Law Librarianship Commons^™

Creating Persistent Law Review Article Links With Digital Object Identifiers, Valeri Craigle, Benjamin J. Keele, Aaron Retteen

Faculty Scholarship

A case study for how to use digital object identifiers (DOIs) to make online journals more accessible and improve their site user reports.

Law Library Blog (May 2023): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Congressional Oversight Of U.S. Government Programs, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Presentations

Provides detailed overview of how the U.S. Congress conducts oversight of federal agency programs. Contents include a letter from a member of Congress to an agency head concerning an environmental development in Indiana, information on the foundations of congressional oversight, details on how Congress may require agency reports on various subjects in public laws, an example of a congressionally mandated report by the Department of Defense, documentation of congressional funding of individual federal agencies, examples of congressional committee hearings, congressional committee issuance of oversight and investigative reports which may include dissenting opinions, Congressional Budget Office cost estimates on congressional committee …

W&L Law Library Newsletter, Vol. 2, Iss. 2 (Apr. 2023), The Law Library At Washington And Lee University School Of Law

W&L Law Library Newsletter

W&L Law Library Newsletter, Volume 2, Issue 2 (April 2023).

Confused About Copyright?, Sara Anne Hook

Graduate Scholarship and Professional Work

No abstract provided.

Law Library Blog (April 2023): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Open Access Without Open Access Values: The State Of Free And Open Access To Law Reviews, John R. Beatty

Law Librarian Journal Articles

This study examines 648 currently published law journals to determine the amount of freely available content and whether the journals have adopted open access behaviors. Although most of the journals have volumes available online for free, the usual hallmarks of open access, including open licenses and clear reuse policies, are absent.

Oh No, Another Chatgpt Post: Incorporating Ai-Powered Chatbots Into Legal Research Exercises And Assignments, Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

Since it was launched at the end of November 2022, the discourse around ChatGPT and AI search tools has been unrelenting. What impact will AI-powered chatbots have on education? Will students submit ChatGPT-written essays and homework assignments? Will AI make lawyers obsolete? Look, this chatbot just passed the bar exam! Wait a minute—is this thing. . . sentient?

Lisp – An Historical Reminiscence, Heather Simmons

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

Reflections on the history of the Legal Information Services to the Public group of the American Association of Law Libraries.

The Importance Of Member Participation In The Aall Salary Survey, Kathleen Brown, Deanna Barmakian, Ariel Newman

Faculty Works

The American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) has a long history of providing helpful salary-related data to the AALL membership and beyond. The value of the Salary Survey lies in providing extensive compensation data for law librarians and legal information professionals, enabling jobseekers and law library management to identify and understand trends in compensation and the evolution of the work law librarians perform.

Law Library Blog (February 2023): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Which Office Essentials Are Actually Essential? I Relocated To The Conference Room To Find Out!, Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

Hello and Happy New Year from my office home office temporary office/library conference room! January always brings new opportunities and challenges, but over here in NYC those challenges began at the end of 2022 when on Christmas Day three pipes burst at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, causing significant flooding throughout the building including—where else—the law library. And my office. What’s the saying? New Year, new temporary workspace? Something about this feels vaguely early-pandemic to me.

Ok, Zoomer: Teaching Legal Research To Gen Z, Olivia R. Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Articles

Generation Z has entered law school. With each new generation comes new education preferences. While research on Gen Z in the legal academy has grown over the past few years, to date none deal explicitly with teaching legal research to Gen Z. This article connects Gen Z’s childhood and resulting peer personality to 10 tangible pedagogical changes for teaching legal research to Gen Z.

Overcoming Barriers To Documenting Institutional Knowledge, Cynthia Bassett, Lauren Seney

Faculty Publications

It is inevitable—employees come and go in libraries. When they leave, they take their institutional knowledge out the door with them unless it is captured before they go. Documenting institutional knowledge is crucial for continuity of service. Anyone who has ever inherited a department or started at a new library with highly reined and involved procedures knows that learning how and why processes are managed can be overwhelming. If there is no documentation to explain things, library staff can be stymied for months as they get up to speed, severely impacting productivity and morale. Knowing all of this, many libraries …

Build A Career That Aligns With Your Passions, Ashley A. Ahlbrand

Articles by Maurer Faculty

When I was wrapping up my final semester of law school, I was fretting about what I would do next. The job market for new attorneys had tanked, less than half of my classmates had job offers lined up, I had no connections of my own that I could work, and worse, I still didn’t know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Expressing my anxiety to our school’s Westlaw rep at the time, she asked me to reflect on my favorite parts of law school. That was easy: I loved any class where I could write a …

Prison Libraries, Intellectual Freedom And Social Justice In Nigeria, Olusegun Adebayo Opesanwo, Oluyomi Abidemi Awofeso Phd

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This paper deployed a systematic review to examine prison libraries and intellectual freedom towards attaining social justice in Nigeria. Information resources used cover the periods of 2010 and 2020 to articulate the necessary development in prison libraries, intellectual freedom and social justice in Nigeria. Search engines such as Google scholar, Semantic Scholar, and RefSeek were used to retrieve information and through different queries yielded several results but very few of them were selected to fit in the study due to limited studies directed to address the focus of this study particularly in the Nigeria scenario. Information obtained were subjected to …

Law Libraries And Sustainability Of Judicial Precedent In Nigerian Legal System, Emmanuel Owushi Dr

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study adopted descriptive study to examine law libraries and sustainability of judicial precedent in Nigerian legal system. The population involved legal educators, law librarians and practitioners in four States in different geopolitical zones of Nigeria, namely Rivers State, Lagos State, Benue State, and Anambra State. Due to the large population, the study employed multi-stage of balloting and random sampling techniques to sample 100 respondents each from the selected states. Out of the 400 samples, 389 respondents responded correctly to the questionnaire, indicating a 97.3 percent response rate. A self-designed questionnaire was utilized and means score was used to answer …

Locating Free And Low-Cost Secondary Sources In Michigan, Cody James

Law Librarian Scholarship

Secondary sources are all the legal resources that describe what the law is without actually having the force of law. For example, treatises, law review articles, and practice series are secondary sources while statutes, regulations, and cases are primary sources. Although secondary sources are not binding authority, they provide valuable, up-to-date insight and commentary about existing laws. These insights are especially useful when handling matters outside of an attorney’s usual areas of practice.

Unfortunately, secondary sources are not cheap — consider that a full set of Michigan Civil Jurisprudence has a retail cost of $25,119. That said, a lot of …

The “Food Blog” Scroll And Its Impact On Online Legal Research, Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

After transitioning from a written to a “live” format for assignments in my Advanced Legal Research class, I noticed a vaguely familiar pattern of students unintentionally scrolling past relevant information on their screens.

W&L Law Library Newsletter, Vol. 2, Iss. 1 (Nov. 2022), The Law Library At Washington And Lee University School Of Law

W&L Law Library Newsletter

W&L Law Library Newsletter, Volume 2, Issue 1 (November 2022).

Law Library Blog (November 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Case Files From The Late Hon. Michael S. Kanne Donated To The Jerome Hall Law Library, James Owsley Boyd

Keep Up With the Latest News from the Law School (blog)

The case files of the late Judge Michael S. Kanne have been donated to the Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s Jerome Hall Law Library.

Kanne, a 1968 graduate of the Law School, served on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1987 up until his death in June 2022. Prior to his elevation to the Seventh Circuit, Judge Kanne served on the bench of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Indiana.

Judge Kanne’s files span the entirety of his service on the Seventh Circuit, and contain papers regarding opinions, concurrences, and dissents …

W&L Law Fall Scholarship Celebration 2022, Andrew Christensen, Michelle Cosby, Jennifer Mitchell, Christopher B. Seaman, Melanie D. Wilson

Library Events

On October 6, 2022, the Washington and Lee Law Library hosted the fourth W&L Law Fall Scholarship Celebration. The event was co-sponsored by the Frances Lewis Law Center and took place in the Law Library's main reading room from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

On display were dozens of scholarly articles, books, and chapters authored by the W&L Law faculty and student body between October 2019 and October 2022, with hundreds of additional works accessible online through the Scholarly Commons institutional repository.

Faculty, librarians, staff, and administrators mingled with law students over hors d'oeuvres and wine to peruse the formidable scholarly …

Citation Sources For Legal Scholarship: Ranking The Top 28 Law Faculties, John R. Beatty

Law Librarian Contributions to Books

Published in The Role of Citation in the Law: A Yale Law School Symposium, Michael Chiorazzi, ed.

This study examines the effects of the data source on citation metrics and faculty rankings by comparing three sources of legal scholarship citation data: Google Scholar, Westlaw, and HeinOnline. It compares six years of citations to works by all of the tenured and tenure-track members of the top twenty-eight faculties as determined by two recent legal citation studies. Rankings generated using the Leiter-Sisk method on the data from the three sources showed moderate to high correlation (0. 77 to 0. 96) to each …

Academic Law Librarian Credentials And Student Loan Debt, Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

When Joe Biden announced some student loan debt forgiveness last week, borrowers everywhere let out a collective (if muted) sigh of relief: finally. The student loan debt crisis and resulting debate is well-documented and I won’t go into more detail on it in general. But I’ve been thinking about the relationship between student debt and librarian credentials and the emerging crisis in academic law libraries: too many job openings, not enough qualified candidates. It’s all connected. But how?

Law Library Blog (August 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

We’Re All Historical Researchers Now: The Impact Of Dobbs On Legal Research Instruction, Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

Congratulations, it’s July, which means you have officially survived what may very well be considered the most consequential Supreme Court term in the history of the United States. Simply existing in this country over the past few weeks (months? years?) feels like trying to swim through rapidly drying concrete. Avoiding the news is impossible if for no other reason than the direct impact so much of the news of late has on the job of a law librarian. Imagine teaching a legal research class at the end of this past SCOTUS sitting? I’ll spare you the image because I did, …

Using “Live” Assignments For Formative Assessment, Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

At the Teaching the Teachers Conference a few weeks ago, I gave a demonstration of a formative assessment style we’ve been using at my institution for the past year and a half: a live assignment, AKA the Research Practicum. The presentation was virtual; COVID struck, of course, and I couldn’t get on a plane and fly to Portland. Fortunately, the nature of this assessment lends itself beautifully to a pivot to virtual because it is already entirely virtual. The Research Practicum uses Zoom or some other video conferencing platform and asks students to research while sharing their screen as their …

How I’M Spending My Summer (Getting Acclimated To The Physical Workplace), Olivia Smith Schlinck

Library Staff Online Writings

It’s mid-May which, in the law school world, means finals, grading, graduation and the impending summer. As the spring semester winds to a close, I’ve been finding myself staring at a mostly blank – beautifully, thankfully blank – summer calendar and wondering: how will I fill my time?

Law Library Blog (May 2022): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.