The Ginger (Law) Librarian

As a member of the AALL State of the Profession Survey Advisory Group , I am excited that the survey has been released! The Advisory Group is comprised of librarians from all types of law libraries with the purpose of designing a survey to assess the current state of the profession. The State of the Profession Survey will document the current landscape of law libraries, specific to each library type, and will provide benchmarking in the following areas: Technology, collections and library resources, constituent services, institutional outcomes, research competencies, training, staffing, and leadership. The purpose of the State of the Profession Survey is to provide members and their organizations with the information and insights they need to effectively assess, advocate, and strategically prepare for the future. We started working on the survey in 2017 with this purpose in mind. In the survey, you will find questions pertaining to the various enumerated areas. While the sur...

The recent proposed change to ABA Standard 601(a)(3) , calls for the removal of a written assessment of the effectiveness of the library in achieving its mission and realizing its established goals.  Standard 601. Library and Information Resources, General Provisions Explanation of Changes: The current version of Standard 601(3)(a) was developed during the Comprehensive Review as a method of involving a law library in the process of strategic planning required of a law school. It was envisioned that the planning and assessment taking place for a law school (under what was then Standard 203) would incorporate the work done by the library under this new Standard. To ensure that incorporation, it was decided that a written assessment should be completed by the library. However, when the requirement for strategic planning for a law school was removed during a later phase of the Comprehensive Review, no change was made to the new Standard 601. As a resu...

If you haven't gone  through  an ABA Site Visit recently, it may be interesting to know that  the  ABA has revised its guidelines on the ABA Self-Study, which is made up of the Site Evaluation Questionnaire (SEQ) and Self-Assessment.  The SEQ is fairly straightforward; the  Self-Assessment  -- not so much. I n the  Managing Director’s Guidance Memo (revised March 2017),  it states that the Self-Assessment will focus “on evaluation of the educational program and efforts to improve it.”  It also mentions that  the  schools should report descriptive data only  once –  in the SEQ portion  of the Self-Study. At  the conclusion of the Site Visit, the Site Team will review the law school's Self-Study as it prepares a report using the  Site Evaluation Report Template .  The Site Evaluation Report consists of the following sections:  Organization, Administration, Institutional P...

While at AALL Management Institute last spring, one of the other attendees asked Maureen Sullivan, our fearless leader and management expert, how law libraries can stop "hemorrhaging talent." This question struck a chord. I love this profession, and it feels like a calling. But I often find myself asking "is it time for something else?" The sense from the room at Mgmt Inst was that I am not alone. And we are at a continued risk of losing talented, valuable librarians. We have to consider why we're losing folks to create change. I'll highlight a few reasons here: Librarianship is generally considered a "pink collar" profession. And we face many of the same issues that legal writing instructors face across the country . Like legal writing instructors, our positions are disproportionately occupied by women in less secure (generally staff), low-status positions.  As such, we are subjected to various microaggressions that are commonplace in str...

If you are considering creating a digital law library, Lexis put together a wonderful white paper on topic that guides you through the process.  While there is product placement throughout, this white paper is helpful for anyone considering a digital law library. The white paper offers general best practices, along with information on the LexisNexis Digital Library product.  According to the white paper, one of the first things to consider is the approach that your law library will take to digital migration: I ncremental: Some organizations have an ongoing preference for printed volumes and offer eBooks for just a select portion of titles. Accelerated: Others place more emphasis on mobility or are concerned about the administrative overhead that comes with physical books; they may choose to replace a large percentage of hard-copy volumes with eBooks. According to the 2015 ABA technology survey, one third of lawyers report using legal eBooks for work.  Holi...

An associate professor of law at Seton Hall Law School has an interesting take on the commentary surrounding legal sector employment stagnation. According to the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, law firms employed about 90,000 more lawyers and about 80,000 more paralegals in 2014 than at the start of the survey in 2001. At the same time, law firms shed 180,000 to 190,000 legal secretaries, other legal support workers and their supervisors. As a result, [commentators] have mischaracterized a decline in the fortunes for low-skilled support workers at a time of expanding opportunities for highly educated workers as stagnation for all. Law firms have sharply upgraded the education level of their work force, increasing the number of workers with graduate degrees by 100,000 and those with bachelor’s degrees by 30,000. At the same time, jobs for those with one year of college or less have shrunk by 125,000. Those who say law firms are going through “structural change” may b...

Check out my new post on the RIPS Law Librarian Blog discussing library marketing to showcase relevance.

My mentor warned me that librarianship was thankless work. He constantly reminded me that I would get a lot of complaints for doing a job that most people found dispensable, and it would cost me a lot of money to end up there. I would be treated like a second-class citizen in the academic world. Yet, even after all of that, I still couldn't help myself because librarianship feels like a calling. So when I ran across another librarian's post about librarianship as a calling , it resonated with me. From the public librarian: I’m training to be a professional librarian, having just finished a lecture on “semantic web ontologies” and “linked data,” and sat dumbstruck in front of a “Dewey Decimal assembler” without a clue as to what I’m looking at. The course is challenging – it’s a three-year master’s degree that bites eye-watering chunks out of my wages. Why am I doing it to myself? The fact is, I can’t not. It’s a sort of calling – like becoming a priest, only with warmer ...

A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article got me thinking about students taking responsibility for their learning.  The author of the article laments the questions, "When am I going to use this?" There’s one question that we should all put down immediately, and rage against with the last shreds of our academic freedom: the old refrain, "When am I going to use this?" This question, I think, manages to embody the worst of our cultural situation. It is a complaint, a subterfuge, an insult, a lazy way out. And before you think I am simply railing against the generational deficiencies in our current crop of students, I’m not. I’ve heard versions of the theme from parents, administrators, politicians, and even, I am chagrined to add, esteemed colleagues. We must put an end to it all. Our obsession with utility — and our childish demands for it to reveal itself immediately lest we "waste" a precious second of our time that could be better spent wa...

The NYTimes recently ran a piece asking " What is the Point of College? " The author put college in two categories: utility university and utopia university. One vision focuses on how college can be useful — to its graduates, to employers and to a globally competitive America. When presidential candidates talk about making college more affordable, they often mention those benefits, and they measure them largely in dollars and cents. How is it helping postgraduate earnings, or increasing G.D.P.? As college grows more expensive, plenty of people want to know whether they’re getting a good return on their investment. They believe in Utility U. Another vision of college centers on what John Stuart Mill called ‘‘experiments in living,’’ aimed at getting students ready for life as free men and women. Here, college is about building your soul as much as your skills. Students want to think critically about the values that guide them, and they will inevitably want to test out thei...

I appreciated Barbara Fister's take on the recent Amazon expose in the NYTimes . What strikes me most from the perspective of an academic librarian is that [the expose] is basically the story of contemporary tech capitalism, which has had enormous influence on library culture and higher ed. Faculty must publish more and gather metrics to prove that they’re not only producing more but in the right places using impact factors, which should never be used to evaluate the value of an article, but hey, it’s a number! It must be true! The anxiety level is ratcheted up as only select faculty from the right programs get prestigious jobs and most teaching is contracted out to underpaid independent creatives.That’s why you don’t get an office. They are only for our star employees, all six of them. New journals have to be launched to handle the overflow of perishable publications, but no problem, we'll just send the bill to libraries. When that well runs dry, we’ll have authors build ...

The NYTimes published an article today called Too Many Law Students, Too Few Legal Jobs . It's the same critique that we've been hearing for awhile now. This time the onus was to stop allowing federal student aid to freely flow to law schools - especially the schools at the bottom where the graduates have the worst job prospects. Okay, okay, I understand the idea that if we squeeze the purse strings, the schools will finally be forced to do something.  However, this will have a deleterious effect on diversity in an already fairly homogenous profession. The schools at the bottom are some of the most diverse in the country. And that's not an accident as minorities and low-income students generally lag in being afforded the same resources that (again generally) allow someone to attend a top school - things like not having to work while in undergrad so they can solely focus on grades or not being able to take an LSAT prep course, etc.... We know that legal education ...

NALP recently released its " Selected Findings from the Employment Report and Salary Survey for the Class of 2014 ." The good news: the employment rate for 2014 graduates rose over 2 percentage points compared to the class of 2013, the first increase since 2007 the percentage of employed gradutes in JD required or JD Advantage jobs also increased The bad news: the actual number of jobs obtained by the class of 2014 was actually smaller than that in 2013;  the smaller graduating class size accounted for the increased employment rate because the ABA shifted the "as of" reporting date from Feb. 15 to March 15, these results may slightly overstate the success of graduates compared with 2013 The future: with class sizes continuing to decline, the percentage of graduates finding employment should continue to rise, as long as there is not a setback in the slowly recovering job market I'll take the good news. With LSAT takers up and a positive jobs rep...

It appears that the ABA has quietly dropped the limitation that full-time law students only work up to 20 hours per week. Before the latest iteration of the ABA Standards for Approval of Law Schools, this was the pertinent standard: Standard 304 . COURSE OF STUDY AND ACADEMIC CALENDAR (f) A student may not be employed more than 20 hours per week in any week in which the student is enrolled in more than twelve class hours. For 2014-2015, Standard 304 is now Standard 311 , and there is no mention of the 20-hour work limit. If you are interested in working, beware that while the ABA seems to have dropped the limitation, law schools may still impose the restriction through the honor code. If your law school does have a 20-hour limitation, you may want to discuss it with the powers that be and notify them of the change in the ABA Standards. And although you may be able to work more than 20 hours per week while going to law school full-time, it may not actually be advisab...

The new RIPS Blog by Janelle Beitz alerted me to a thoughtful piece by Sarah Glassmeyer at Slaw discussing the continuing need of a law library. You should read Glassmeyer's article, which specifically addresses the recent uproar over Washington & Lee's new Strategic Transition Plan where “[o]perating budgets will be reduced by 10 percent in 2015-16 with the exception of the library budget, which will grow by 2 percent.” There were many comments about this 2-percent increase that are so disheartening for law librarians. As Glassmeyer eloquently responded: While, in the above example, the library budget is increasing by 2%, I can almost guarantee that its material costs are going up 10% or more. Annually. The subscription databases that are “replacing libraries” are actually paid for from the library budget. They are not a competitor to the library, but rather they are a digital branch of it. Yes, even books are on the databases. But not all are. Also, depen...

Library Babel Fish (aka Barbara Fister) alerted me to a recent NYTimes article discussing college for a new age. Joe Nocera of the NYTimes recently profiled Kevin Carey and Carey's new book, "The End of College." “'The story of higher education’s future is a tale of ancient institutions in their last days of decadence, creating the seeds of a new world to come,' he writes. If he is right, higher education will be transformed into a different kind of learning experience that is cheaper, better, more personalized and more useful." A telling quote from the book: "You don’t need libraries and research infrastructure and football teams and this insane race for status,” he says. “If you only have to pay for the things that you actually need, education doesn’t cost $60,000 a year.” It's not a new criticism that universities have gone beyond the necessary to the lavish, which ups the cost for all. But libraries? Really? Libraries are more in line wit...

The ABA Journal posted an interesting article about the value of a law degree. "[T]wo researchers who previously concluded that the present value of a law degree is about $1 million more, on average, than the value of a college degree" are now concluding that a bad economy has a relatively small impact on lifetime earnings. The researchers conclude that "[g]raduating from law school in a bad economy has a relatively small impact on lifetime earnings relative to graduating with a bachelor’s degree, according to a preliminary draft research paper by the researchers, Rutgers University economics and business professor Frank McIntyre and Seton Hall University law professor Michael Simkovic, a visiting research scholar at Fordham University’s law school." They find that "[t]hough unemployment levels at graduation affect pay for the first four years, particularly in boom times, the impact fades as law graduates gain experience, according to the new paper ( avail...

Check out my post over on the RIPS Law Librarian Blog discussing law libraries innovating under pressure.

Rick Bales, Dean of Ohio Northern University Pettit College of Law, posted a picture over on the Law Deans Blog  showing anecdotal evidence of a law library's mass cancellation of print.  Dean Bales noted that "[l]ibraries are going digital, and budget pressures make it difficult to justify maintaining print publications. Most law firm and county libraries have long since cancelled their print subscriptions, driving up the publication costs for the few remaining (mostly law school) buyers." It's true that libraries can discard a lot of material that was once only available in print but is now duplicated by many electronic resources. Law libraries are officially in " The Shed West Era " where we can reasonably  rely on WestlawNext rather than the costly print material. There are pitfalls associated with relying on proprietary databases, but this is the direction we are all moving. Dean Bales goes on to say that "[s]helves at many law librarie...

In October 2013 the American Association of Law Libraries issued a Request for Proposal  seeking consultants to deliver a report on the economic value of law libraries. The time has come for the release of the final  report on the Economic Value of Law Libraries by the Economic Value of Law Libraries Special Committee . Dewey B. Strategic has a breakdown of the highlights of the report: Qualitative Information 1. Employ both formal and informal communications regularly. 2. Provide context with qualitative data. 3. Use testimonials to highlight the impact of delivered services. 4. Tailor the value message to stakeholder preferences. Quantitative Information and Analysis 1. Go beyond the mere measurement of activities and utilize methods that measure and demonstrate success or impact on organizational services. 2. When reporting metrics related to specific library activities, report them in the context of the larger frame of importance to the organization. ...