric Parker
Helen Wohl
Jane Woldrow

*Access to these resources requires a special login. Personal AALL usernames and passwords will not work. ALL-SIS members should contact the ALL-SIS webmaster to request the proper login information.

Continuing Education

Submitted by Carol A. Watson, Chair of the ALL-SIS Continuing Education Committee, 2010-11 Director, University of Georgia Law Library

The ALL-SIS Continuing Education Committee has been working on submitting a successful proposal for the BNA Continuing Education Grant Program this year. The Committee began the year by surveying the ALL-SIS membership on their preferences for webinar topics by offering the choices of project management, networking the room or time management/stress free productivity tips. Project management received 55 votes from individuals indicating they would be most likely to attend the program. Time management received 34 votes and networking the room received 10 votes. Consequently, the Committee made the decision to pursue proposing a grant on the topic of project management.

The Committee researched potential speakers and identified James Hassett, the founder of LegalBizDev, as an expert speaker. Mr. Hassett regularly gives presentations to law firms, bar associations and other legal organizations on the topic of legal project management. Mr. Hassett has recently released a second edition of his popular text Legal Project Management Quick Reference Guide. In November 2010, the Committee negotiated a speaker’s fee with Mr. Hassett and submitted a continuing education grant proposal for conducting a webinar on the topic of legal project management. Unfortunately, this proposal was not accepted because we could not negotiate to record the presentation and provide unlimited access to the recording by the AALL membership.

In April 2010, the Committee approached Mr. Hassett with a different proposal. Rather than a presentation, we suggested a Q &A format on the topic of legal project management. Mr. Hassett accepted our request and agreed to the recording of the presentation for future viewing by AALL members. In May 2010, we resubmitted the grant proposal with a revised description of the format. Our legal project management program was accepted and will be presented on October 12. 2011 at noon EST. The 2011-12 Continuing Education Committee will be responsible for coordinating the webinar.

I would like to thank the members of this year’s committee for all of their hard work and patience: Anna Blaine, Christine Brown, Karen Nuckolls, Rashid Humayun, Sally Irvin and Sara Repinski.

Continuing Status/Tenure

Directors' Breakfast

Faculty Services

Legal Research & Sourcebook

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

A subset of the LRS Committee began analyzing the results from a survey on legal research technology that was distributed to law schools in early Spring 2011. In the upcoming year, the LRS Committee aims to draft a report summarizing the results.

Another subset of the LRS Committee worked on the legal research roundtable for the 2011 AALL conference held in Philadelphia. The group discussed topics for the roundtable, finalized those topics, and organized note takers and moderators. The roundtable was well attended.

A final portion of the LRS Committee focused on the Sourcebook for Teaching Legal Research (“Sourcebook”). Contributions to the Sourcebook were solicited via email and posted to the website. In addition, the group began the process of analyzing procedures governing the Sourcebook. This task will also be continued by the LRS Committee in the upcoming year.

Annmarie Zell
Vice Chair, ALL-SIS Legal Research and Sourcebook Committee
August 2011

Listserv Manager

Local Arrangements

Middle Managers' Forum

Newsletter

The 2010 - 2011 Newsletter Committee consisted of Barbara Gellis Traub, Chair, Rittenberg Law Library, St. John‘s University School of Law; Leah Sandwell-Weiss, University of Arizona College of Law Library; Sue Kelleher, Texas Tech University School of Law Library; Yasmin Sokkar Harker, CUNY Law School Library; Jennifer Allison, Pepperdine Law School; Steven Robert Miller, Indiana University School of Law - Indianapolis; Lauren Schroeder, University of Houston, O‘Quinn Law Library; Julia F. Jaet, Marquette University 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 16, 2010, February 20, 2011, and approximately June 16, 2011; the election issue was published on March 25, 2011.

Highlights of this year‘s issues:

• The Fall 2010 issue was almost entirely devoted to reviews of programs and activities at the 2010 Annual Meeting in Denver. Committee members and 6 other ALL-SIS members wrote articles covering more than 17 programs and other activities;
• Coverage of the Faculty Services Showcase Showdown hosted by Harvard Law School Li-brary, an article discussing new CALI projects (with a call for CALI volunteers), and an article examining critiques of advanced legal research courses (Winter 2011);
• Articles on ALL-SIS and other programs, awards, and activities scheduled at the upcoming annual meeting, little known facts about Philadelphia, some new member profiles, and a report of a “link rot” analysis (Summer 2011).

The indexing project, which received funding in 2009-2010, was completed in October 2010. The indexer retrospectively indexed nearly 30 years of the Newsletter. The Newsletter page of the ALL-SIS website now contains a search box with which to locate articles on the topic of your choice. Yasmin was instrumental in making this happen and I would like to thank her for her hard work.

I would like to thank all the committee members for their hard work and their articles. We wouldn‘t have had a newsletter without their contributions.

• Sue again collected and wrote the Member News for all three issues.
• Leah wrote a review of the 2010 Hot Topic from the Annual Meeting for the Fall issue.
• Yasmin continued her column, A Librarian in the Dark, on DVDs of interest to law librarians, with a review of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days in the Summer 2011 issue.
• I-Wei wrote Looking Up From the Bottom: Bankruptcy Law and Research and Communicating with Patrons: The Best of the Best for the Fall 2010 issue and continued her column, Survey Roundup.
• Lauren wrote a review of Behind the Scenes at the U.S. EPA for the Fall 2010 issue and Phabulous Philadelphia Phacts for the Summer 2011 issue.
• Jennifer reviewed Navigating Your Way to the Classroom: Law Librarians Teaching New Law School Classes, Training U.S. Law Students to Work in a South African Legal Aid Clinic, and the AALL/LexisNexis Call for Papers for the Fall 2010 issue.

I‘d also like to thank the many ALL-SIS members who submitted articles this year for publication, including Theodora Belniak (2 articles), Theresa Strike, Katy Stein, Donna Nixon, Charles A. Pipins II, Da-vid Lehman, Kris Niedringhaus, Michele Thomas, Su-san Nevelow Mart, Lisa Junghahn, Thomas Sneed, Mary Godfry-Richards, Darla Jackson, and Robert Hu. It is gratifying to see how many ALL-SIS members submitted articles for publication, and I hope this spirit will continue and grow throughout 2011 and 2012.

Finally my sincere thanks, again, to Leah for guiding me through the process of learning to edit and get the Newsletter posted. I am sure that with her leadership, ALL-SIS will continue to go “from strength to strength”.

Barbara Gellis Traub
Chair & Editor, ALL-SIS Newsletter

Nominations

The nominating committee had a number of candidates nominated for our open Elected Member position. As such we selected three candidates instead of two: James Kelly, Debora Person and Ted Potter. We selected two Vice Chair/Chair-Elect candidates: Faye Jones and Leah Sandwell-Weiss. All candidates supplied written (via fax/email) acceptances, which were forwarded to the ALL-SIS Chair. All of the members of this committee did a wonderful job and it was a pleasure working with them.

Stefanie Pearlman
Chair, Nominating Committee

Programs

Program Planning Committee members Darla Jackson (Chair), Debora Person (Vice-Chair), Rosemary LaSala, Ronald Wheeler, and Molly Brownfield worked diligently to compile and rank programs for the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting. The Annual Meeting Program Planning Committee (AMPC) accepted six ALL-SIS sponsored programs for the 2011 meeting. Those programs are:

E-6: Teaching Advocacy in International Commercial Arbitration Research is Essential

F-6: Meeting Employers' Expectations: Are Library Schools Doing Everything They Can?

H-6: Making the Grade: Assessing Legal Research Skills in the Classroom and Firm

J-1: Developing and Using Patron Satisfaction Surveys

J-5: Feeling Good about Medical Legal Research

J-6: What’s Happening in Green Acres?: The Struggle for Information Access and Instruction in Less Populous Areas

Based on the recommendation of the Programs Committee, the ALL-SIS Board then voted to independently sponsor the following programs:

Supporting Librarian Scholarship: Sunday, July 24, 1:30 - 2:45 p.m. Competency/Track: Library Management and Administration

Questioning the Paper Chase: Why Should Law Librarians Obtain a Law Degree? Sunday, July 24, 3:00 - 4:00 p.m., Competency/Track: General or Core Programs

We're All in This Together: Achieving Success Through Collaboration with Non-Library Staff: Monday, July 25, 8:45 - 9:45 a.m., Competency/Track: Library Management and Administration

Empiricist or Empirical Reference Librarian?: Structuring an Empirical Legal Research Program: Monday, July 25, 2:15 - 3:30 p.m., Competency/Track: Library Management and Administration

The Program Committee then worked with the ALL-SIS Newsletter and Webmaster to publicize these programs. For the first time, the Programs Committee is also coordinating the recording of the independently sponsored programs and hopes to make the recordings and handouts from these programs available online.

Public Relations

The 2010/2011 members of the Public Relations Committee are: Kristina Alayan (Duke), Meg Butler (Georgia State), Jean Callihan (Cornell, vice-chair), Lisa Junghahn (Harvard), Jessica Randall (Connecticut), and Mila Rush (Minnesota, chair)

The Committee engaged in several activities this year. As in the past years, we are setting up the SIS tables at the CONELL Marketplace and in the Activities Area. Both tables will be staffed to provide information on the Academic Law Libraries SIS and generally talk up membership in this SIS. Both tables will contain this year's giveaway of lip balms and candies, the list of meetings/programs/etc., sample newsletters, new brochures, and other flyers. Kristina Alayan solicited volunteers to staff the table at the Activities Area. Mila Rush prepared a list of the programs, meetings and other events of the ALL SIS.

The brochure was revised this year by Jean Callihan and Jessica Randall. Copies will be made available at the two tables and Webmaster Creighton Miller mounted it on the SIS Website.

Work on the giveaway was a multiple step process. We ended up with lip balms that are US-made, with SPF15, beeswax, aloe and vit.E. Of course, there will be the inevitable candies.

In an effort to help the other committees publicize their activities and events, Mila contacted three and Meg Butler contacted two, other committees. Both sent publicity copies to aallnet.org/events. In addition, the ALL-NEW Committee meeting flyer will be available at the CONELL table.

Special Collections & Collection Strengths Task Force

Statistics

Proposal to the ALL-SIS Executive Board
Concerning Long-Term Direction for the Statistics Committee

INTRODUCTION

The Statistics Committee [SC] is an underutilized resource within the ALL-SIS organization. Given that recourse to data-driven empirical study rises throughout the profession, one could expect this unit to face increased demand for its expertise. The reality, however, has been much the opposite: for many years the Statistics Committee has lacked a clear mission, and grown moribund.

The reasons for such stagnation are several, and it is not the goal of this brief to rehearse them in detail. Yet a major portion of any complete explanation will be the lack of ongoing, long-term projects of a positive and readily understandable nature. Such projects would:

• Provide a training ground in basic statistical methods and interpretation for new members with little formal statistical training,
• Raise the profile of the Committee within the organization so that relevant problems are referred to it, and
• Serve the profession by making available a source of specially tailored information to address important questions concerning its developing practice.

A project of the type envisioned here –an annual statistical report of developments within the practice of law librarianship – would offer a secure foundation upon which to base more complex undertakings. Past efforts to move directly to this latter step – as in the interest to investigate and supplement ABA and ARL questionnaires – have foundered in significant part because Committee members have not come equally equipped to address these high-level statistical problems. Members have been frequently well-intentioned but unschooled in the problems of statistics and data methodologies – skills rarely taught in either law or library school – that they were being asked to solve. Their experiences as users can equip them to identify certain shortcomings of current techniques, but cannot provide the basis upon which to approach their improvement. Earlier attempts, therefore, have been unsuccessful, and unsuited to be presented to the relevant sections of more data-savvy organizations such as ABA and ARL. In short, to effectively address the need of law librarianship, we must become able to couch our concerns and suggestions in the relevant language of sound data methodologies.

The purpose of this brief is to outline a project that could be assigned to the Statistics Committee by the Executive Board to address these background matters. It would produce both a useful product for the profession, and imbue within members of the Committee the needed skills through an extended hands-on experience.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Statistics can be productively employed to advance investigation into three distinct kinds of questions:

• Trends: trend data record the progress and development of a specific feature. Little meaning is embedded in the statistic itself, its purpose solely to provide an accurate account of actual practices, which can then provide an empirical support for later interpretations. Trend data are descriptive statistics.
• Benchmarks: benchmarks bear a superficial resemblance to trend data, but are intended for a different purpose. Benchmarks are specifically offered as a standard against which one can compare individual performance. When used in this way, benchmarks are a normative, prescriptive statistic.
• Correlational: studies of interest to law libraries often require examining the interaction between two or more variables with the goal to understand one set of observations through its relationship to the other. These investigations, significantly more complex than the first two, require the inclusion of explanatory statistics, or statistics that can bear the weight of providing answers to important questions.

The Statistics Committee should be charged to provide information to ALL-SIS and the Board in any of these three categories, on whatever topics judged beneficial. Such an ongoing responsibility would bring a needed stability to this underutilized organizational resource, generate new tools for the practice of law librarianship, and through participation in these projects cultivate a deeper pool of statistical literacy within the profession. One or more projects of this kind – conceived as an annual statistical report on the profession – in addition to whatever additional short-term assignments it may receive, would require the Committee to identify existing data sources, establish working relationships with external agencies that collect and report such data, mine the data to gather those informing the specific interests of ALL-SIS, and identify relevant gaps in those existing sources and identify reasonable means to fill that void. These are all needed skills that experience has shown must be cultivated within the Committee itself if it is to function adequately.

In order to assist the Executive Board to better appreciate what is being proposed, brief examples of each of the kinds of statistical data outlined are presented below. The intent is to illustrate a bit of the process the Committee might follow to generate the envisioned compendium of information.

Example 1: Trend Data

PROBLEM: What has been the pattern of serials acquisitions by law libraries over the last several years?

METHOD: Data for all ARL law libraries were collected for the SERPURE variable, defined as “Current serials purchased (SERPUR): SERPUR is subscriptions to current serials (including periodicals but excluding monographic series) paid for by the library. Note that SERPUR refers to copies, not titles. Three paid subscriptions to Science are counted as three SERPUR, though this is one serial title. EXPSER divided by SERPUR should be the average price per current serial.
NOTE: In 2006-07 and beyond, SERPUR is measured by title—not by subscription.”

In 2006-07, two new variables were added, SERPURE (Current Serials Purchased, Electronic), and SERPURP (Current Serials Purchased, Print). After this addition, in principle SERPURE+SERPURP=SERPUR.

RESULT: Law libraries have been steadily increasing the number of serial titles they purchase from an average of 4,300 per school in 1993, to 7,475 in 2009. By the latest reporting period, however, two-thirds of current serial purchases are in electronic format rather than the traditional print (5461 v. 2652).

COMMENTS: Trend data are the least difficult to present, as it generally requires only formatting existing information for easy consumption. The main challenge is to identify the variables that would be of consistent utility for law librarians. 

Example 2: Benchmarks

PROBLEM: How much do libraries spend on materials per student enrolled?

METHOD: For the years 2007-2009, ARL data were identified that reported how much law libraries spent total for materials (EXPLM, which is the summed result of expenditures for monographs, serials, other materials, and items other than materials such as bibliographic utilities) and TOTSTU, or total full-time student enrollment. Sixteen schools reported these data consistently enough to be included in this analysis.

For benchmarks to be useful, they should enable the user to compare their own performance with schools that are broadly similar to their own. Therefore these data were broken down by U.S. News and World Report tiered ranking. This required the elimination of two Canadian schools in the data pool; additionally, one fourth-tier school was excluded on the grounds that, as the only member of that category, its information would not be anonymous.

RESULTS: All categories of schools progressively spent more per student on library materials over the years examined. Rank does not appear to be a reliable predictor of a school’s comparative expenditures of this kind.

COMMENTS: Benchmark data can be especially provocative, and for this reason care must be given to make certain that all information is aggregated. No information should be reported for individual schools.

Example 3: Correlational Statistics

PROBLEM: Is there a relationship between a law library’s new volume acquisitions, and the utilization of its interlibrary loan services? A likely expectation is that as a library adds fewer monographs due to tightened budgets, it will find itself needing to borrow more than it had in the past.

METHOD: ARL statistics for ten law libraries (California Berkeley, Georgia, Harvard, Kentucky, Notre Dame, Pennsylvania, Texas, Vanderbilt, Virginia, and Yale) for the years 2004-2009.

Examination A Guide to the Machine-Readable ARL Statistics Data, the following variables were identified as potentially relevant to the problem being investigated:

Examination of the data revealed that libraries inconsistently provided usable data for MONO, so this variable was dropped from the final analysis. Results in the summary table below report Pearson’s r correlations between each of the two ILL variables and the two collections variables:

RESULT: Initial analysis suggests that while earlier collection development impacted what one borrowed, more recently it bears a stronger relationship with what one lends.

COMMENTS: A cursory analysis such as this, which sufficed to verify that there is indeed some meaningful correlations at issue, would be followed by a more rigorous study to achieve solid outcomes. In addition to expanding the pool to include all law libraries for which data are available, analyses should include more sophisticated statistical measures that will allow simultaneous control of all variability, including that of multiple years.  This is the kind of special topic studies that could be assigned to the Committee at the beginning of each cycle, to be included in the annual statistical report.

Proposals

The points offered above may be rephrased into the following specific proposals for action from the ALL-SIS Executive Board:

1. Committee Appointments: To function adequately, the Statistics Committee needs as many members as possible that are well-versed in the basics of statistical methodologies, typically acquired through some manner of formal training. ALL-SIS should recognize the difficulty in identifying persons of appropriate background and specialized skills in sufficient numbers by making appointment to the Statistics Committee a staggered multi-year assignment.
2. Training: Even when members enter their committee tenures with a general knowledge of statistics, it will often be the case that this will not be sufficient to undertake the specific projects assigned by the Board. The Board should provide funding for specialized training as committee members identify relevant learning opportunities.
3. Annual Reports: The Board should charge the Statistics Committee to take steps to begin preparing, on an annual basis, statistical overview of the practice of law librarianship. Producing this report – a mix of trends, benchmarks, and correlational studies – would require cultivating a deep fluency with the scope and significance of existing statistical measures, both their strengths and shortcomings.
   

   This undertaking would yield two necessary outcomes that are currently lacking: First, a useful statistical description of law librarianship, allowing the identification of emerging trends and meaningful relationships, and, second, a highly skilled Statistics Committee that would then possess the in-house expertise to adequately respond to specific needs from the Board. Working with the data sufficiently closely to produce these regular reports would expose Committee members to the shortcomings and inconsistencies existing in reported sources, allowing them to better frame any questions intended to address such shortfalls.

James M. Donovan, Ph.D.
Chair, ALL-SIS Statistics Committee 2010-2011

Student Services

The ALL-SIS Student Services Committee had a very productive year.

1. AALL program approved – Developing and Using Patron Satisfaction Surveys. In conjunction with the program the committee collected surveys used by law libraries. A compiled “sample survey” was then created. The surveys are on the web page.
2. The committee held a 3-day listserve discussion on Marketing Your library Services to Students. The discussion feedback was posted to the web.
3. The committee updated its Sample Academic Student Services Documents. A request for links to LibGuides created by law libraries was sent to list. The compiled list was posted to the Student Services section of the ALL-SIS web page.
4. Solicited information on services provided by the library to student organizations. Information will be posted on the web page.
5. Solicited information on services provided by the library to LLM and SJD students. Information will be posted on the web page.
6. Solicited information on services provided by the library to clinical programs. Information will be posted on the web page.

Committee members:

Merle Slyhoff, Chair
Chris Dykes, Vice-Chair
David Bachman
Brent Bernau
Pam Brannon
Laura Fargo
Heather Hamilton
Ann Hemmens
Todd Ito
Deborah McGovern
Adeen Postar
Morgan Stoddard

Task Force for the Review of ABA Standards

U.S. News Rankings Task Force

Webmaster

As the new webmaster for 2010-11, I spent a good deal of the year familiarizing myself with the ALL-SIS website, blog, and associated online resources. I also worked closely with the Board and the various committees to update information across the website, helped the Newsletter Editor publish four issues of the SIS’s online newsletter, and created a mini-site publicizing ALL-SIS events for the 2011 AALL Annual Meeting (http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/annualmeeting/2011/). The year’s most significant project involved AALL’s transfer of its AALLNET platform to a completely new interface running on a new content management system. Stage I of this project—completed this year—involved minimal changes to the ALL-SIS website, though it did require implementation of a new and less-effective mechanism for controlling access to protected ALL-SIS content. Stage II, scheduled to begin immediately after the annual meeting, will require an extensive redesign of the entire website.

Respectfully submitted,

Creighton Miller
ALL-SIS Webmaster, 2010-11