The ALL-SIS CALI Committee works year round as the Advisory Panel for the CALI Legal Research Community Authoring Project. This summer CALI, and the many academic law librarian authors reached a milestone of 100 Legal Research lessons in the CALI library. CALI and the ALL-SIS committee, however, are always looking for new authors. If you might be interested in being a CALI author you can find more information on CALI’s web site at http://www.cali.org/static/lrcap.
CALI has recently launched two new initiatives that provide opportunities for academic law librarians to contribute in new ways. At AALL in July 2010, CALI rolled out the CALI Reviser Project. This project allows a law librarian to adopt an “orphaned” CALI lesson. Lessons may be orphaned because the original author has retired or no longer has the time to review, edit and update the lesson. This is a nice way to learn the CALI Author software (if you are considering authoring a new lesson) and will get you a shared authoring credit (listed in OCLC!) You may even be eligible for a modest honorarium. For more information about the CALI Reviser Project, including a list of lessons needing adoption, see http://www.cali.org/Revisers.
Finally, a brand new initiative from CALI is the LibTour project offered via CALI’s Classcaster. The idea is to provide a brief audio “tour” of resources standard to most academic law libraries. Librarians can write a script and record the audio tour. CALI will then post the audio tour to Classcaster, create a QR code which students can scan with a smart phone, and create a letter-size poster that libraries can display near the resource in their library. The first LibTour was written by Beth DeFelice on American Law Reports and can be heard at http://libtour.classcaster.net/. If the accompanying poster was displayed near the ALRs, a student could go to the shelves, scan the QR code with their smart phone and listen to the audio tour while standing with the materials. Alternatively, the QR codes could be incorporated in to online tours that a library might develop for Orientation or a Legal Research class. This is an exciting new project which creates excellent opportunities for ALL-SIS members to author short works which will be valuable to libraries across the country. If you would like more information on the project please contact Austin Groothuis, 312-906-5303 or agroothuis at cali.org.