Showcase Your Great Ideas
Always a popular feature at our AALL Annual Meeting, posters are on display in the exhibit hall throughout the entirety of the Annual Meeting.
Creators of accepted posters should plan to be available during the poster session presentation period on Tuesday, July 18 from 9:45 a.m.–11:15 a.m. EST to answer questions and discuss their work. Creators are also encouraged to be on hand during the Opening Reception on Saturday evening, and the Sunday and Monday exhibit hall breaks, since these no-conflict events see increased traffic in the exhibit hall. An award will be given to the poster deemed best by the Annual Meeting Poster Session Award Jury.
- Deadline: Poster ideas must be submitted by June 5.
- Questions: Contact Ashley Laverty, AALL manager of conference programs & education.
SUBMISSION FORM
The submission form will open on Monday, April 24, and all poster ideas will be due by June 5.
RESOURCES
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Frequently Asked Questions 1. What is a poster session? A poster session is a visual forum for presenters to highlight their libraries and to share their successful ideas with colleagues by presenting a research study, a practical problem-solving effort, or an innovative library program. These sessions are suitable for a presentation of topics that may not be meaty enough for an entire paper or formal presentation and allow for works in progress. Posters combine text and graphics to present information in a clear, visual manner, and allow conference participants to become quickly and easily acquainted with the topic on their own.
2. What topics are appropriate? A poster can cover any topic related to law libraries and legal information. Example topics would be a description of an innovative library program, a discussion of classroom techniques, or findings from a research project. They are not vendor sponsored advertisements, although independent product discussions and analysis are welcome.
3. What should poster session proposals include? The proposal must include a title, name(s) of the creator(s), and an abstract of 50–200 words describing the information to be presented in the poster. As with the conference educational programming, you’ll need to designate a content area, and the posters should support AALL’s Body of Knowledge or the Strategic Plan.
4. If my poster is accepted, what do I have to do? Create an engaging visual display that explains your topic to be affixed to a free-standing board. Specific size and material requirements for the posters will be sent with the poster acceptances. Please note you are responsible for printing and shipping costs. Plan to set up your poster between 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. EST on Saturday, July 15. Poster creators and co-creators will need to be present during the poster session presentation period on Tuesday, July 18 from 9:45 a.m.–11:15 a.m. EST to answer questions and discuss your poster. You must remove your display once the exhibit hall closes on Tuesday at noon.
5. Are there any available resources for creating posters? Yes, please review these two resources as well as the submissions from last year’s Annual Meeting & Conference below.
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Get Inspired: Read the 2022 submissions Information Management
Indexing for Your Firm or Faculty (1)
Book publishers rarely provide free indexes anymore; even in-house publications by law firms, courts, and law schools can benefit from indexes. This poster shows fundamental indexing techniques and professional development resources for librarians who want to add indexing to their service portfolio. Techniques on the poster include selecting index terms from text, composing headings and subheadings, language consistency, and cross references. Brochures containing the poster content will be available for attendees to take away.
Linda Tashbook, University of Pittsburgh – Barco Law Library
The People’s Law Library of Maryland (2)
The Thurgood Marshall State Law Library maintains the People’s Law Library (PLL), a legal information and self-help website. PLL content includes 75+ instructional/procedural articles (e.g., how to start a case), 400+ substantive law articles (e.g., child custody), a directory of legal services organizations, a statewide legal clinic calendar, and connects users with the Library’s reference desk and the Maryland Court Help Centers.
The poster will provide information about the site redesign, technical upgrades, and content development, which began in 2018 and was completed in 2022. The site redesign included rebranding the site and updating site navigation. Technical upgrades included improving accessibility, modernizing the user experience, enhancing the mobile user experience, and optimizing the legal services directory and clinic calendar. Content development included translating additional articles into languages other than English, prioritizing content frequently handled by self-represented litigants, and developing workflows for legal content reviews.
The success of the site redesign, upgrades, and content development is evidenced by increased site traffic. For example, pageviews increased by 90% between fiscal year 2018 and fiscal year 2021. Pageviews for fiscal year 2022 is on track to be even higher, and the poster will include fiscal year 2022 statistics.
Chi Song, Thurgood Marshall State Law Library
Marketing + Outreach
Beyond Climate: The Intersectionality of Environmental Justice (3)
Environmental justice is the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, national origin, or income in the development, implementation, and enforcement of laws, regulations, and policies related to environment, climate, and food. When considering environmental justice, many focus on climate and climate change, but the related issues and solutions extend far beyond climate to environment and conservation, food and food systems, and issues of land management and indigenous sovereignty. Through this poster we will examine the intersecting issues and suggested solutions that fall under the umbrella of environmental justice; we will focus on food justice, climate, and indigenous sovereignty. We will share selected tools that address these issues and encourage viewers to apply an intersectional lens to environmental justice.
Jamie Flood, USDA National Agricultural Library, National Agricultural Law Information Partnership & University of Illinois
Kirstin Nelson, USDA National Agricultural Library, National Agricultural Law Information PartnershipBook Displays, Powered by LibGuides (4)
Libraries have spent their entire history cultivating impressive collections but are increasingly struggling to connect those resources to patrons in the digital age. The COVID-19 Pandemic exacerbated this trend, with many libraries limiting checkout policies or outright closing their doors to patrons. Our own book displays have gone entirely unnoticed for years. To increase awareness of the library’s offerings to students, faculty, and other stakeholders, we began marketing our displays with accompanying LibGuides. The early returns have been notably positive.
Justin Iverson, William S. Boyd School of Law at UNLV
Zero to Hero: How a Small Staff Can Make a Big Impact in Student Services (5)
In our efforts to welcome students back to the library and rebuild community after two years of remote/hybrid learning, the Belmont Law Library staff has placed an emphasis on bringing joy to our students’ lives. Our initiatives were either free or low cost and received universal praise from students and the administration, including 100% approval ratings in our year-end survey. Initiatives to be discussed include wellness activities, holiday and event-themed snack displays, legal games, and social media campaigns.
Emily McCutcheon, Laura Randazzo, and Amanda Brock, Belmont University College of Law
Research + Analysis
Couldn’t Stop, Wouldn’t Stop: Scholarly Research During the Pandemic (6)
While working from home for the 18 months that our library was closed, I worked on some very cool research projects related to my scholarly interests, including critical legal studies, the history of censorship in East German libraries, Jewish arbitration in the United States, and comparing judicial discretion in criminal sentencing in California and Germany. Come check out my presentation and writings from this period, and let’s talk about how to stay motivated and engaged when working on scholarly projects!
Jennifer Allison, Harvard Law School Library
Print Elimination & Enhanced Online Access Points (7)
Print Elimination Initiative: Need to move to electronic but have push-back? Learn about the steps, relationships built, and intranet access points created to fully cancel Court Rules and all other electronically accessible publications firm-wide, saving several $100k year over year.
State Executive Order Keyword Searchable Database (COVID-19): Why create? Orders are centralized on large vendor sites requiring manual 1-1 review vs. searchable to access only relevant, subject matter results. Many documents are imaged PDFs vs. OCR searchable. These fill a niche need.
Intranet Enhancements: Incorporate vendor results across several vendors in one location (Google-like). Learn how to create these partnerships with your vendors by internally partnering with several groups to roll out and develop.
Newsletter Centralization: Do you have multiple vendors offering newsletters to allow attorneys to remain up to speed in their practice/industry? Create one location to review offerings globally by practice area with notes/links to sign up.
Embed Yourself in Practice Groups: Leadership partnerships to roll out specialized training series per PG and publish PG-specific resources to their intranet site for quick access. Learn innovative ideas or create a solution.
Jillian Eaton, Baker Donelson
Teaching + Training
BA in Law + MA LIS: Creating New Pipelines for Law Librarianship (8)
The University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in collaboration with the School of Government & Public Policy launched a BA in Law in Fall 2014. This first-in-the-country undergraduate law degree enrolls over 1,500 students.
Law librarians and colleagues at the School of Information collaboratively developed a BA in Law AMP (Accelerated Master’s Program) MA LIS, scheduled to launch in Fall 2022.
BA in Law students apply to the MA LIS in their junior year of undergraduate study and begin taking master’s-level courses in their senior year. As many as 12 units can be applied to both the undergraduate and master’s degrees. The GRE is not required.
Students in this AMP are eligible for our two-year Law Library Fellowship, which includes a graduate assistant position with tuition remission. Students can fulfill internship requirements in the law library and complete the optional Legal Information certificate. Knowledge River, an iSchool program focused on recruiting and retaining BIPOC LIS students, is a key collaborator in this endeavor.
The goals of the AMP are numerous and revolve around the complementary needs of decreasing barriers to entry while increasing diversity throughout our profession. The AMP provides financial incentives, practical experience, and mentoring so that students are fully prepared to launch their careers after graduation.
Teresa Miguel-Stearns, Jennifer Rochelle, and Jen Bedier, University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law, Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library
Judicology: Visualizing Court Structures & Cases (9)
Once, I was a legal neophyte confused by all the countless bold text legal terminology and phrases and their meanings encased by—more words—in the legal textbooks and how to trace judicial procedural histories. Therefore, I have been on a mission to create a diagramming method that brings order to chaos, for the next generation of students of the law.
“Kim”areanna Ross, k i m Publications
Learning from the Students: Engaging Legal Technology Students in Organizational Planning (10)
Belmont University has hosted a Legal Technology Course since 2020. The course is a survey of current trends in legal technology with a mixture of lecture and practical experience through vendor-sponsored trials. This year, the law library investigated expanding technological resources and engaged the bright minds of the students participating in the legal technology course. Students were presented with a directive to convert one of the law library’s existing classroom spaces into a collaborative technology space. They were provided with a hypothetical budget and guidance from the legal technology professor. Their submission consisted of a 10 to 15-page proposal and 15-minute presentation on how they proposed to redesign the space. This effort provided students with the opportunity to survey the available technological resources and engage in a whole system approach to designing the space. Additionally, students will receive public acknowledgement for their ideas, if adopted. The law library was able to engage a bright group of professionals to provide input and feedback on what they, as students (our primary patron group), were looking for in the physical space.
Nicholas Pleasant, Belmont University College of Law Library