The Ginger (Law) Librarian

Previously, I discussed the problem with impact factor in law and the seemingly insurmountable task of creating a meaningful impact factor. But as any good law librarian would do, we always try to "make it happen." To that end, I recently ran across PlumX as a platform to aggregate various metric sources. As noted on  Texas Tech University's LibGuide on point , besides traditional citation counts, there are many ways of tracking research impacts. They try to capture the presence in new scholarly venues, presence and impact in social media and other forms of online engagement, such as views, downloads, bookmarks etc. Collectively, we refer to these as altmetrics , as opposed to traditional citation measurement using Web of Science, Scopus and other citation enhanced databases. PlumX  is a subscription-based platform for tracking research impact.  PlumX gathers and brings together appropriate metrics for all types of scholarly research output.  They cat...

At a recent talk, it was recommended that law librarians learn enough about coding to understand how coding intersects with the organization and retrieval of information. To ensure that our systems function properly, we should all, at minimum, know what a programming language is, how to talk about it, and what coding can and cannot do. We must understand what coding is, how it relates to libraries, what can reasonably be asked of code, and the threshold concepts that are required to work alongside those who actually write the code. Law librarians understand how the end user interacts with the various retrieval systems. We understand the intersectionality of cases, statutes, and regulations, etc.... As well as best practices for accessibility and the practical search skills of our prospective or practicing lawyers. For a retrieval system to work well, it must be coded with all of these considerations in mind. A programmer, working alone, may not have this wholistic view. Now that ...

The Harvard Business Review recently released the results of an enlightening new study about the speech patterns during SCOTUS oral arguments. According to the article , a new empirical study shows that the male justices interrupt the female justices approximately three times as often as they interrupt each other during oral arguments.  HBR examined the transcripts of 15 years of Supreme Court oral arguments, finding that women do not have an equal opportunity to be heard on the highest court in the land. In fact, as more women join the court, the reaction of the male justices has been to increase their interruptions of the female justices. Many male justices are now interrupting female justices at double-digit rates per term, but the reverse is almost never true. In the last 12 years, during which women made up, on average, 24% of the bench, 32% of interruptions were of the female justices, but only 4% were by the female justices. And there is a consistently gendered pattern...

While working as a Faculty Services & Scholarly Communications Librarian, I presume I am not alone in being asked to create an impact factor for which to judge the scholarly work of faculty. In fact, Gary Lucas at Texas A&M was recently asked a similar question : Texas A&M University assesses its colleges and departments based partly on scholarly impact and using quantitative metrics. The law school’s dean has assigned me the task of identifying scholarly impact metrics for use in assessing the performance of our law faculty collectively and individually. This essay discusses the major issues that arise in measuring the impact of legal scholarship. It also explains important scholarly impact metrics, including the Leiter score and Google Scholar h-index, and the major sources of information regarding scholarly impact, including Google Scholar, Westlaw, Hein Online, SSRN, and bepress. Ultimately, Lucas proposes ranking scholarship by Google Scholar citation count to p...

While the very specific requirements of a law library collection have loosened under the ABA Standards , it should not signal that law libraries are any less important . The loosening of the Standards allows us to tailor our resources to truly support the law school and create practice-ready grads. Law libraries still heavily support the ABA Standards and should be seen as a valuable resource as law schools try to meet the new standards. The following standards are (or should be) directly affected by law library support: 1. Experiential Learning :  The ABA’s increased experiential learning requirement, requiring at least six hours of experiential courses for each student, is a direct response to the argument that new attorneys lack the necessary skills to act like a lawyer from day one on the job. To qualify as experiential under Standard 303(a)(3), “a course must be primarily experiential in nature and must (i) integrate doctrine, theory, skills, and legal ethics, and engag...