VOLUME 27
ISSUE 3
Summer 2008

Inside this issue:

• ALL-SIS Programs Accepted for the 2008 Annual Meeting
  • Program & Event Schedule
• ALL-SIS NEEDS YOU!!
  • Committee Volunteer Form
• Call for Papers Program in Portland
• Empirical Legal Studies
• First Annual Report of the ALL-SIS Student Services Committee
  • Results of the “Student Services in Academic Law Libraries Survey”
• Join Us for the 2008 Legislative Advocacy Leadership Training in Portland!
• Member News
• New Member Spotlight
• On the Nightstand
• PreCYdent:  A New Search Engine Enters the Legal Research World
• Proposed Amendments to ALL-SIS Bylaws
• The Role of Print Repositories in an Electronic Age

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

As my term as ALL-SIS Chair comes to a close, I would like to take this time to reflect on recent events as well as highlight upcoming activities. As all of you have heard, we have lost another giant in the field this year, Roy Mersky, and his absence will be keenly felt throughout our community. ALL-SIS has made a donation to AALL’s Centennial Fund in memory of Roy, and we know that his contributions to law librarianship will never be forgotten. We’ll have an article about Roy in the next issue of the Newsletter.

Our election of new officers took place in April. Please join me in congratulating our incoming Board members:  Beth Adelman, Vice-Chair/Chair Elect, and Sara Sampson, Secretary/Treasurer. Thanks to everyone who voted! Congratulations also go to the recipients of this year’s ALL-SIS awards and grants. For the Frederick Charles Hicks Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Law Librarianship, we have two equally deserving awardees:  Roy M. Mersky and Robert L. Oakley. The winner of the ALL-SIS Outstanding Article Award is Carol Parker for her article, Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access:  Changing the Way We Think About Legal Scholarship, 37 New Mexico L. Rev. 431 (2007). For the ALL-SIS Outstanding Service Award, we have two recipients:  Diane Murley (webmaster) and Leah Sandwell-Weiss (Editor of the ALL-SIS Newsletter); without either of them, ALL-SIS’s operations would be significantly less smooth than they currently are. Thanks to the Awards Committee (Patricia Harris O’Connor (Chair), Frances Brilliantine, Marlene Alderman, Terrance Manion, Sandy Sadow, and Victoria Williamson) for their excellent work in soliciting nominations and selecting recipients.

As this year’s annual meeting approaches, I wanted to remind everyone again of the revised format for a number of our ALL-SIS events this summer. First, the Middle Managers’ Breakfast will turn into a late afternoon substantive forum, to be held on Saturday, July 12th. Second, the Business meeting will be combined with the Reception and Awards Ceremony, to be held at 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, July 13th. Our VIP this year will be Steve Johansen, Director of Legal Analysis and Writing at Lewis and Clark Law School and a past-president of the Legal Writing Institute. Through both formal and informal discussions, we hope to build stronger relations with this group in coming years.

Please check out all the exciting programs that we have lined up for you in Portland. You can find information about them in this newsletter and on the special annual meeting page on the ALL-SIS Web site. If you are a newer academic law librarian, please mark your calendar to attend the Newer Academic Law Librarians Meeting (NALLM). It takes place at the Hilton at 5:30 p.m. (right before the business meeting and reception) and is a wonderful opportunity to network and to ask questions of librarians experienced in all library operations. Details for all these events will be available at the ALL-SIS table in the activities area of the exhibit hall and on the ALL-SIS Web site, www.aallnet.org/sis/allsis/annualmeeting/2008/.

The last year has been a very busy, yet educational and rewarding time. Working with ALL-SIS Executive Board members Filippa Anzalone, Linda Ryan, Suzanne Thorpe, and Marianne Alcorn has been a pleasure and I thank them for their efforts this year, as well as for their wise contributions on ALL-SIS policy issues. I would also like to thank all of the dedicated individuals serving as committee chairs and committee members this past year, as their efforts are reflected in every aspect of ALL-SIS’s operations from the publication of our newsletter to the designing of a new Student Services webpage to the release of the first draft of a new statistics measurement tool to assess outputs. Thank you for allowing me to serve as ALL-SIS Chair this year. I hope to see all of you in Portland.

Best wishes,
Michelle