The Ginger (Law) Librarian

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...

As law school budgets continue to shrink, it's not unreasonable to presume that many law libraries are coming under increased scrutiny. Law school administrators cannot touch faculty salaries or law student financial aid. When a dean looks at a law school budget , the biggest expenditure after faculty salaries is the library, and many must now wonder "what are all those people doing with all that money?" Accordingly, one of the budget-cutting measures may be to consider  combining the law library with the university library . Historically, as the heart of the law school, law school libraries have functioned apart from the greater university library community. In a 1957 study, forty of the forty-one responding law libraries did not want to be considered part of the university library system or be a part of its administrative structure, even if they currently were. This position was codified through section 602(a) of the ABA standards, which requires law schools to “hav...

The  Wall Street Journal (sub req'd) is reporting on pushback against difficult bar exams (particularly California's bar). One camp of law-industry watchers blames the drop in passing rates on the declining credentials of incoming classes. Others point to changing study habits of so-called millennials, who grew up with the ability to find information at their fingertips and aren't accustomed to the intensive memorization and writing skills needed to pass a bar exam.  The article ultimately asks:  Does the exam even test what incoming lawyers need to know? It seems that, based on what a lawyer actually does, the test should be about spotting legal issues, research, and proper legal analysis. A law school education prepares students to spot the multitude of legal issues to Explore those issues using sound (efficient and effective) legal research methods To do a proper legal analysis of the various issues (or the call of the question, as it were) with cites to r...

Instead of getting bogged down trying to instruct on the nuts-and-bolts of each database, it is more important to emphasize a research process that works in any database. To that end, I've always taught a version of the Rombauer Method of legal research . Preliminary Analysis – developing search strings and searching secondary sources for an overview of the topic Codified Law – searching constitutions, codes, court rules, and regulations Binding Precedent – searching case law that the court must follow from a particular jurisdiction Persuasive Precedent – searching case law that the court may follow from other jurisdictions The beauty of this research process is that it can be geared toward any database. As long as the user can maneuver the database to find relevant secondary sources, he or she will be able to fulfill the first step of the research process and so on. If students use this research process to keep their research strategic and organized, they should fee...

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that business schools are taking a stand against academic rankings. Business-school deans and research faculty at more than 20 universities are taking a stand against the academic rankings published by media outlets such as Bloomberg Businessweek, Nikkei Inc.’s Financial Times and the Economist Group. Rather than “acquiesce to methods of comparison we know to be fundamentally misleading,” the administrators are urging their peers at other schools to stop participating in a process they say rates programs on an overly narrow set of criteria. Those in the business of rankings say that the rankings help students make an informed decision about what is likely among the most expensive purchases these students will make in their lives.  The administrators opposed to the rankings methodologies are of the opinion that if the goal is to help inform [students] about how to make the best decision about business schools, let’s give them the raw info...

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 ...