The Ginger (Law) Librarian

In early March, the University of California , one of the largest research institutions in the world, blew up negotiations with Elsevier, one of the largest publishers of research articles in the world. The university would no longer pay Elsevier millions of dollars a year to subscribe to its journals. It simply walked away. Despite months of contract negotiations , Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to UC research while containing the rapidly escalating costs associated with for-profit journals. UC's goal of open access is something that every institution should move toward because: (1) At the same time academic institutions are paying for access to journals, their employees are providing labor to journals for free. AND (2) journals pay for the research that they publish. In the United States, research funding often comes from government agencies—in other words, from taxpayers. Yet if members of the public tried to read new acad...

Over the course of the last week or so, there's been a lively discussion on the LRW-PROF listerv about teaching legal research using books. The discussion started from this post: At SCU, we have traditionally held one or two class sessions in which students conduct legal research in the library in books.   Some of us are considering modifying, shrinking, or even eliminating these exercises to make more time for additional electronic research practice. We identified some theoretical pros and cons to this approach. We are curious to hear about practical effects from anyone who has gone through this process of shrinking or eliminating book research. What effects, good and bad, have you seen in your students' ability to research? Any flak from librarians or employers? I appreciate any ideas.  Here is a sampling of the responses: Sample Response 1: I have always taught a modicum of book research each year, and, at the very least, I introduce my students to...

According to Dictionary.com, Palimpsest is defined as: noun 1. a parchment or the like from which writing has been partially or completely erased to make room for another text In the case of most law libraries, the "other text" is now electronic. As late as 2015, I was still in denial about the transition . Many of my blog posts have centered around the benefits of print ( here , here , here , here ). I still love print, and I still believe that there is a beauty in the serendipity of exploring the stacks. But even physically exploring the stacks is less relevant today. For example, our catalog now shows a preview of the books on the shelf near a book that we are interested in. When performing a search for Divergent Paths by Richard Posner, the following virtual browse display shows the books nearby: Budget constraints coupled with patron preference for electronic access means that our print collections are dwindling. There's no use romanticizing print while...

In the seven years that I've been a law librarian, ABA reporting for law libraries has made a fairly dramatic shift from measuring inputs to measuring outputs. Chapter 6 of the Standards, along with most of the Standards, now places an emphasis on outcomes instead of inputs. For libraries, that means an analysis of how well the patrons of a library are being served rather than how much we spend for various activities, and much of the information now required comes from the sabbatical site visits rather than from annual information on expenditures or staff. One of my colleagues recently pointed out that during an ABA site visit, law libraries must highlight how our patrons are being served. As the physical collections shrink, we need to focus more on customer service.   This same colleague opined that, on the horizon, law school administrator's will look at this [measuring outputs only] as another opportunity to slash library budgets particularly in regard to print. Outsid...

Barbara Fister over at InsideHigherEd recently discussed practices for designing learning spaces in libraries . Her post was informed by a new report published by  Project Information Literacy  called Planning and Designing Academic Library Learning Spaces. The report involved interviewing 49 librarians, architects, and consultants involved in 22 library construction projects that were completed between 2011 and 2016. The research probes how these three parties negotiate their values and incorporate them into designs, what kinds of learning are these new and renovated spaces meant to support, and what best practices (and worst practices) might inform libraries embarking on a renovation.  Fister noted a surprising finding that [s]tudents weren’t part of the discussion, or at least not in any depth, in a majority of these projects. Apart from gate counts and a focus group or survey here and there, studying student needs or asking their opinion wasn’t part of the plann...

Here at Texas Tech University, we just received word that starting in Spring 2017, the Texas Tech Libraries Document Delivery department will offer a new 3D object service. You can have 3D objects fabricated for instructional use.This includes anything like carbon nanotubes and molecules, architectural features and buildings, and even more unusual items like human vocal cords. The SHAPES Project is currently looking for ideas to fill its catalog with document delivery material that will be useful to a major research university. For more information about 3D printing at Tech, see our 3D printing services FAQs . What a cool way to fuse library services with new technology. 

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...

The Chronicle of Higher Ed ran an article written by a historian about the ever-increasing need to preserve our vast amounts of data. As the historian notes, the radical reduction of barriers to reading and publishing online has resulted in an abundance of cultural expression in audio, video, textual, and numeric formats. Yet paradoxically, in this age of digital abundance it is harder, not easier, to secure knowledge for future generations. How much will future generations know about today’s online culture when the average webpage lasts just 100 days?  One of the biggest challenges of our time is to find a way to archive material. If we learn to manage the abundance of digital information as quickly as we learned to manage print, solutions will come within several generations, approximately when the first few cohorts of digital natives mature, age, and begin to reckon with their own legacies. By that time, though, much will be lost, not by choice but by default. Preserving da...

Head on over to the RIPS Law Librarian Blog to see my recent post on law library collection development practices!

There's a new online newspaper aggregator in town. It's called Elephind . From the website : The goal of Elephind.com is to make it possible to search all the world’s online historic newspapers from one place.  With Elephind.com it is now possible for family historians, genealogists, and researchers to search historic digitized newspaper archives from around the globe. Elephind.com is much like Google, Bing, or other search engines but is focused on only historical, digitized newspapers. It enables you to search, for free, across many newspaper sites simultaneously, rather than having to visit each site separately. By clicking on the Elephind.com search result that interests you you'll go directly to the newspaper site which hosts that story. Many of the smaller newspaper sites are not well known and may be difficult to find with the usual search engines but are searchable from Elephind.com. Elephind also provides useful information for maximizing searches , includ...

You've gotta love a good "people's history." In my formative undergrad years, I remember working at a local bookstore and being exposed to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States . It. Blew. My. Young. Mind. And now a law librarian colleague (Thanks, Randy!) has brought a new "people's history" to my attention. It's called Part of Our Lives: A People's History of the American Public Library . Despite dire predictions in the late twentieth century that public libraries would not survive the turn of the millennium, their numbers have only increased. Two of three Americans frequent a public library at least once a year, and nearly that many are registered borrowers. Although library authorities have argued that the public library functions primarily as a civic institution necessary for maintaining democracy, generations of library patrons tell a different story.  In Part of Our Lives , Wayne A. Wiegand delves into ...

Like most other types of writing, there is an art to writing academic book reviews. According to  InsideHigherEd :  In fact, like other genres of academic writing, such as journal articles and research proposals, academic book reviews tend to have a standard, even formulaic, structure. Although of course this may vary slightly by discipline and/or publication venue, my advice is, if in doubt, to use the following framework, with one paragraph for each of the following seven sections: Introduction. All good pieces of academic writing should have an introduction, and book reviews are no exception. Open with a general description of the topic and/or problem addressed by the work in question. Think, if possible, of a hook to draw your readers in. Summary of argument. Your review should, as concisely as possible, summarize the book’s argument. Even edited collections and textbooks will have particular features intended to make them distinctive in the proverbial market...

Libraries have been around for a very long time, and they will continue to be around for a lot longer, albeit in a different form that what we are used to seeing today. So what will libraries look like in 85 years? Jim O'Donnell from Slate put it into perspective : That’s not so very far away. The next time you see a tiny baby, bear in mind that she or he has a very good chance of living to see the 22nd century. What will the world of libraries look like then? Nobody can know—but perhaps we can talk about what libraries should be in that imaginable future. O'Donnell posits three variations of libraries in the future: 1. One Global Library:  Once an encyclopedia or a book or a journal or a database is in digital form, there is no good reason why it should not be made as universally and freely available as possible, and no good reason why it should not be centrally held and maintained. Right now, major university libraries harbor knowledge riches galore, astonishin...

Check out my new post on the RIPS Law Librarian Blog discussing library maintenance agreements .

There is an interesting thread running on the AALL My Communities email list regarding West Library Maintenance Agreements (LMA). From the email list: Responses to Leaving Your LMA “Survey” This posting appears to have hit a raw nerve in the US law librarian community. I received approximately seventeen responses from law firm, court/government, and academic law librarians. Out of the seventeen, two law libraries have already left their LMA contracts. But, many of you have contemplated doing so. Several of you mentioned that they decided not to cancel their LMA because they received as much as a fifty percent discount on their contract, or they did not cancel because they were concerned about the extra paperwork and hassle of reconciling invoices and monthly statements if they did NOT keep their LMA intact. The common concerns I saw threading through the attached comments were these: LMA is not flexible enough for me. We need to reduce as much print as possible, but if we ...

Check out my latest post on the RIPS Law Librarian Blog discussing issues surrounding e-book collections in law libraries .

Here are a few books that you might keep in mind for collection development purposes: Digital Scholarly Editing: Theories, Models and Methods  (8/28/15) Accidental Information Discovery: Cultivating Serendipity in the Digital Age  (10/15/15) Glass Half Full: The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession Divergent Paths: The Academy and the Judiciary  (11/16/15) Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption   Practical Tip for Facilitating Research  (8/31/15) Free Technology for Libraries  (8/16/15) Legal Writing Exercises Point Taken: How To Write Like the World's Best Judges  (9/1/15) Principles of Legal Research The Relevant Lawyer: Reimagining the Future of the Legal Profession Legal Writing and Analysis I'm excited to get my hands on these titles to get some new ideas about faculty services and to prep for my legal research and writing course for international students. 

In a perfect example of where libraries generally find themselves in the era of fast-paced technological innovation and Big Data, the Library of Congress is having some trouble transitioning. In the spring of 2010, the Library of Congress announced it was taking a big stride toward preserving the nation’s increasingly digital heritage — by acquiring Twitter’s entire archive of tweets and planning to make it all available to researchers. But more than five years later, the project is in limbo. The library is still grappling with how to manage an archive that amounts to something like half a trillion tweets. And the researchers are still waiting. The archive’s fate is yet another example of the difficulty of safeguarding the historical records of an era when people communicate using easily deletable emails, websites that can be taken down in seconds and transient tweets, Vines and Snaps. But the library’s critics also see it as a cautionary tale from the 28-year tenure of retiring L...

Last fall, Robert Ambrogi posted on his blog, Law Sites , about the challenges and opportunities facing information professionals. He noted the current time of unprecedented innovation "when two guys in law school who think they have a better idea for a legal research site can run with it and create the company Ravel Law by the time they graduate." So what does this mean for information professionals? According to Ambrogi, "[f]or too long, librarians were defined in the public consciousness by the place in which you work. Many now believe that that place is irrelevant, unnecessary and too expensive to keep around. At both law firms and law schools, there are some who argue for doing away with the physical library altogether." While this can cause worry and panic, "it also provides an opportunity to examine what it is [information professionals] provide. As soon as you begin to look at it that way, you see immediately that what you provide is something...

The Washington Post shared a recent article about a historian who tried to use the wild-web (aka Internet archive ) to do historical research and mostly failed. As the researcher described, "[historians] use anything we can to get a view of how humans behaved in the past. In the 21st century, the web gives us a unique window onto society. Never before has humanity produced so much data about public and private lives – and never before have we been able to get at it in one place." The British Library and Institute of Historical Research created a research project to mine this data. The researchers were "among the first in the world to use the web archive for academic research." And the researchers thought that searching the web archive would be as simple as a Google search.    "[S]ince we could navigate Google reasonably easily, we thought we could use the archive in the same way. Do a search. Get a group of webpages on a particular subject. Read them. Draw...