VOLUME 27
ISSUE 2
Spring 2008

Inside this issue:

• Academic Law Libraries Experiment with Facebook
• ALL-SIS Sourcebook for Teaching Legal Research
• The “Call for Papers” Has Begun!
• Five Professional Development New Year’s Resolutions for a New Librarian
• It’s Never Too Early to Start Planning an Annual Meeting Program
• Member News
• Memorials
  • Donald J. Dunn, 1945 - 2008
  • Robert L. Oakley, 1945 - 2007
• On the Nightstand
• Principles and Core Values Concerning Public Information on Government Web Sites
• Slate for Election of Officers

Message from the Chair

Michelle Wu
Interim Senior Vice Dean for Academic Affairs and Professor of Law
Hofstra University
Deane Law Library
122 Hofstra University
Hempstead, NY 11549
516-463-5858
lawmmw@hofstra.edu

Happy New Year! As one year winds to a close and another begins, I would like to take this time to reflect on where we have been and also look to our activities in the months ahead.

This year, our reflections are dominated by memories of two great lights recently lost:  Bob Oakley and Don Dunn. They will both be greatly missed, and our sympathies go out to their families, friends, libraries, and law schools. Their legacies will live on in AALL and ALL-SIS, and we will continue to honor them by celebrating their contributions to librarianship and by following their lead in making our profession ever better.

In looking forward, planning for the annual meeting is in full swing. This year, ALL-SIS has made some notable changes in response to sponsorship and timing concerns. This year, we will forgo all vendor sponsorship, in hopes of becoming more self-sufficient and avoiding any appearance of conflict. We have also changed times and/or dates of events to accommodate the tighter schedules of the now condensed annual meeting and to make sponsorship less critical. The changes are as follows:  (1) the Middle Managers’ Breakfast will turn into a late afternoon substantive forum, to be held on Saturday, and (2) the Business meeting will be combined with the Reception and Awards Ceremony. The first 30 minutes (approximately) of Sunday evening will be spent on business and awards, after which the usual reception will follow. ALL-SIS will provide food in the form of appetizers and desserts, and there will be a cash bar. This Business Meeting, Reception, and Awards event will be held at the headquarters hotel instead of at a local library. The Board will continually assess the value of these changes throughout the annual meeting, and we encourage members to send comments our way.

The annual meeting will also bring an exciting array of ALL-SIS programming. Our Program Committee, chaired by Sara Sampson, forwarded twenty-nine proposals to the AALL Annual Meeting Program Committee and, of these, nine programs and one workshop were selected for presentation in Portland. In addition, ALL-SIS will sponsor three additional programs recommended by the Committee:  (1) Supporting New Faculty - Help them to Energize, Evolve and Explore their Teaching and Scholarship Responsibilities; (2) Evolving Research Instruction:  Exploring Law Student Information Literacy to Energize Instructional Programming; and (3) Evolving from Snoozing to Using:  Increasing Student-Centered Learning Using Educational Technology. A list of ALL-SIS programming for the 2008 Annual Meeting can be found at http://www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/annualmeeting/2008/programs.htm.

Our other committees have been equally busy, and I would like to highlight a just a few of their activities. The newly formed Student Services Committee will be surveying the membership early this spring on various student services practices (e.g., services to law journal students). They will collect, analyze, and report on the data as it becomes available, and their website will be designed to serve as a resource for all library personnel working with students. The Statistics Committee has completed its first draft of the supplementary statistics instrument, based on the survey that the committee conducted last year. They are currently field testing the instrument at selected libraries and hope to publish a draft within the year.

Before closing, I would like to ask each of you to think about individuals deserving of our ALL-SIS awards and grants. The deadline for submitting nominations is the end of March, but it is never too early to nominate colleagues for awards.

Wishing you a wonderful new year,
Michelle M. Wu
ALL-SIS Chair