ALL-SIS Committee Annual Reports

2007–2008

Awards

The ALL-SIS Awards Committee selected the following award and grant winners. Winners will be recognized at the ALL-SIS combined business/award ceremony to be held on Sunday, July 13, 2008 during the AALL meeting in Portland.

Two persons were nominated for the Frederick Charles Hicks Award for Outstanding Contributions to Academic Law Librarianship. The Awards Committee elected to give this award jointly to Professor Roy M. Mersky (University of Texas) and Professor Robert L. Oakley (Georgetown).

The winner of the ALL-SIS Outstanding Article Award is Carol A. Parker (Law Library Director and Associate Professor at the University of New Mexico Law Library). Her article, Institutional Repositories and the Principle of Open Access: Changing the Way We Think About Legal Scholarship, is available at 37 New Mexico L. Rev. 431 (2007).

The Awards Committee decided to award the ALL-SIS Outstanding Service Award jointly to Diane Murley (Web Services Coordinator/Reference Librarian at Arizona State University) and Leah Sandwell-Weiss (Reference Librarian & Adjunct Assistant Professor of Legal Research at the University of Arizona College of Law Library). Ms. Murley has served the Academic SIS by being its Web Administrator. Ms. Sandwell-Weiss has served the Academic SIS by editing its newsletter.

The members originally appointed to the 2007/08 Awards Committee were Patricia Harris O'Connor (Chair from the Western State University College of Law), Francis Brillantine (Catholic University of America), Marlene Alderman (Boston University), Terrance Manion (Georgia State University College of Law), Sandy Sadow (Widener University) and Victoria Williamson (University of LaVerne College of Law). During the academic year, Ms. Sadow retired and Ms. Williamson accepted a position at the San Diego County Public Law Library, making her no longer eligible to work on the committee.

The information on the ALL-SIS awards and grants found at the ALL-SIS home page (http://aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/awards/) was revised. At the suggestion of Past ALL Chair Suzanne Thorpe a Nomination Form was created for the Frederick Charles Hicks Awards to facilitate the receipt of nominations. The process of nominating candidates and coordinating the work of the committee was greatly facilitated this past year by judicious use of email to receive nominations and electronic or scanned copies of articles under consideration for the Outstanding Article award.

The Committee Chair will continue to be Chair next year and will work with the new committee members to revise the submission requirements to facilitate the use of email for the work of the Committee. At the request of the Board, next year's Committee will also draft new language to re-instate the CONELL Awards.

Bylaws

Submitted by Deborah Norwood, Chair

Committee Members:

Dragomir Cosanici
McGeorge School of Law Library
Patricia Fox
Widener University School of Law Library
Deborah Norwood, Chair
George Washington University School of Law Library
Mary Persyn
Valparaiso University School of Law Library

The committee drafted a revision to the bylaws on succession of officers due to a vacancy. The intent of the proposed amendment is to bring the bylaws of the Academic Law Libraries Special Interest Section into compliance with the AALL model bylaws for special interest sections.

The draft was submitted to the Executive Board, who approved placing the amendment before the membership for a vote, as required by Article VII of the section's bylaws. The proposed amendment was published in the section newsletter and posted on the section's website. A vote on the revision is scheduled for the section's business meeting at the 2008 annual meeting for AALL.

A marked copy of the bylaw is set out below:

Article V: OFFICERS AND COMMITTEES

Section 3. Succession

In the event of the disability or withdrawal of the Chair, the title, duties, and obligations of the office shall be assumed by the Vice-Chair, who shall then serve until the end of his or her own term as Chair. If the vacancy occurs more than twenty weeks before the next election, a special election shall be held to fill the office of Vice-Chair/Chair-Elect upon the assumption of the office of Chair by the Vice-Chair.

The occurrence of a vacancy in the position of chair shall be filled by the succession of the present vice chair/chair-elect to serve as chair until the next scheduled election of special interest section officers. The occurrence of a vacancy in the position of vice-chair/chair-elect or secretary-treasurer (either before or after the vice-chair or secretary-treasurer takes office) shall be filled by a special election conducted by the nominating committee. The person elected by special election shall serve in this position for the duration of the term of office.

CALI

Over the past year, CALI's Editorial Board and the Legal Research Community Authoring Project (LRCAP), which is made up of the ALL-SIS committee members, has reviewed every legal research lesson over 3 years old. Due to this review over 20 lessons were updated and revised. There are currently over 72 legal research lessons. During the past year LRCAP has also made a concerted marketing effort to solicit lessons on state primary and secondary legal research. Efforts have also continued to expand the lessons available in Foreign and International legal research. Both of these areas are expanding quickly.

CALI has developed a new lesson review template which has been extremely beneficial to the anonymous reviewers and has provided a more consistent feedback to authors. In addition, CALI and LRCAP has started an Author's Wiki to provide tips and tricks for new CALI authors.

In the upcoming year LRCAP will continue to review legal research lessons that were written over 3 years ago and have not been revised in the past 3 years. LRCAP will also continue to solicit lessons for state primary and secondary legal research lessons and lessons on foreign and international law. The challenge has been and will probably continue to be in the area of foreign and international legal research. This area of lesson development has been slower than other topics in legal research. Continued outreach to the Foreign, Comparative & International Law SIS will be crucial to building lessons in this area.

Collection Development

One goal of the committee this year was to make the web page more relevant. One associated project was to update the collection development pages. A subcommittee solicited new policies and asked for updates on existing policies. In addition, I appointed a liaison to work with the ad hoc committee set up within the Technical Services SIS to examine collection development policies. The TS-SIS acquisitions group had contacted me to discuss cd policies being in multiple places. We agreed that since TS seemed to be the logical umbrella group, why not collect all policies, or at least links, from the library-type SISs to be put on the TS cd page.

A subgroup worked on collecting blogs, listserves, etc. relevant to collection development. The list will appear on the committee's web page.

Connie Lenz recommended a meeting of the collection development librarians from the large academic law libraries. She contacted the “qualifying” librarians and has set up a first meeting of this group for Portland.

Some projects that didn't quite get off the ground will be resurrected in Portland for next year.

Merle Slyhoff
Chair

Continuing Education

The 2007–2008 ALL-SIS Continuing Education included Jenny Lentz, UCLA, Lynn Hartke, Saint Louis University, Melissa Bernstein, University of Texas and Leslie A. Pardo (Chair), Arizona State University. A productive meeting was held at the conference in New Orleans. Two projects were planned which including an ABA approved CLE Program for the ALL-SIS membership and a Best of Regional Meetings competition.

The committees conducted a survey of the ALL-SIS membership on possible program topics and investigated the ABA requirements for CLE programs. The survey yielded the following results: 79.8% of those participating in the survey would very likely or likely participate in a teaching legal research continuing education program, 69.7% in a faculty services program and 67% in a management program. Most would participate in a local workshop, 91.9% and 62.9% would attend a regional program. A webinar was a little more popular at 51.5% than a podcast at 39.8%. Virtual programming was far less popular than in-person programming. CLE credit does not seem to be a factor in participation. Only 24.2% would likely participate if they would receive CLE credit and 80% of respondents had JDs. ABA requirements for CLE credits are virtually impossible to meet for all states unless you partner with a big vendor and the committee was advised not to do this.

The committee then set out to work on a second project, a Best of Regional Programming competition. The competition had two purposes: to recognize achievement in continuing education programming by an ALL-SIS chapter and to create a repository for continuing education ideas on the ALL-SIS web site which all members could utilize and benefit from. The committee submitted a proposal to the ALL-SIS Board which outlined the objective, eligibility, administration of the award, judging criteria, the award process, and award presentation. A nomination form was also created. The Board considered the award and decided not to go forward with it this year.

An idea grew from the Best of Regional Programming competition that would still serve the purpose of the committee and the award. A repository could be created on the ALL-SIS web site of continuing education programs offered by chapters. It could be comprehensive or each chapter could select their best programs to post. Links to handouts and audio or video could be a featured on the site. Not only would it be a helpful repository of ideas but it would be a historical timeline of continuing education programs for law librarians. The board felt it would be a very valuable resource.

The Chair would like to thank the members of the committee for all their hard work this past year.

Continuing Status/Tenure

Directors' Breakfast

Faculty Services

The ALL-SIS Faculty Services Committee includes Toni Aiello (Hofstra); Matthew Braun (George Washington); Sooin Kim (Toronto); Deborah Person (Wyoming); Ellen Platt (Santa Clara); Adeen Postar (American); Wendy Scott (Syracuse); Jane Thompson (Colorado); and Valerie Weiss (Pittsburgh). It is chaired by Joanne Dugan (Baltimore).

Outgoing co-chairs Marianne Alcorn and Margaret Schilt coordinated the ALL-SIS Faculty Services Committee Roundtable, held July 16, 2007 at the AALL Annual Meeting in New Orleans. Adeen Postar, Marianne Alcorn and Margaret Schilt facilitated small group discussions. Participants chose among topics that included What New Faculty Liaisons Need to Know; Plagiarism; and The Obsessive Reference/Faculty Services Librarian. The discussion was quite lively at times!

The Faculty Services Committee focused this year on how we can best support our faculty who are breaking new ground, either in their research or in their own careers. That theme will continue at the Annual Meeting in Portland.

In March, the Committee sponsored a listserv discussion entitled “Supporting the Interdisciplinary and Empirical Research Needs of Law Faculty.” Toni Aiello took the lead in administering the discussion. We had a good response from ALL-SIS members, and Ellen Platt posted the Archives of the discussion on the ALL-SIS webpage: http://aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/faculty/
discussion/interdisciplinary-empirical-research.pdf

In May, Adeen Postar coordinated a second listserv discussion, “Herding Cats: Providing Services to Adjunct Faculty.” Again, we had a nice discussion, which Ellen has offered to post to the website. That should be done shortly.

Also in May, Joanne Dugan created a survey on services to new faculty. The results will be announced during a program in Portland.

The Faculty Services webpage also includes a list of faculty services webpages. Wendy Scott originally compiled the list in 2006 and updated it this year. Ellen Platt converted it to HTML: http://aallnet.org/sis/allsis/committees/faculty/
materials/webinfo.asp

The Committee has three events scheduled during the Annual Meeting in Portland: the Committee business meeting on Sunday, 7/12/08 at noon; the Round Table discussion on Monday, 7/14/08 at 10:45; and a program on Sunday 7/12/08 at 1:30 entitled Supporting New Faculty: Helping Them to Energize, Evolve and Explore Their Teaching and Scholarship Responsibilities. The program is coordinated by Adeen Postar and will feature Adeen, Jane Thompson, and Joanne Dugan.

Legal Research & Sourcebook

Local Arrangements

Membership

The ALL-SIS Membership Committee is charged to:

Work regularly with AALL Headquarters to identify new members of the ALL-SIS
Maintain the “Welcome Kit” for new members to the SIS and send it to new members of ALL-SIS
Work with NALLM/Mentoring Committee to spotlight new ALL-SIS members in the ALL-SIS Newsletter
Develop recruitment information on the benefits of membership for the ALL-SIS website
Submit one column to the ALL-SIS Newsletter describing the work of the committee during the current year

The Membership Committee is also tasked with conducting a member survey every other year.

Committee members met in New Orleans to discuss activities for the coming year. We planned to propose a program for the Portland Conference about using academic seminars to recruit law students to librarianship, and to develop the bi-annual member survey. The outgoing chair had indicated that membership packets should be processed after January, so we expected to really gear up around that time.

A program was proposed for Portland, but was rejected by the program committee.

We met by phone in February 2008, and discussed the committee charges. We divided up the list of new members to conduct email and telephone interviews for the purpose of writing spotlight articles. Thanks go to committee members Mila Rush, Tina Ching, Marin Dell, Sarah Glassmeyer, Margaret Christiansen and Sally Wambold for their efforts in this area.

New member welcome packets were sent to 40 individuals who had joined the SIS between September 2007 and January 2008.

The committee discussed the member survey. In reviewing past efforts, we realized that every version was different, making long-term statistical analysis impossible. We also discussed concerns about the purpose of the survey. From the responses to the most recent survey, we identified the following list of 20 issues that we thought might be worth investigating, either through further surveys or as topics of interest for the program committee to consider:

Faculty support and outreach
Legal research, especially Advanced Legal research
Student support and outreach
Job postings
Career advancement
Academic freedom and Tenure
Job discrimination
Employee management
Current issues in librarianship
Collection Development
Censorship/Patriot Act and other Advocacy Issues
Mentoring
Librarian recruitment (new librarians/potential administrators)
Research Assistant programs/management
Pro se issues and concerns, strategies for successfully meeting these needs
Statistics
Virtual reference
Getting published
Faculty status and/or rank
Using new technology

Faculty status and/or rank might be included in Academic freedom and Tenure.

A request was made to the board to collect information from other SIS committees regarding member survey interests. However, it appears that there was not enough time for responses to this query to be developed. As a committee, we were unable to identify any specific data-gathering purpose for the survey. Without specific questions to answer, it was not possible to design a worthwhile instrument. The board will need to consider whether a bi-annual survey is really desired and what the purpose of collecting the data should be. The board's decisions on these issues should be communicated to the incoming committee chair, Margaret Christiansen, as quickly as possible so that her committee can proceed with the survey this year.

An email invitation was sent to 675 academic members of AALL who are not members of the ALL SIS to attend the SIS programs in Portland and (re)consider joining the SIS.

Notes for the incoming chair:

January is too late to begin the new member welcome packets and spotlights. This information should be requested quarterly so that timely actions may be taken.
The SIS secretary/treasurer is the person who can obtain new member information (whether or not he/she knows it).
Hannah Phelps is the person to contact at AALL to obtain information about academic members of AALL who do not belong to the ALL SIS.
In my opinion, the strongest invitation to academics who aren't part of the SIS would be signed by the SIS president and timed to arrive just before the AALL membership renewal notices.
In designing future surveys, it would be helpful to designate a core set of demographic items to track, and to establish a clear purpose for the data to be gathered in other areas of the instrument.

Respectfully Submitted,
Laureen C. Urquiaga
2007–2008 Membership Committee Chair

Middle Managers' Breakfast

New Academic Law Librarian's Meeting (NALLM)/Mentoring

The 2007 – 2008 Newsletter Committee consisted of Leah Sandwell-Weiss, Chair; Sue Kelleher, Texas Tech University School of Law Library; Simon Canick, University of Connecticut School of Law Library; Susan Herrick, University of Maryland at Baltimore; Stephanie Marshall, Texas Wesleyan University School of Law; Steven Robert Miller, Indiana University School of Law - Indianapolis; Alexandra Olson, Akerman Senterfitt; I-Wei Wang, University of California School of Law Library; and Board Liaison, Marianne Alcorn. Our three regular issues this year were published on September 7, 2007, January 31, 2008, and June 3, 2008; the election issue was published on 25 March 2008.

Highlights of this year's issues included:

Reviews of programs given and roundtables held at the annual meeting, committee assignments and charges, a new column (On the Nightstand), and some recommended non-law books for law librarians (Fall 2007);
Articles on Facebook, the ALL-SIS Sourcebook for Teaching Legal Research, professional development resolutions, and memorials on Donald Dunn and Bob Oakley (Spring 2008);
Articles on ALL-SIS programs and activities scheduled at the upcoming annual meeting, empirical legal research, PreCYdent, and the results of the student services survey (Summer 2008).

I would like to thank all the committee members for their hard work and their articles. Sue collected the Member News for all three issues, Steven Robert Miller wrote Instructional Technology in Teaching Legal Research: Tricks of the Trade in the Real and Virtual Classroom for the Fall 2007 issue and PreCYdent: A New Search Engine Enters the Legal Research World for the Summer 2008 issue. I-Wei Wang wrote Networking to Serve Self-Represented Litigants for the Fall 2007 issue and Five Professional Development New Year's Resolutions for a New Librarian in the Spring 2008 issue. I-Wei also initiated a new column “On the Nightstand” to cover “good reads” for law librarians. Susan Herrick wrote Fourth Northeast Regional Law Libraries Meeting for the Fall 2007 issue and provided a lot of editing/proofreading assistance.

I'd also like to thank Sara Kelley for continuing her Developments in Legal Education column in the Fall issue even though she was no longer on the committee and all the ALL-SIS members who submitted articles for publication, including Jennifer L. Behrens, Carol Bredemeyer, Carmen Brigandi, James G. Durham, Galen L. Fletcher, Joseph L. Gerken, Darla Jackson, Cheryl L. Kelly, Darcy Kirk, Phillip Gragg, Pat Newcombe, Deborah Norwood, Sara Sampson, Margaret Schilt, Paula Seeger, Laurence Seidenberg, Karen W. Silber, Amy Taylor, Katie Thompson, Barbara G. Traub, and the folks on the Membership and CONALL/Mentoring committees for sending information and pictures for our New Member Spotlight column. Finally, I'd also like to thank Michelle Wu and Marianne Alcorn for their support and advice.

Nominations

Programs

Public Relations

Connie Lenz (chair), Julie Lim, and Yu-Hui Chuang served on the 2007–2008 ALL-SIS Public Relations Committee. The Committee publicized ALL-SIS activities throughout the year by submitting announcements for posting to the ALL-SIS website and to the SIS News section of AALLNET. The Committee worked with the ALL-SIS webmaster to make the ALL-SIS brochure (which was redesigned and updated in 2006–2007) available on the ALL-SIS website. The Committee plans to publicize ALL-SIS at the upcoming CONELL Marketplace and AALL Annual Meeting by distributing program information, brochures, and notepads imprinted with the ALL-SIS logo.

The Committee notes that its role in publicizing ALL-SIS events and news throughout the year may be diminishing. First, chairs of other committees often publicize their own activities by posting information directly to the ALL-SIS list and by sending items directly to the webmaster for inclusion in the site's ALL-SIS News feature. Second, this year AALL moved its SIS News feature from the print publication Spectrum to an online column available through AALLNET. There is no regular schedule for submissions and news from the various special interest sections is posted as received. At present, there is no RSS feed or subscription option for this AALLNET feature.

Statistics

This year the Statistics Committee worked on one project, creating a survey instrument for academic law libraries that had content law librarians were interested in, but was not on the ABA Annual Questionnaire.

Due to recent changes to the ABA Annual Questionnaire, less and less information about law libraries is being collected. While some of those figures are part of the self studies, others are no longer as relevant as they once were. As the challenge of counting electronic titles and volumes continues to get muddier, there is a need for new academic law library metrics. One is financial information, and that is covered by the current ABA Annual Questionnaire.

The other area that needs evaluation is how the law library contributes to the law school. The goal of the survey that we designed is to help document the library's contribution to the life of the law school.

The plans for the coming year are to publicize the survey so that law libraries can be prepared to provide or not provide the requested information as well as to distribute the survey. In future years, the ALL-SIS Statistics Committee will need to compile and publicize the results as well as amending the survey instrument itself.

We have attached the most recent draft of the ALL-SIS survey instrument to this Annual Report for reference.

Jonathan Franklin and Kory Staheli, co-chairs, Lorna Tang, Robin Schard, Beth Mobley, and Maureen Cahill

AWARDS	BYLAWS	CALI
COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT	CONTINUING EDUCATION	CONTINUING STATUS / TENURE
DIRECTORS' BREAKFAST	FACULTY SERVICES	LEGAL RESEARCH & SOURCEBOOK
LOCAL ARRANGEMENTS	MEMBERSHIP	MIDDLE MANAGERS' FORUM
NALLM / MENTORING	NEWSLETTER	NOMINATIONS
PROGRAMS	PUBLIC RELATIONS	STATISTICS
STUDENT SERVICES	Previous Committee Reports	ALL-SIS Reports to AALL