The ALL-SIS Program Committee received a large and varied group of program proposals for the upcoming Denver Conference. So many deserving proposals created a dilemma for the programming committee, Uwe Beltz, Paul Callister, Michele Finerty, Darla Jackson, Faye Jones, Rosemary LaSala, and I. After careful review the committee forwarded its recommendations to the AALL Annual Meeting Program Committee for review and consideration. A total of ten ALL-SIS sponsored programs were accepted: eight AALL programs, one AALL workshop, and one ALL-SIS program.
A panel of newer academic library directors will outline the skills they felt were most valuable to them in securing a director’s position and then thriving in that role. Panelists will discuss: budget management, change management, personnel management, project management, collection development and others. Participants will have an opportunity to select a skill they would like to explore and work in small groups to develop a learning plan for this skill.
This program will feature an open discussion among law librarians and the editors of The Bluebook. By answering questions posed by the moderator, the editors will explain the rationale behind Bluebook rules, while the librarians will discuss issues they face as they assist users with The Bluebook. The program is not intended to make the editors change the rules “for us,” but, instead, to make all users of the Bluebook better informed as they work with their editors and students.
Librarians have debated this issue for years. Now, with the economy putting pressure on law firms and law schools, the talk about who and how to train law students to become practicing attorneys is becoming action. Law firms have announced in-depth training programs where the incoming associates are paid less but enrolled in intensive training on practicing laws. Law schools have added practice-oriented courses, and some have instituted lawyering programs. There have even been suggestions of unpaid apprenticeships. This program will examine how the current economic crisis has shifted the focus on how to train associates. Panelists will discuss the challenges facing law firms and law schools and identify opportunities for librarians to map their future and be a part of these revolutionary changes.
Librarians need to be able to identify abilities in themselves and within developing members of the profession that will allow them to be effective leaders. The three parts to leadership development are: 1) “The Inside,” which means to know yourself. Examining the concepts of emotional intelligence will provide tools to better understand your leadership abilities and potential. 2) “The Outside,” which means how we relate and use our abilities within our groups and organizations. 3) “The Together,” which means it takes a village to raise a leader. Mentoring and feedback are vital to the development of one’s own abilities and those around us. This panel discussion/discovery session will provide ample opportunity to discover and interact with the presenters.
Communicating with students is a challenge academic law librarians face daily. Our competition is the students’ downtime, lunchtime, web time, and time with friends. What’s the best way to reach them? What works beyond the lure of free food? The ALL-SIS Student Services Committee will hold a “contest,” asking members to submit examples of their successes in communicating with students. The committee will choose approximately six top examples that will be presented at an informal poster session. Attendees will be able to drop by any or all of the sessions and see what worked, ask questions, and walk away with fresh ideas on communicating with students. All examples would be presented at the same time, and attendees could stop by as many as they wanted to in the allotted time.
Law schools are currently considering redefining their curriculums to respond to the highly influential 2007 Carnegie Report which advocates enhancing the signature pedagogy of legal education, the Socratic Method, with an experience that better integrates skills instruction. Legal research is a fundamental legal skill, one the bench and bar routinely indicate law schools do not teach well. As legal research professionals, law librarians should respond to the Carnegie Report by examining legal research education. This presentation explains how law librarians can contribute to curricular reform by leading the way with the development of a signature pedagogy for legal research, based on the Carnegie Report’s recommendations. The panel will provide an overview of the Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education, the need for a signature pedagogy of legal research, and how this statement can assist in advancing legal research instruction in law schools.
Many law libraries are looking to develop distinctive digital collections of materials that aren’t available through commercial publishers. Collecting documents secured through FOIA requests offers a unique opportunity for these institutions. As government secrecy has increased, the number of FOIA requests has escalated, making procuring previously restricted government documents for public use an important goal. Law libraries are poised at the intersection of scholarship, freedom of information, preservation, and collection development, standing in a pivotal position to help scholars and practitioners access this hard-to-find content. This program will present a cross-section of perspectives on building, contextualizing, publicizing, and preserving a digital archive collection of materials secured through FOIA. Discover how these declassified documents in digital formats can be collected, archived, and made accessible for current and future research
The 2007 Carnegie Report on Legal Education calls for significant changes in legal education, including greater emphasis on practical skills development. This could potentially result in greater teaching opportunities for law librarians. The speakers, three librarians who teach upper-level legal research courses, will discuss how they bring “real life” into their classrooms through their lectures, exercises, classroom discussions, and assessment tools. Using a foreign and international legal research class as a case study, the first speaker will guide participants through the necessary steps to design, obtain law school approval of, and implement a course. The second speaker will prepare participants to design a syllabus, including learning goals, and assignments that will measure students’ success at achieving those learning goals. The speaker will also address the need to consider students’ various learning styles when creating assignments. The final speaker will identify the skills and practices necessary for building one’s credibility as a professor, thereby creating an effective classroom presence. This program will help other librarians develop their own legal research course.
With every new year and each new technological marvel, the work of librarians engaged in collection development has the potential to get more complex. We are barraged with publication announcements in our e-mail inboxes, our print mailboxes and on our fax machines. Many of us also have contracts with book jobbers, subscriptions to products designed to help with collection development workflow, and a number of other individually devised schemes for locating and acquiring the right materials for our libraries, while eliminating the items that don’t fit our collections. With so much information at our fingertips and so many possibilities before us, now is the perfect time to review both the fundamental “tried-and-true” tools of collection development, as well as some of the newer tools that hold great promise for streamlining our workflow to get the most comprehensive and relevant information. This program will touch on a few of the most widely used traditional tools for collection development, some of which include Books in Print, WorldCat, acquisitions listservs, and slip/approval plans. It will then move on to some of the new and exciting possibilities offered by Web 2.0, like RSS feeds for new acquisitions and collection development blogs. Participants’ input on their favorite tools they currently use will be gathered and shared.
Panelists will explore different models of providing faculty services and the pros and cons of each model. Panelists will discuss strategies to find the right balance between providing faculty research support, teaching, and other library duties with constrained budgets, a smaller staff, and the push to be more proactive in legal education.
Please come out and support the ALL-SIS Programs in Denver and begin thinking about the proposals for the 2011 Philadelphia Conference.