The ALL-SIS Faculty Services Committee hosted a stimulating and informative roundtable on the second day of the AALL Annual Meeting in St. Louis. Coordinated by the 2005/2006 co-chairs, Michele Kristakis and Sara Sampson, the roundtable featured short presentations by Margaret Schilt on current awareness, James Wirrell on research assistance, and Leslie Pardo and Liz Goldberg on new faculty orientation.
The group of approximately 50 attendees then broke up into three groups, discussing best practices and news to share at the end with the larger group.
Current awareness ideas and initiatives include bloglists for faculty services webpages, new means of filtering the flood of information to faculty, and using a blog to deliver current awareness materials to adjunct faculty.
The research assistance group reported good success with hiring research assistants after their first year in law school for a two-year commitment; recruiting the dean to promote the research assistance program, and advised against hiring law review staff as research assistants, because they are too pressured by their commitment to the journal.
The new faculty orientation group suggested a webpage devoted specifically to new faculty as well as luncheon meetings with new faculty. Some libraries are able to have librarians on faculty development committees, giving the librarian the opportunity to promote the library even before a new faculty member arrives on campus.
A complete report of the ideas generated at the roundtable will be posted soon on the ALL-SIS faculty services committee website.
The Faculty Services Committee plans a busy year of adding new content to the committee website, as well as continuing our popular and informative listserv discussions. We will have two this year, one on copyright permissions issues and another on setting boundaries. Look for further information by email.