This past year, I was appointed to the Bylaws committee. As technical services librarian and a very new law librarian, I wanted to take my place on the Bylaws Committee very seriously, so tried to think about how I could contribute to the Association and the section. This year, the ALL-SIS Bylaws committee was charged with three things: reviewing the ALL-SIS Bylaws and recommending any changes to the Executive Board; reviewing the SIS Bylaws to insure compliance with AALL’s Constitution and Bylaws; and submitting one column to the ALL-SIS Newsletter. As the committee worked on these things - dividing tasks and communicating by e-mail - I saw our professional lives get busy and slow down according to the different seasons of the academic calendar. Each of us on the committee had a different role in the library, but we shared the common goals of the committee as well as an attachment to principles that govern academic law libraries and the community that supports the law library profession.
Seeing how our goals were the same but our jobs very different, I started to wonder about the purpose of the Bylaws Committee and Bylaws in general. My first question was: so, what are bylaws exactly? Like everyone, I have always been part of organizations that have bylaws, so I had nice sense of how they work in general but I really wanted to know why they are important. Since I consider myself a good, information seeking librarian, I decided to consult a source: the dictionary. The definition for bylaws is similar in many of the dictionaries I consulted, but my favorite was the one I found in the OED. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Online, bylaws are “an ordinance made by the members of a corporation [or society] for the better government of their own body or for the regulation of their dealings with the public.” This definition told me that bylaws are created by a group in order to shape how that organization will operate. The members are the ones who create the structures that govern.
Knowing the definition of bylaws led me to my next question: what is the purpose of the ALL-SIS Bylaws? The Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section was created in 1979 and with this creation came a group that focused and promoted those ideas that were particular to the academic/law school setting. Like many types of bylaws, the ALL-SIS Bylaws does many things - establish officers and committees; set up rules for nominations and voting; and, very importantly, establish the name and object of the section. Article II of the ALL-SIS Bylaws establishes the “Object” of the section. The ALL-SIS bylaws have two objects:
(www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/bylaws/index.asp)
The ALL-SIS bylaws establish ways for the section to provide for its members and represent the interests of the academic group. Providing and representing embody two important roles. By providing a forum, the ALL-SIS becomes a place to gather and discuss. This forum is a place to inform each other of different ideas and perspectives while engaging in thoughtful and respectful discussion. After this information has been discussed in a forum, ALL-SIS can then represent this information to others. The section is a place to explore new ideas and decide what ideas are important to the group as a whole. Once this discussion has been made, ALL-SIS can advocate as a whole for those things that are important for the section. ALL-SIS allows academics to have a communal voice in what law librarians do and how law librarians are perceived.
All of this reflection and analysis on bylaws lead me to understand many things about being in ALL-SIS. Most of all, in this Centennial year, I realize it is important for academic law librarians to remember where we came from, who we are now, and what we want to be. These bylaws are the guidelines we created for ourselves. Let’s make the most of our forum. Let’s make the most of our voice.
It has been an exciting and busy year for the ALL-SIS CONALL/Mentoring Committee. The committee, co-chaired by Paul Moorman and Patricia Kidd, has been busy this year with various mentoring activities and planning for this year’s Conference of Newer Academic Law Librarians (CONALL).
Earlier in the year, we selected three newer academic librarians to be featured in an upcoming issue of the ALL-SIS newsletter. You may have already read the feature on Kathleen Thompson. Keep a look out for features on Lauren Collins and Laurence Abraham.
Paul is busy coordinating the events for CONALL at this year’s annual meeting in St. Louis and providing overall leadership for this committee. This year’s CONALL is taking place at Washington University in St. Louis’ beautiful law school between 5:00 - 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday, July 11. The bus for CONALL attendees leaves at 4:00 p.m. from the Renaissance Grand Hotel, St. Charles Street Entrance. Please encourage your newer colleagues to attend and thank you LexisNexis for sponsoring the event.
Committee Members, Patricia Kidd, Kathleen Thompson, and Barbara A. West are busy pairing academic Mentee/Mentor participants for AALL’s Mentoring Program. While this can be hard work, it is a rewarding experience that puts you in touch with many wonderful and talented experienced and newer librarians.
In addition to planning for CONALL and our mentoring activities, the committee was proud to be a part of President Michael Slinger’s outreach to people who are considering law librarianship as a career. Michael solicited the names of people interested in academic law librarianship from ALL-SIS members so that he could follow up with a letter describing academic law librarianship, ALL-SIS, and the various scholarship and mentoring opportunities available to people interested in joining the profession. Michael received the names of over 60 people who were identified as being interested in academic law librarianship and hearing more about the profession. He wrote a letter and asked our committee to introduce and send the letter to the people who were identified. We were glad to help! The response we received to his letter was extremely positive. In fact, some of the people who received his letter have indicated that they will be attending the Annual Meeting in St. Louis and CONALL. We look forward to meeting them and welcoming them to our profession.
The members of the committee t hank you for a great year and hope to see you in St. Louis.
The members of the Continuing Status/Tenure (CST) Committee intend to complete the survey/summary of the employment status of non-director academic law librarians prior to the AALL meeting in Saint Louis. Since the AALL meeting in San Antonio the committee members have added information on more than 25 law libraries. The ALL-SIS web page with the survey/summary information at www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/cst/ is updated periodically by Brian Huddleston. We currently have information for 161 law schools and will continue to add information until all of the ABA accredited law schools are included. According to the ABA web page at www.abanet.org/legaled/approvedlawschools/approved.html as of February 2006, there were 192 law schools approved by the ABA to grant J.D. degrees. Eight of these law schools are provisionally approved. The three broad categories used by this committee are tenure track, continuing status, and employment at will. The CST committee is also collecting tenure track documents. Brian intends to add information on the status of directors to the web site.
In addition, Brian has been coordinating the development of Tenure, Faculty Status, and Law Librarians - A Bibliography which was last updated on February 14, 2006, at www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/cst/bibliography.html. Elizabeth Adelman’s Library and Information Science Abstracts search contributed numerous articles to the bibliography. Anyone who would like to annotate an article listed in the bibliography should contact Brian Huddleston at bhuddle@loyno.edu.
Committee Members
After a halting start last year - waiting for the well-considered outcomes of the Education Summit and a refinement of the Board’s charge - the ALL-SIS Education Committee’s work began in earnest mid-year. The Committee contributed questions to the March 2006 member survey, posted educational programs on the AALL Calendar of Events, and posted its first discussion question.
In a continual assessment of how the Committee might meet its charge, the following issues were raised:
Following on the heels of the survey, the Committee’s discussion question drew a limited response but raised two important issues that reach beyond professional development into the future of the profession itself: librarian status in academic institutions; and “alternative” careers for law librarians. Other academic law librarians said they want to learn about web authoring and web reporting tools, leadership, institutional repositories, and collection management criteria. “What I need to know…” is what one brave soul admitted wanting to know. Is this another call for a continuing education checklist for law librarians? How can we use the Competencies of Law Librarianship (www.aallnet.org/prodev/competencies.asp) to direct professional development planning?
The Committee also recently received the member survey results related to professional education. Representing 259 complete responses, they offer an enlightening view of what these members think about professional education for academic law librarians.
Notwithstanding the expense and time costs, respondents ranked in-person programs highest in “providing the best opportunities.” Ranked #3 or higher: Annual Meeting (67%); regional (54%); local (58%). Ranked #7, 8 and 9: DVDs (47%); CDs (46%); tapes (55%). 66% want to learn about educational programs via the ALL-SIS listserv. 42% ranked a blog last for this purpose. For SIS time slots at the Annual Meeting, panels and roundtable discussions were listed most frequently as the preferred format.
When asked for one or two topics of interest to learn about through ALL-SIS, the answers spanned the entire spectrum of library issues: services and outreach; teaching; trends; technology; specific skills and knowledge; status, tenure and changing roles; statistics; research and publishing; collection management; advocacy; careers; diversity; budgeting and management; preservation; designing surveys; database design; and AALL involvement.
The comments, while not attributable to all, suggest that ALL-SIS members want more of everything! As we anticipate the opportunities for education and fellowship at the Annual Meeting, each of us should look for ways to contribute to the development of educational opportunities that promote the profession and the individuals within it.
Thanks to the ALL-SIS Executive Board for its supportive oversight this year, to Committee members for their involvement, and to ALL-SIS members for contributing to the conversation.
In the past year, the Faculty Services Roundtable Committee continued its mission of sharing what works (and doesn’t) in faculty services. The committee sponsored three virtual roundtables through its listserv. The first discussion, led by Susan Broms of the University of Pittsburgh Barco Law Library, was on the use and management of research assistants (RA) in our support of faculty research projects. It seemed that librarians are most successful in hiring good candidates when they encourage particular students to apply or hire students that they have taught or previously worked with. In the second discussion Jane Thompson, of the University of Colorado Law Library, focused the group’s conversation about new faculty orientation. In this discussion, we learned that while it’s important to start a faculty member out right, we should also focus on offering training and information about our services throughout a faculty member’s career. Most recently, Liz Goldberg, of the Indiana University School of Law Library, led our third discussion about service to faculty outside of the law school. One particularly helpful suggestion is to communicate with these faculty members on an ongoing basis about the services we can provide in consulting on assignment design, research guides and tours. This way, we can help the class as a whole rather than individual students at the reference desk.
If you’d like to review these virtual roundtables or don’t want to miss the next virtual meeting of this helpful group, visit the archives of the listserv or sign-up at http://share.aallnet.org/read/?forum=all-fsr.
The committee has been busy with other activities as well. Marianne Alcorn, of Arizona State University’s Ross-Blakely Law Library, Leslie Pardo, of Cleveland Marshall College of Law Library, and James Wirrell, of McGeorge School of Law’s Schaber Law Library, are planning for the creation of an online clearinghouse for faculty services resources. Continuing with this work would be a worthwhile project for the committee next year. Susan Broms and Michele Kristakis, both of Barco Law Library, are writing a summary of the survey the committee completed last year.
The Faculty Services Committee will hold a Roundtable during the AALL annual meeting on Monday, July 10, at 10:15 a.m. Please join us in our continuing collaboration to improve library service to faculty.
The ALL-SIS Legal Research Committee has had a productive year. The Committee’s first project was to revamp and expand our Web page. A sub-group of the Committee, coordinated by Louise Tsang, undertook this effort. The sub-group consisted of Mary Rumsey, Bill Mills, Colleen Williams, and Virginia Lougheed.
The Committee’s Web page now has an inviting new look, and its content has been updated and expanded. Additions to the page include links to “Results of Surveys Taken by the LR Committee,” including a report of the 2005 Advanced Legal Research Instruction Roundtable in San Antonio as well as results of previous surveys. Also new on our page are a set of links to “Recommended Legal Research Resources” including (but not limited to!) our own Legal Research Instruction Sourcebook; the FCIL-SIS’ Foreign and International Legal Research Syllabi and Class Materials Page; the Akron Online Resource Portal, which provides subject access to pathfinders and research guides from over 130 law schools and other institutions; and the Tarlton Law Library’s “Contents Pages from Law Reviews,” a searchable database of tables of contents from more than 750 law reviews and other scholarly publications related to the law.
Also new to the site are links to selected Blogs (and lists of blogs) of interest to law librarians, and a list of “Law Library Display Ideas” provided by Sybil Marshall. We have included a suggestion box inviting members to convey to us any ideas for how the Committee’s Web page could be improved to be of greater use to our members. We invite you to check out the “new and improved” LR Committee Web page at www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/legalresearchcommittee/index.asp and we welcome your feedback and suggestions!
Our second project for 2005 - 2006 was to plan and execute the Legal Research Instruction Roundtable for the St. Louis meeting. Led by Judith Ford Anspach, the sub-group which undertook the planning for the Roundtable consisted of Laura Cadra, Joe Gerken, Gail Partin, and Lisa Spar. We anticipate that other members of the LR Committee will assist with conducting the Roundtable in the capacity of greeters, discussion leaders, and note takers. Plans for this year’s Roundtable include hosting some topic-specialized tables to focus on issues such as Advanced/Subject Specialized Research Instruction; Instructional Technology in Legal Research Courses; Introductory Legal Research Courses; and Teaching Foreign/LLM Students, as well as general “Serendipity” tables where participants may discuss topics as desired rather than focusing on predetermined topics. We also plan to compile the high points of the discussion for posting on the Committee’s Web page for review by both attendees and non-attendees, and are exploring some options to keep the dialog going throughout beyond the annual session. This Roundtable has been very popular in past years, and we encourage you to mark your calendars to join us this year for what we hope will be a stimulating and rewarding session.
As chair, I’d like to publicly offer my thanks to the Committee members who so enthusiastically and generously shared their ideas and their time to work on these projects. While it’s been a pleasure working with all of you, special thanks are due to Louise Tsang and Judy Anspach for their excellent work in spearheading the work of each of the two “branches” of this committee.
The ALL-SIS Legal Research Sourcebook is a searchable database containing legal research instructional materials contributed by members of AALL, including syllabi, presentations, research exercises and links to Internet-based tutorials. The purpose of the Sourcebook is to provide models that can be used by AALL members as an aid in developing training programs and resources. The Sourcebook is available to all AALL members at www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/secure/Research/index.asp (AALL login required).
The focus of the Sourcebook Committee over the past year has been on promoting the use of the Sourcebook and seeking new contributions to the database. To achieve these goals, the committee has engaged in several publicity activities, including: a joint call for contributions campaign with RIPS and their Teach-In Toolkit; the creation and distribution of a brochure highlighting the features and benefits of the Sourcebook; and the initiation of a direct email campaign seeking new contributions from specific individuals who teach legal research. As a result of these efforts, the Sourcebook has undergone a substantial expansion during the last year.
The continued success of the Sourcebook is dependent on contributions by AALL’s membership. Please consider contributing some of your teaching materials. The instructions for doing so are available on the Sourcebook website. If you have any questions about the Sourcebook or the process for submitting materials, please contact Kathy Hall (hall.849@osu.edu) or Paul Howard (phoward@pacific.edu).
Committee Members:
The ALL-SIS Membership Committee is pleased to report on the successful completion of two projects included in our charge - the “Welcome Kit” and the Biennial Membership Survey of 2006. The “Welcome Kit” was mailed to thirty-five of our newer ALL-SIS colleagues in February 2006. This “Welcome Kit” included:
The Biennial-Membership Survey of 2006 was conducted this past spring. This survey was designed by the Committee to obtain feedback from the ALL-SIS membership regarding their interests and needs to shape the work of the SIS in the future. The ALL-SIS community in this survey conveyed their interest to explore educational programs in traditional library services as well as emerging issues. Some of the major conclusions from the results of this survey are summarized below:
In conclusion, the feedback from the survey provides a snapshot of the issues that are of primary concern to members and highlights further topics for ALL-SIS to explore in the future.
The 2005 - 2006 Newsletter Committee consisted of Leah Sandwell-Weiss, Chair; Donald L. Ford, University of Colorado Law Library; Sue Kelleher, Barry University School of Law Library; Colleen C. Williams, Georgia State University College of Law Library; and Board Liaison, Carole Hinchcliff. Our issues this year were published on August 31, 2005, February 2, 2006, and May 30, 2006, meeting our schedule.
Highlights of this year’s issues include articles on:
The other highlight of the year actually did not involve the committee in anything but an advisory role: the finding and digitizing of all the old issues of this newsletter. This was primarily the work of Diane Murley, the ALL-SIS website committee co-chair and webmaster. The archives are up at www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/newsletter/Archives/archive.html. Thanks, Diane, for all your work on this project.
As editor/chair, I would like to thank all the committee members for their hard work and their articles. Sue collected the Member News for all three issues, Colleen wrote Developing a Law Faculty Publications Database: The Georgia State University Law Library Experience, for the Summer 2006 issue, and Don provided a lot of editing/proofreading assistance. I’d also like to thank Sara Kelley for continuing her Developments in Legal Education column even though she was no longer on the committee and all the ALL-SIS members who submitted articles for publication, especially Brian Huddleston, Frank Y. Liu, Joel Fishman, Diane Murley, Ron Wheeler, Stephanie Davidson, Helane Davis, Susan Herrick, Rosalie Sanderson, Rob Hudson, and the folks on the Membership and CONALL/Mentoring committees for sending information and pictures for our New Member Spotlight column. Finally, I’d also like to thank Michael Slinger and Carole Hinchcliff for their support and advice.
This year’s ALL-SIS website committee included David Carl Genzen, Cleveland State University; Donna Gulnac, UCLA; Kit Kreilick (Co-Chair); Diane Murley, Southern Illinois University (Co-Chair); Steven R. Probst, Valparaiso University; and Leah Sandwell-Weiss, University of Arizona. Our charge included developing re-design ideas and working with ALL-SIS committees and the executive board to determine new information that should be on the website.
If you have visited the ALL-SIS website (www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/) over the past months, you may have noticed a gradual change in the site’s appearance, as more and more pages have had their background image of shelves of books replaced by a white background on a field of blue. The old banner remains, but we are having a contest to design a new banner. You will find details on the contest elsewhere in this issue and on the website.
We added a “What’s New?” section on the home page, from which I link to recent additions to the website, current activities of committees or the section as a whole, announcements of deadlines, and other new and time-sensitive information.
Several ALL-SIS committees have added pages to the ALL-SIS site, providing information about committee activities and links to committee projects. We plan to add pages for as many committees as possible, with the type of page content varying according to each committee's charge. You can find links to committee pages from the home page.
The other change to the website has been less obvious. I have added links to previous versions of pages, where available, for historical and archival purposes. The links to historical pages may appear at the bottom of the current page, as they do on the committee reports page (www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/reports/index.asp), or on a separate index page, such as the meetings and programs page (www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/meetings/index.asp).
As a special project, working with the centennial committee and the newsletter, I had all available issues of the ALL-SIS Newsletter and its predecessor, the ALL Newsletter, scanned into PDF. You can link to the newsletter archives from the ALL-SIS Newsletter home page (www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/newsletter/NewsLetter.html). We are still missing a few issues, and we would like to add an index. If you can provide any of the missing issues or would like to help with the indexing, please contact me at dmurley@siu.edu or Leah Sandwell-Weiss at leah.sandwell-weiss@law.arizona.edu.