This year’s Faculty Services Committee has hosted two listserv discussions, made plans for our Meeting and Roundtable at the AALL Annual Meeting in Denver, and made a good start on the Committee’s new charge: developing a Faculty Services Toolkit that will serve as a resource for faculty services and other law librarians who plan, provide, and supervise a faculty support services in academic law libraries. Committee member Creighton Miller has also undertaken the updating of our Committee web page resource list, “Library Faculty Services Information on Law Library and Law School Web Sites,” a project to be completed by July.
Members of the 2009 - 2010 Faculty Services Committee (Toni Aiello, Chair; Suzanne Thorpe, Vice Chair; and members Barbara Kallusky, Julie Graves Krishnaswami, Connie Lenz, Cynthia Lewis, Creighton Miller, Donna Nixon, Julieanne (Juju) Stevens, and Barbara Traub) met twice by conference call to plan and coordinate this year’s work. We have hosted two successful forum discussions, “Overcoming Challenges of Marketing Library Services & Resources to Faculty,” conducted January 26 - 27, 2009, with Cynthia Lewis as forum coordinator, and “The Emergence of 24/7 Faculty Services?”, a May discussion which posed the question of how the advent of mobile devices, laptops, and Web 2.0 have affected expectations for faculty services in academic law libraries. For the first time, the Committee decided to extend a forum discussion over three days, Friday, May 6 through Saturday, May 8, 2010, in order to make participation convenient for librarians working weekend schedules or needing more flexibility. While the response was excellent and the information and ideas shared were valuable and wide ranging, the scant activity on the Saturday argues in favor of going back to the Committee’s previous practice of scheduling most listserv discussions for Tuesday-Wednesday or Wednesday-Thursday dates. Summaries of both discussions will be posted to the Committee’s web site, in addition to the threads of both discussions in archived content.
A Toolkit sub-committee composed of Suzanne Thorpe, Connie Lenz, and Juju Stevens has developed a substantial outline of a Faculty Services Toolkit that will be a continuing project of the Committee and feature of our web pages. The Toolkit will consist of four major sections: Organizational Structures and Job Descriptions for Delivery of Faculty Services; Faculty Services (covering types of services being provided by librarians, examples, explanations, and descriptions); Administrative Details (sample policies, procedures, and forms, request and reporting systems, and other service methods); and Marketing Services and Resources. Each section will include links to relevant resources and bibliographies in addition to sample materials. The success of the project will depend on submissions from librarians and institutions well beyond the Committee, so watch for future Committee requests for sample documents for our Toolkit.
The Faculty Services Committee Meeting will be held on Sunday, July 11, 2010, from noon to 1:15 p.m. All are welcome, so please join us and share your input and ideas. The Faculty Services Roundtable will take place Monday, July 12, from noon to 1:15 p.m. The Committee has planned discussion groups on (1) introducing WestlawNext to faculty; (2) meeting the challenges of faculty needs, demands, and skill development for classroom, communication, and current awareness technology; and (3) developing and supporting faculty repositories. If you have an additional discussion idea or a new hot topic you would like to suggest, bring it to the Committee Meeting on Sunday. We hope many as possible will be able to join us for this year’s Roundtable.
In addition to the Meeting and Roundtable, an ALL-SIS sponsored “alternative” program, “ReMapping Faculty Services Support: New Models for Cooperation and Collaboration” will focus on faculty services. This program will take place Monday, July 12, from 8:45 a.m. - 9:45 a.m. Panelists, including Committee members Toni Aiello and Cynthia Lewis, “will explore different models of providing faculty services, the pros and cons of each model, and 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.”
We hope that you’ll make room in your calendars for these Annual Meeting programs.