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Showing posts from December, 2017

Law Librarian Status & Academic Freedom

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We know that law librarians lack status in the status-obsessed legal academy . Some could argue that this is a gender equity problem , with females making up the overwhelming majority of law librarians (another post for another time). But the lack of status also confers a lack of academic freedom to engage in tough conversations. This is particularly difficult for law librarians because we are not protected to fully engage with and advance our field . A field that is wrongly pegged as supplementary or secondary . In the era of big-data algorithms with no accountability and the "fake news" phenomenon, librarians must tackle tough, controversial subjects that affect information. And law librarians take the ethical use of information very seriously with the   ACRL Framework for Information Literacy emphasizing the role of “using information, data, and scholarship ethically” and the AALL Legal Research Competencies and Standards stating that a successful legal researche