In late summer 2005, Georgia State University College of Law Library began the process of building a faculty publications database. Law Librarian Nancy Johnson wanted to provide a searchable repository of faculty publications. Archiving our faculty publications is important to the College of Law’s history. Additionally, the list showcases faculty publications to attorneys, students, and graduates. The database went live on April 7, 2006.
The scope of the project was to list the publications of the more than 40 College of Law faculty members (including librarians) and provide links to the works available online.
The librarians met to decide on the types of publications that would be included in the database. We decided to have the following categories:
We decided to create links to publications available on Westlaw, LexisNexis, HeinOnline, Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN), the Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction website, and free websites. While at least one faculty member publishes in non-legal publications available in non-law databases (e.g., EBSCOhost), we were unable to find a way to link to such articles.
We decided to exclude continuing legal education materials, other seminar publications, speeches, presentation slides, and forthcoming works. The latter was excluded because the database will be regularly updated. We also decided to exclude faculty members who have not published, even though other law schools’ faculty publications databases we evaluated do list non-publishing faculty.
A Graduate Research Assistant (GRA), Elinor Hale, was made available during the fall semester to assist with the project. She gathered the lists of publications and began the process of verifying the citations under the supervision of reference librarian Colleen Williams.
The Law Library hired a pool of two GRAs for spring semester 2006, both of whom (Stephanie Mutti and Matthew Kaynard) greatly participated in this project. After completing the citation verification, the GRAs gave the lists of citations to the librarians (reference librarian Colleen Williams, senior reference librarian Nancy Adams, head of public services Beth Adelman, and electronic services librarian Terrance Manion), who searched for any publications the GRAs were unable to find. The librarians then consulted faculty members for feedback.
Once the citations to the faculty publications were collected, an interface was built by the College of Law web coordinator, Earl Daniels, to enter the citations into a database. The web-based data-entry screen supported several editing aids including a pop-up journal selector, link builder, and quick keys for copying and pasting citation elements to the proper input fields. Colleen Williams coordinated the data entry phase of the project and as it was progressing, a data retrieval system was developed. Scripts were written to support customized lists by faculty member, year of publication, and publication type. The output lists are formatted in proper Bluebook citation by cascading style sheets with provisions for exceptions to standard formatting. The final system offers significant flexibility and maintainability by separating the content from the presentation.
The most significant challenge to creating the database was coordinating with the different parties involved with the database. The law librarians needed to rely on the feedback of faculty, and the web coordinator had many other projects. However, everything came together, and the database went live the first week of April, in accordance with the Dean of the College of Law’s wish that it be online before the end of the spring semester.
Creating the database of current faculty is stage one of the faculty publications project. In the future, we will include the publications of former faculty published during their time at the College of Law.
This database of current faculty will be an ongoing project. Existing faculty lists are to be updated twice a year (fall and spring semesters), and lists for new faculty will be entered as they arrive.
Georgia State University College of Law’s faculty publications database is located at http://law.gsu.edu/library/index/faculty_publications/.
In creating our publications database, we looked at approaches taken by other law schools: