ALL-SIS Co-Sponsors the Legal Information & Technology eJournal

The Legal Information and Technology eJournal (www.ssrn.com/update/lsn/lsn_legal-info-tech.html) was launched in 2009 with the generous support of MALLCO. The eJournal’s co-founding editors are ALL-SIS members Randy Diamond (diamondrj@missouri.edu), Director of Library and Technology Resources and Associate Legal Research Professor of Law at the University of Missouri Columbia; and Lee Peoples (lpeoples@okcu.edu), Associate Professor of Law Library Science and Associate Law Library Director at Oklahoma City University. This summer the ALL-SIS Executive Board agreed to sponsor 2/3rds of the eJournal’s cost for the next three years. MAALL will sponsor the remaining 1/3rd of the cost for three years. These sponsorships will begin in January 2010.

We are pleased to announce that ALL-SIS will receive a number of benefits for co-sponsoring the eJournal. ALL-SIS will be prominently identified as a co-sponsor on the eJournal’s homepage and in each bi-monthly issue. Thematic issues highlighting papers from any ALL-SIS workshops or programs are also possible. We welcome article submissions from ALL-SIS members and will give any articles submitted by ALL-SIS members priority for inclusion in the bi-monthly eJournal issues.

Submitting an article is easy. If you already have an SSRN account, just upload your paper and classify it under the Legal Scholarship Network > LSN Subject Matter eJournals > Legal Information & Technology eJournal. If you do not have an SSRN account, it is very easy to set one up and upload your paper for free at www.ssrn.com. ALL-SIS members should email me or Randy once you have submitted your article to make sure we give it priority when selecting articles for the bi-monthly issues.

The primary goal in establishing the eJournal was to make the scholarship and professional literature of law librarianship accessible in one place. Randy summarized the idea as follows:

Imagine talking with a recent law graduate who is interested in becoming a law librarian. The grad was a research assistant for a prolific law professor, familiar with her use of various scholarly communication networks including SSRN, and asks you where she can look at a collection of current law librarian scholarly engagement, “you know like law faculty have in their SSRN subject matter journals.” “Well you can look at LLJ, LRSQ, Perspectives, and Spectrum, all are online. You can also search on SSRN for the names of law librarians you know and who you think may have posted their work there. That will give you a list of papers an author has posted to SSRN, but there isn’t an SSRN database where you can look at all law librarian SSRN postings in one place. You can also keyword search on SSRN for topics you think law librarians may have written about and you can browse the Legal Writing Journal, Legal Education Journal and a few others where law librarians have posted their work, but no, there isn’t a subject matter journal for law librarianship… .”

The eJournal is also a vehicle for:

• Establishing our presence in a venue frequented by law faculty and deans;
• Providing opportunities for the next generation of leaders to develop their writing agenda;
• Building a culture of scholarly communications within the profession facilitating feedback on ideas and works in progress;
• Extending awareness of law librarian scholarship throughout the legal academy and to other disciplines using SSRN; and,
• Creating another avenue for sharing our teaching materials and promoting our reputation as teachers and curricular innovators, especially in use of technologies.

We currently have over 300 subscribers and are nearing the 50,000 articles downloaded mark. If your institution has an SSRN subscription I urge you to subscribe to the eJournal today. To subscribe simply log on to www.ssrn.com, click on subscriptions, Legal Scholarship Network, LSN Subject Matter eJournals, and select Legal Information & Technology. A video explaining how to subscribe may be viewed here: http://ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html#subscrDemo.

Randy and I are extremely grateful to the 2008 - 2009 ALL-SIS Chair Filippa Anzalone, Vice Chair/Chair Elect Beth Adelman, the other members of the Executive Board, and to the ALL-SIS membership for supporting the eJournal. One of our primary concerns as co-founding editors of the eJournal was to keep it fully supported from within the profession and to not rely on vendor sponsorship. A description of the eJournal is included below. If you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me or Randy.

Legal Information & Technology (journal description)

The Legal Information and Technology eJournal includes working papers, forthcoming articles, and recently published articles in all areas of legal information scholarship. Topics include (but are not limited to):

1. The impact of legal information on domestic, comparative, and international legal systems;
2. The treatment of legal information authorities and precedents (e.g., citation studies);
3. The examination of rules, practices, and commentary limiting or expanding applications of legal information (e.g., citation to unpublished opinions and to foreign law);
4. The study of economic, legal, political, and social conditions limiting or extending access to legal information (e.g., trends in the legal publishing industry, intellectual property regimes, and open access initiatives);
5. The finding and use of legal information by academics to produce legal scholarship, by law students to learn the law, by attorneys in practice, and by judges and others decision makers to determine legal outcomes;
6. The history of legal information systems and technological advancements;
7. Legal information system design and assessment; and
8. The relationship of substantive areas of law (such as information law, intellectual freedom, intellectual property, and national security law) and other academic disciplines (e.g., information science) to legal information. This includes the scholarship of law librarians, other legal scholars, and other academic disciplines.

The eJournal also includes working papers, forthcoming articles, recently published articles, and selected documents (such as White Papers, briefings, reports, course materials) on the practice of law librarianship. Submissions are welcome in all areas of law librarianship including:

1. Administration, management, and leadership;
2. Facility design and construction;
3. Evaluating and marketing law library services;
4. All aspects of public, technical, and technology services;
5. Collection development, including sample collection development policies and procedures;
6. Electronic resource management and development including licensing, digitization, and institutional repositories;
7. Research and reference services; and
8. Legal research instruction teaching methods and substantial or innovative course materials.