Law Librarian Blog

A Belated "happy birthday to you", Mark Giangrande

LLB's long-time co-editor, Mark Giangrande, turned 60++ on March 16th (or is it +++?). Here's a music video clip of one of Mark's favorite bands. [JH]

LLB Turns Eight Years Old Today

Or in blog-dog years, 56 years since LLB joined the blogosphere on Jan. 1, 2005. LLB’s two senior citizen co-editors extend our best wishes for the New Year to all, young and old-timers.

2012 was an interesting year. There were some positive as well as some less than positive developments. Time and energy permitting –- hey, Mark and I are getting pretty damn old for doing this blogging thing –- we will be publishing some "year in review" LLB posts based on our admittedly idiosyncratic perspectives on a few selected topics in the coming days and weeks. [JH]

LLB Turns Seven Years Old Today

Happy New Year's Day to all and happy anniversary to all the co-editors, contributing editors and readers of LLB since we started publishing on Jan. 1, 2005. [JH]

A Very Vintage Happy New Year to All

From two very vintage LLB bloggers, Mark Giangrande and yours truly. [JH]

Sarah Glassmeyer, Recipient of Two Very Prestigious LLB 2011 Awards

In the spirit of "Best 2011 'Something' Awards," LLB is delighted to announce that Sarah Glassmeyer's has been awarded LLB's 2011 Best Recap of the Year Blog Post again. Actually we didn't have an official LLB award last year, so "again" means she has been retroactively awarded LLB's 2010 Best Annual Recap of the Year Blog Post. You can read Sarah's awarding winning 2011 post at Man Plans. God Laughs. 2011 in Review. It starts off with the following:

Hey, remember last year at this time when I said that I wanted to have a really boring 2011 and not do anything too “interesting.” ... Um. Yeah. That didn’t quite happen." The past year hasn’t been a bad one by any stretch of the imagination.  Actually, it’s been quite good and huge improvement over 2010.  2011 ain’t been boring, that’s for darn sure. ... I tried to be boring.  I really did. 

Sarah's retroactively awarded LLB 2010 Best Recap of the Year Blog Post was 2010 Was an Interesting Year. LLB's commentary at 'Tis the Season for Year in Review Blog Posts stated

[Sarah's] goal for 2011 is to have "a more boring year." I doubt she will achieve that goal. In fact, who would want that for Sarah! Continue to stretch and stay true to yourself is a far better goal for 2011.

Well, Sarah certainly stayed true to herself in 2011. As for the coming year, she writes

So, 2012?  Who knows. I think it’s clear that I suck at making predictions or plans.  And another thing I’ve learned this year is that sometimes the big things don’t really appear to be big at the time – and good things happen completely randomly and without any expectation of it at all.  So I guess my only plan for 2012 is to be open to possibility.

Once again, I believe that means Sarah will continue to stretch and stay true to herself in 2012. That's a good thing.

LLB's Best 2011 Twitter Stream. In the ad hoc created LLB category for Twitter, Sarah is hereby awarded LLB's Best 2011 Twitter Stream. While Twitter has become an avenue for providing a heads-up current awareness function by law librarians who use Twitter for this purpose, in addition to her current awareness tweets, Sarah's "day-in-the-life of a newbie Chicagoan" tweets deserve this "very prestigious" LLB recognition.

Granted this is a very idiosyncratic award because the co-editors of LLB are two born and breed and vintage Chicagoans;  Mark Giangrande works in Chicago at DePaul Law, and yours truly is a "Chicagoland" ex-pat. In my case, Sarah's "I live in Chicago now" tweets have been a delight to read. Hence the award. I don't think Sarah would object to my characterization of them as "farm grrrrrl, meets big city."

Just like all contributors to LLB are not censored and are free to post whatever they want (e.g., "Joe (or Mark), you recent ignorant SOB post...," (ditto for comments posts) LLB "awards" do not go through a screening process. That means Mark and any of our LLB contributing editors are free to honor anyone for anything by way of an "official LLB award" for 2011. Hell, I didn't even contact Mark to see if he was OK with with the above awards!

In this case, the only "swag" that comes with the above-announced LLB awards is a personal promise to buy Sarah an Al's Italian Beef sandwich the next time I am in my hometown or the next time Sarah and Mark hook up. Sarah works on the west end of downtown Chicago aka the Loop. Mark on the east end of the Loop (read Al's is nearby DePaul Law, Sarah). I have not checked with Mark but I believe he would be willing to do his "duty" as LLB co-editor to pick up the tab for an Al's Italian Beef.

If I ever get back up to Sweet Home, Chicago, the first Al's Italian Beef is on me, Sarah. Alas that may not be until 2016 when AALL conducts its always interesting annual convention in Chicago. Pause .... I'm doing the math... . OK, I will be on the verge of retirement age, assuming the Blog Widow ever allows me to retire. You better remind me, Sarah. [JH]

Editor's Note: Well, perhaps you can't read Sarah's posts. They were online. Now they are not. "Something isn't quite right here ... This site has been suspended." According to a Dec. 27th tweet, Sarah is probably in Canada now and is going to be offline most of the week.

On Turning 60

Not me but I'm not far behind.

Happy Birthday to LLB's co-editor, Mark Giangrande. Most law librarians who specialize in legal research are "toast" after about 10 years (ah, like me). But not Mark. Plus he teaches legal research at DePaul Law and for CLE courses, publishes substantive legal analysis in law review articles and writes for LLB; read in addition to his unsolicited posts, I frequently email the following: "Mark, You've got the expertise to write about this legal or IT matter, I don't, so FYI. -- Joe."

So, Happy Birthday, Mark And I think you will get a kick out of this: Turning 60, published by America: The National Catholic Weekly:

Were I a Hindu, it would be somewhat easier to rise to the occasion. Completing one’s 60th year — shasti-purti — is indeed an important event, the completion of a lifetime’s cycle of with accompanying rituals that mark the fullness of a life cycle. Life and health after 60 are then a grace, a gift.

Yet still, even among non-Indians, 60 marks a threshold of sorts. After 60, only in odd contexts is one still young — as in, “At 60, I am still safely in the younger half of American Jesuits." 60 is about getting old.

Old, us? Remember Chicago in the 80's, Miami in the mid-90's? Damn it all to hell, we are getting old! How did this happen??? {JH}

"And what have you done, another year over and new one just begun:" on the sixth anniversary of Law Librarian Blog

So this is 2011 (echoing John Lennon) and here LLB is. Launched on Jan. 1, 2005, today is this blog's sixth anniversary. Day in and day out, a hard working team of past and current co-editors and contributing editors who had plenty of other things to do have helped publish at least one post on LLB each and every day -- well over 11,000 posts. When launched, the intention was to provide a current awareness service to law librarians and members of the public interested in law and legal research-related news and developments.

Thanks to the the integration of social media features in websites, RSS feeds for eNewsletters and new social media platforms, particularly the use of Twitter, one might think there is not nearly as much need to publish a post as a current awareness feature, alerting readers to news, new resources, or something of interest posted elsewhere, unless one is covering a topic with links to multiple web destinations or is also adding commentary and analysis in the text of the blog post. In his 2010 Blawggies award post, Dennis Kennedy wrote "the biggest trend in blawgging in 2010 is the continuing movement of blawggers into social media. It’s definitely decreased the frequency of blog posting by many blawggers and changed what gets written about on a blog as opposed to distributed via social media." This is why Social Media, the Mobile Platform and Personal Portals was the 2010 Blawggie award winner in the most important trend in law-related blogging category. Kennedy adds

It used to be that websites and blogs made a great effort to drive people back to the website or blog and capture the reader there. The website or blog was the one central “home base” (as Chris Brogan and others call it). Now, I see our web presence as much more distributed and our audience finding us in a variety of unrelated ways.

Since launching our Law Professor Blogs Network in 2004, my advice to well over 100 blog editors and contributing editors has always been, if you publish regularly, viewers will come and some will stay as regular readers by taking the blog's RSS feed. This is certainly an effort to make a blog a "home base" where readers can expect to find something of interest on the topic covered by the blog. Certainly not every post published on blogs will be must-reads but hopefully there will be sufficient reader interest to retain a blog's RSS feed.

But blog posts of all kinds -- current awareness, analytical, commentary -- also do something that other social media platforms do not do very well. They feed our common web search engines with content, content that a searcher may find useful for the search topic-at-hand, one where discovering a blog as a "home base" is not necessarily the most important factor. While I completely agree with Kennedy's trend analysis, this is where I have a problem with Kennedy's comments about this trend. If content is king, the author's intention for publishing something on the web by alternative social media avenues may not matter as much as the information provided and found by Google, Bing, etc., searches if published in blogs. Blogging as a social media avenue is less micro-audience, less restricted to an author's original intention, than other social media platforms because of Search.

Content-Shift in the Law Librarian Blogosphere. The law librarian blogosphere has changed since 2005 and so has LLB. We do post less often than in the past and our content, as Kennedy noted above about law blogging generally and I noted in LLB's fifth anniversary post last year, has shifted at least with respect to frequency of types of published content -- more commentary and analysis and less news and developments for the purpose of current awareness although we still do some of the latter. One reason for less frequent posting may very will be the content shift Kennedy noted. It certainly takes more time and effort to write "think pieces" than current awareness alerts. Being an "aging and decrepit Boomer" law libarian-blogger, for example, I really only have one analysis and commentary post in me during any given week, LOL. "Think piece" by the way comes from the time when I worked for the Chicago Tribune and the article ID used to label contributions in the editorial and syndicated columists section of the newspaper. Blogging is akin to newspaper publishing in many respects, first and foremost being it is a publishing venture.

This is a web space for younger, more energetic, and in my opinion, more expert about current developments law librarian bloggers. Years ago, I gave up trying to be the first to publish in this web space -- that's utter madness for this 58-year old! I rely on my fellow-travelers by way of RSS feeds for both alerting me to new developments and their very well informed commentary and analysis about them. I just add my 2-cents like the old geezer that I am a little later in the blogosphere timeline. Perspective, albeit just mine and usually cranky, is the order of the day when I try to grind out an LLB "think piece" post.

Recently, a law librarian, one I have one hellva a lot of respect for, took time out from his busy workday to call me, essentially to say, "I've been looking for your post about X" the day the post was published. I appreciated the call and have had similar and not all that infrequent communications from other law librarians over the years whose implied message oftentimes is "I wish I could say that publicly." My response in this conversation was "well, it took me ten hours over the course of two days with a last minute update before heading off to the "day job" to get it done." Left unspoken by both of us was the silence from AALL about "X". What was "X"? Rudovsky, of course, which could not have been written without the excellent coverage provided by other bloggers.

Why Blog? Many excellent law librarian blogs also publish content for all of above purposes. Why? Could it be because we cannot depend on either our legal vendors or AALL for providing web-distributed information without a wee bit too much self-serving institutional spin when they decide not to simply remain silent. We certainly haven't ever seen AALL respond to anything in "blogosphere time." We can expect our legal vendors to gloss over matters since most of their blogging content is marketing-related. We know not to expect that their blog and website published information about products, services, how to use them, sales and pricing schemes, etc. will highlight flaws and traps. Just take all things WestlawNext and "assured pricing plans" pitched by West to individual consumers interested in a West print title as two examples from last year.

Should we expect the same sort of gloss-overs or silence on matters of import from our professional association in web communications? Unfortunately, yes. For example, instead of publicly stating for all to read that the current incremental nudging up of annual percent increases many institutional buyers are or can expect to be seeing on top of the not inconsequential percentage roll-up on prior year's fixed costs when institutional subscriptions for online legal search come up for renegotiation, we hear nothing from AALL officially about how and by whom online price increases are trending up higher than many institutional buyers' annual budgets in this economy. You don't need an official study to publicly issue an institutional buyer alert to watch out for something like this. In fact, no official study could be made if one takes the confidentiality clauses of WEXIS licenses seriously (which I do, until, well AALL does something about sharing some cost information by market sector without disclosing the identity of instiutional buyer). And about those NDAs TR Legal is tossing on the table before negotiating online renewals ...  not a word from AALL.

What about AALL taking a public position every law library institutional member is saying privately, namely that after years and years and years of annual print continuation price increases in the industry being far and away above annual institutional collection development budget increases, in our current budgetary climate, the trend has gone too far. Nothing. Instead we read "woe is us, times are tough" articles. If AALL thinks it needs an official study to base an official statement on this topic, there's the Price Index, right? Wrong.

In last year's most illustrative example of our association glossing over something it did for CYA purposes, our leadership did not simply state publicly "we screwed up big time for the latest Price Index because we did not specifically ask for print continuation pricing." (Citation omitted but regular LLB readers may recall this and it will be the topic of a forthcoming post.) For an association with credibility problems with many of its institutional members, trying to avoid this admission by saying that it was "discovered" that Thomson Reuters and then further "discovered" that other legal vendors did not provide this data is an obvious attempt at self-serving institutional spin.

The membership deserves and should demand better from AALL. As far as I am concerned until one of our elected AALL officers publicly states his/her opposition to less than frank web communications to its members, they all deserve to be tarred and feathered because nothing AALL does is so damn important that it trumps accountability and transparency. If accountability and transparency does not apply to the business conducted by AALL, we might as well quit pretending it applies as a fundamental principle of our profession. If we do not lead by example, we have no basis to claim leading at all.  

2010, the Year AALL Continued to Maintain Its Blogosphere Silence About Significant Issues Faced by Its Institutional Members. In last year's fifth anniversary post, I stated that it was a fair assessment to characterize 2009 as the year the legal information professional blogosphere became the consumer advocate for legal resource users, individual and institutional. See also, Taking the Proverbial Bull by the Horns: AALL as an Agent of Change. This remains the case. It is a fair assessment to characterize 2010 as the year AALL failed to use the blogging platform for consumer advocacy after the example set by many law librarians in this web space, as if an example even needed to be set.

Blogging has been a mainstream web communications platform since at least 2006. I, for one, am not afflicted with early adopter syndrome, but after five damn years, the only reasons I am left thinking that AALL officialdom does not want to or has no intention of creating a "home base" for the vendor-buyer relationship in the blogpshere must be because either (1) they simply do not want to frankly address these matters which are important to the membership or (2) their inability to produce substantial results behind closed doors will come to light by addressing them publicly when no response is forthcoming from vendors.

I, for one, but I doubt I am the only one, think sunlight is the best disinfectant. Official statements publicly available for all to read in a timely manner can have positive consequences for institutional members, particularly those who have insufficient purchasing power to deal one-on-one with major vendors who view them as captive consumers. Need I mention that industry investment house analysts are also very interested in reading about the consumer-side's informed insights, trend perspectives, impact of new vendors, and actions taken by institutional buyers and that such content, if made publicly available in a timely matter, by AALL could have significant consequences our vendors cannot take lightly.

Our vendors can ignore, can pretend to be interested in AALL concerns without doing a damn thing, until their CFOs and CEOs say we damn well better address the concerns in our private sector market because it is impacting the investor community. We, well, at least our very expensive vendors' "base" (private sector law firms and corporate legal deparments and toss in larger federal government agencies) do have a voice that will be heard if it uses its vocal cords in a concerted way, that is to say, by speaking out as an institutional advocate. The rest of us outside this base will likely be beneficiaries once we realize that we are not major players.

AALL officaldom's actions so far only proves it is clueless about how this very serious "game" must be played. While some AALL blogs are worth taking their feed, most notably SIS/SIG groups, AALL's official "sanctioned" web content leaves a lot to be desired in content and timeliness. Will 2011 be the year AALL uses blogging as a means for timely consumer advocacy by way of vendor-related alerts as a current awareness service and analysis and commentary on vendor-buyer topics of interests to its members? The only thing stopping our professional association from doing this is our own elected officials on the Executive Board. AALL members who take to heart the fact that this is an association of institutional buyers are left questioning our association's real agenda.

There are some damn competent members on CRIV-Lite (by which I mean CRIV-AALL E-Board controlled) who have been dictated strict do's and don'ts with respect to addressing vendor-buyer issues and issuing any statements whatsoever. Why even have a CRIV-Lite if AALL is going to censor their actions and opinions based on the information committee members receive, investigate and apply their professional expertise to them? Just do away with the Committee. Or let the members address any and all specific issues with vendors one-on-one as they see fit and let CRIV solicit information from the membership by way of a blog to see if a problem or issue presented to the Committee is local or widespread without censorship in something resembling 21st turn-around time. Let CRIV-Lite become CRIV-Traditional to also address such issues and any and all general matters of interest and concern by way of their own blog without censorship in something resembling real time. The AALL E-Board should support, not hinder this Committee's efforts to do what the membership expects from it. Of course, this suggestion won't work unless current members of CRIV are allowed to select from the volunteer pool who they want to join the Committee or at least are allowed to veto who the E-Board has selected to populate the Committee when vacancies arise.

CRIV's current membership composition stacks the deck against responding to the only market forces that matter. Ah, I'm a county law library director but OMG, am I the only AALL member thinking four county law librarians of CRIV isn't really representative of our vendors' major "food groups." The ratio, based on AALL membership, is 2:2:1 (private sector, academic sector, pubic sector). The ratio based on spend is substantially higher where the private sector market eclipses the combined spend of the academic and public sector by an order of magnitude or two, or three. This is utter nonsense. This is why CRIV must be allowed to select and/or solicit law librarians to join as committee members to achieve some sort of balance and expertise when vacancies need to be filled on a CRIV-Unleashed committee. Note well, I know and respect a couple of the county law libarians on this committee but no matter how competent they may be, nothing trumps first-hand experience with dealing with the driving market forces in play and the longer term experiences dealing with them. It's the damn private sector and they simply do not have that expertise. They may understand but they do know in sufficient detail. But I digress... .

Time to be reading something worthwhile about the vendor-buyer state of affairs in an AALL blog? Now, I expect the answer from AALL will be, "we've been considering having the Vendor Liaison write a blog." Bad idea on at least three counts. First is the issue of credibility when communications come from AALL's Board or one of its hand picked appointees. Second, why mediate, restrict, censor the activities of a duly sanctioned committee by wedging this compensated appointee between CRIV and our vendors and between CRIV and the membership. Third, solo blogging is oh so 2003.

Blogging is a publishing business and solo blogging is not and has not been the way to go about this. No less a law blogging authority than Dennis Kennedy recognized this when, on December 26, 2004, he explained his reasoning for characterizing Group Blogs as the "Best Legal Blog Trend of 2004." He wrote

... 2004 saw the appearance of a number of group blogging experiments by both new bloggers and long-time bloggers. I like this trend because it offers the potential of providing better content to a bigger audience ... .

(Emphasis added.)

In the law librarian blogosphere, I believe LLB was one of the first blogs intended from the start to be a group effort. This is the reason LISNews recognized LLB as one of the 10 Blogs to Read in 2008 on January 14, 2008:

We had a hard time picking a law librarian blog. Our "final cut" list included three choices, and each seemed worthy to be our single final choice. In the end Law Librarian Blog edged out the others for several reasons. For me the biggest reason was collaboration; Law Librarian Blog has 2 editors, and several contributors. They cover a wide range of topics in the law library niche, and point the way to good tools and resources.

My hunch is there may be a member or two in CRIV or outside CRIV, thinking "wiki, wiki, wiki" instead of using a blog platform. My answer is "no." A wiki is a fairly walled off garden. We may be a professional association of institutional buyers but we have a public responsibility to all consumers of purchased legal resources. Any of us who have been addressing the purchasing in the public sector by well-meaning public agency and court administrators, like we Ohio county law librarians have for the past year, have seen what can happen when vendors have the information advantage over them. Only blog posts accessible by Search can help us execute this responsiblity to all. 

CRIV is sufficiently large in membership and stable in the duration of membership terms to keep a Vendor Relations group blog going as a long term collaborative effort informed by the opinions of many, not one. Of course, it needs to been more representative of all major market segments. Assuming that, if CRIV-Unleashed regularly publishing content that matters to institutional buyers in a timely manner is the objective, it will acquire an audience and will become a "home base." Today, the best example of group blogging in the legal information web space is, in my opinion, Slaw since its re-deployment which was assisted by a Law Foundation of Ontario grant. Slaw's editorial model, regular columnists and additional bloggers, is the way to do this blog publishing thing and the model a CRIV-Unleashed Vendor Relations blog should follow. As issues arise, blog about them to see how widespread they are. As trends begin to appear, write about them in posts to solicit reader input by way of the blog platform's comment function.

Our major vendors will read a CRIV-Unleashed blog. Perhaps vendors should be invited to guest write posts on topics CRIV requests them to address. Most vendors have an official policy of not commenting to individual blog posts directly very often. Perhaps they will after too many "vendor X could not be reached or refused to comment" when queried about the topic of this post before its publication.

When it comes to the vendor-official AALL relationship, there is an issue of credibility that can only be resolved by allowing CRIV to do its job and to take issues and matters they consider important to the membership publicly. The corrective to the current state of AALL-Vendor affairs is not to wedge a Vendor Liaison between (1) CRIV and vendors and (2) CRIV and the membership. It is to introduce transparency in the relationship and accountability for the relationship by unleashing CRIV to do its job and to do so publicly in a timely and uncensored manner. Unmediated blogging by the Committee's membership is the best way to do this. But I'm not holding my breath... . There is no doubt in my mind that many AALL members are thinking that the time is coming for an independent legal institutional buyer organization to address vendor relations because of the current state of affairs.

It's Not a "Mission from God" But the Law Librarian Blogosphere Remains the Best Watchdog Our Profession Has. Until something is done, the entire law librarian blogosphere remains the watchdog over all things legal information-related including our association, our vendors and activities going on beyond both of those spheres of influence that have or will have a significant impact on the provision of legal information.

I, my colleagues who write for this blog and "fellow-travelers" in the law librarian blogosphere are not on some "mission from god." I believe we all post because there is a vacuum of full and frank discussions of matters of importance. I'm sure we all believe that none of us have "the answer" but we give a damn enough to take the time to say something about the many and varied issues at hand from our individual perspectives. Hell, I tell every blogger who contributes to LLB that it is absolutely OK with me if you want to publish a "Joe, you ignorant bastard" post. I publish every comment to a post that says anything critical of what I have written. I believe my fellow law librarian bloggers do the same.

What does AALL do in the open for all to read using a publishing platform for timely statements? Here's what a CRIV-Unleashed blog post could have said recently:

While the contract between West and the authors of "Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure -- Law, Commentary and Forms" allowed West to use the authors' names on the title page of the pocket part, the editorial quality of ghost written legal analysis and commentary for this title's pocket part as documented in the court record of Rudovsky vs. West is unacceptable in this instance and may be an example of a pattern and practice on the publisher's part. CRIV calls on readers to provide examples of similar instances of questionable editorial content in sufficient specificity for further investigation by the Committee. Readers may do so by commenting to this post or by emailing ... .

Of course a CRIV-Unleashed blog post could have said must more than that. Do note that an incoming AALL Executive Board member has publicly stated in, you guessed it, a blog post, that he sent a message to the AALL Executive Board (and the SLA Legal Division Board) about Rudovsky. I do not know what that message said exactly but my hunch is it echoed in the question he posed in his blog post:

How can we, as customers, stress to the publishers that attempting to run schemes like these may help the bottom line in the current fiscal quarter, but will have long-term damaging effects for years to come?

Regardless of what happens to the verdict in Rudovsky, TR Legal's admissions about the quality of the content produced by its ghost writing staff are a sufficient basis for a timely and public response from AALL if our professional association gives a damn. A message from an individual law librarian blogger to AALL ought not be necessary. Will it be received by official silence? Wait 'n see. Hell, let's see who responds publicly first and how strongly worded that response is, SLA's Legal Division Board or AALL's Executive Board? Perhaps this would signal which professional association our membership dues should go to.

Will This Unacceptable State of Affairs Be Corrected in the Near Term? Maybe, maybe not. But at least one in-coming AALL Executive Board member who is not afraid to express his professional opinion out loud in the blogosphere might be able to awaken AALL officialdom from its very long nap that ignores the power of 21st Century web communications. 

There are plenty of law librarians waiting in the wings to contribute their time, energy and expertise, including some current members of AALL committees, ah, like, CRIV, for example. If not, we just might have to elect more law librarian bloggers in tune with the 21st Century into the E-Club.

Regular Blogging Can be Is a Grind. I was a lot younger in calendar years and "blog-years" when I launched LLB on New Year's Day in 2005, and, as the long-suffering Blog Widow likes to remind me frequently, "I'm not aging well." When LLB was about to hit 2,000,000 total pages views, I thought, "time to quit." Ditto at the 2.5 million page view milestone. Ditto as last year's fifth anniversary and as this one approached. Well ... in thinking out loud fashion, which is what I think blogging should be at least sometimes, this senior citizen, both in calendar years and blogosphere presence, isn't quite ready to call it quits.

I don't know what if any influence LLB has had over the years but it is good to see that the light of much younger, certainly much more energetic law librarian bloggers burns brightly in this web space. Their blogs have acquired readers because we all need multiple "home bases" for their current awareness posts to call attention to matters of significance and their analysis and commentary posts informed by their professional expertise.

On behalf of an also aging Boomer law librarian, my co-editor Mark Giangrande, and our past and current LLB contributors, we wish you all the very best for 2011.

"[A]nd what have you done, another year over and new one just begun." -- John Lennon.

[JH]

Happy Birthday Mark Giangrande!

My co-editor, Mark Giangrande, is enjoying his birthday today by, well, blogging about the FCC's just released broadband plans. See post below. Mark and I go way, way back to the early 1980s. He was attending IIT Chicago Kent Law School and working in the law library there while I was a freshly minted law firm librarian. Back then, when a law firm librarian needed to be bailed out, you placed a call to Chicago-Kent's law library. Not that other Chicago academic law libraries weren't also helpful but Chicago-Kent was the one to call when it was time to hit the panic button. Their help was simply amazing.

Mark was the first techie I knew. When I bought my first Mac in 1992(?), Mark configured it for me because, well, I was an idiot. The odds are high that he is still using my old IIci to run something. Later, Mark went to library school, attending the University of Texas program and working for Roy Mersky during his time in Austin. He has his share of Mersky stories but I'll leave those to Mark to tell.

In the mid-90s we found ourselves both working in Miami at different law schools. I have fond memories of Mark being faced with an admistrative mandate to make his school's website "more Catholic." Thanks to Mark, I also found what probably was the only place in Miami for a good hot dog. When you're from Chicago, you have to find a good hot dog!

What amazes me about Mark is that he continues to practice reference and legal research work day in and day out at his age at DePaul Law now. Once upon a time, legal research was my speciality but I eventually burned out. One must be curious, one must want to find the answer to the issue presented all the time. Curosity was not an unlimited resource in my professional life but it remains so for Mark.

I'm not going to say how old Mark is today but he is part of the boomer generation who has "screwed up the profession." (In case you are interested, Greg Lambert and I agreed in a telephone conversation today that the reason we baby boomers screwed things up in law firm librarianship was because we boomers failed to stop the explosive growth in law firm attorney hiring and its consequences, namely the hiring of far too many MBA types to run mega-law firms who wedged themselves in between firm law librarians and the partners who once ran law firms -- oops, our bad, LOL).

OK, I am going to say how old Mark is. He's "59 and feel it, though not as a complaint. It is what it is" to quote Mark. It always is what it is. But after all of these years and what we have lived through, we remain good friends.

Happy birthday Mark --Joe

LLB Turns Five Years Old: Another Day, Another Post

Five years, that's got to be something like 35 years in blog-years -- never thought I would be here today writing this post.

Way Back When. I launched LLB on January 1, 2005 just to add a law librarian blog to the mix of blogs being published by the Law Professor Blogs Network I co-founded in 2004 -- never thought either would amount to much at the time. Initially I was blogging solo, then I added co-editors to help out, first Cincinnati Law's Ron Jones in 2006 and now DePaul Law's Mark Giangrande (since 2009), plus many great contributing editors over the years. At the time the law librarian/law library blogosphere was relatively uncrowded. Not so anymore. There's plenty of great blogs regularly publishing now, many by (much) younger professional law librarians full of energy and fresh new ideas. The widespread use of RSS feeds for web destinations, the somewhat late arrival of AALL blogs (compared to what was going on in 2005), and the popularization of other social media forms of communication have made it much easier for law librarians to stay informed and to share their opinions about professional developments. Some of the earlier law librarian/law library blogs have gone silent or publish far less frequently than they once did. That's understandable. Blogging is no longer the Next Big Thing. It's now a relatively mature form of web communication with many alternative social networking formats offering excellent options.

We keep plugging away on LLB but god knows for how much longer -- perhaps five years is more like 70 in blog-years. It can feel like that sometimes, particularly last year when I went through the hell that was a 5-month spell of cluster headaches because my doctor in her infinite wisdom decided my meds had to be changed. Blogging on lithium -- the same drug used to put asylum inmates in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest into a zombie state -- was "a trip." At least electro-shock therapy wasn't involved. If it was up to my long-suffering blog widow, Lynette, I would have stopped a year or two ago. I'm surprised she hasn't tried to perform a lobotomy while I'm asleep. Maybe she has. Maybe it has been successful! If you were a zoombie, would you know it?

Blogging can be a grind, but when it is, it's a grind of my own making because I believe the blogging platform is best suited for regular posting, not occasional publications nor micro-bursts into the ether. When the ABA Journal was soliciting blog recommendations for its top law blogs last year, it called for blogs that published at least three times a week. By implication, the ABA Journal was recognizing what was appropriate for this form of web communications. LLB has never missed a day in five years. That doesn't mean every day's RSS feed contains must-reads; clearly that's not the case. They're just blog posts, nothing more, nothing less, and in my case they are oftentimes the result of an early morning caffeinated rush to see what's been going on before I head off to the "day job." We, or at least I, make no attempt to be the first to publish something. Oftentimes, what's really interesting is others' responses to breaking developments so I tend to hold off rushing to publish something so I can read and link to both the development at the moment and others' opinions on the matter. LLB is not necessarily breaking the news but does try to add some context to it.

Times Have Changed. One thing has changed over the years. In the early days, LLB focused on news and developments as a current awareness service of sorts for law librarians and others. We did little in the way of analysis and commentary. Now that the landscape of web communications has changed, we certainly have gotten more opinionated. Looking back over last year's posts, the library-vendor relationship, the anti-competitive effects of the legal publishing industry and its consequences on financing the provision of legal information resources in the current economic climate, the search for alternatives now and the very likely transformation of legal publishing in the not too distant future have been themes that stands out on LLB and in the law librarian blogosphere generally. I've added my 2-cents but I doubt it has been worth even that much.

Last year's utterly unscientific LLB polls and surveys, which greatly benefited from reader participation, for example, produced some unexpected results -- phone calls to me by industry financial analysts from New York and London. WTF as the kids would say. Why is there such a vacuum of information? Shouldn't these folks be calling an official consumer advocate for law libraries? Oh wait, we don't have one. But LLB isn't one either. It's just one blog, one among many in the law librarian blogosphere. I know because I try to read as many as I can. I certainly learn from reading them; think "Jane, you ignorant slut" -- "Dan, you pompous ass!" where I am Jane or Dan in point-counterpoint fashion like this one from SNL's archives after reading a post someone else has written on a topic I covered -- a much better informed and more thoughtful post. Looking back I think it is fair to say that 2009 is the year the legal information professional blogosphere became the consumer advocate for legal resources users, individual and institutional.

It is a shame that one has to slap a vendor around a bit in a blog post when this middle age law librarian, who is well beyond his prime, puts on his "Jack Cafferty" hat to speak his (and only his) mind and later learns via private emails and telephone conversations that there are many like-minded law librarians who are fed up with the consequences of the current structure of the legal publishing industry and want change, want concerted, multitasking input from the professional community in the transformative programming being executed now or just over the horizon. It's not unusual for vendor reps or middle management types to sit in my office in our little county law library in southwestern Ohio saying "I hope we don't piss you off" or asking that our conversations be "off the record." Such is the current state of affairs; 2009 is also the year AALL demonstrated just how ineffective our professional association is as a vocal advocate for its member institutions and their patrons, legal information users. This is a pathetic situation and an unintended consequence of blogging for the last five years.

Cafferty and I were both born in Chicago. Hum... Mark Giangrande is also from Chicago. Maybe there's something in the water but the comparison ends there. Cafferty's outspoken and provocative style of commentary makes mine look amateurish by comparison. But then I am an amateur. Cafferty is a pro: "I get paid to ask questions I don't know the answers to and to complain about the things that bother me." Me? Well I've just taken a curmudgeonly turn of late complete with a very small handful of stubborn ideas and opinions. I can't speak for LLB's co-editor Mark Giangrande but I've known Mark for well over a quarter of century now and know he applies his decades of professional experience and expertise to evaluate curent developments. I learn something new every time he publishes a commentary or analysis and hope you do, too.

"Every Damn Day." Celebrated Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko (1932-1997) once said his column wasn't a gem each and every day it appeared but it did appear every day-- actually I think he said "every damn day" when I ran into him in the hallway of the Chicago Tribune Tower in the early 1990s and asked Royko how he did it. Chicago Tribune readers turned to Royko's column to see if that day's edition was worth reading.That's the way to view LLB. Of course, Royko also wrote in one of his columns, “It's been my policy to view the Internet not as an 'information highway,' but as an electronic asylum filled with babbling loonies.”

For the time being, this babbling loony and Mark Giangrande will continue blogging despite both of us barely holding on to being 50-something (and all that entails) -- thinking out loud sometimes (in my case, certainly getting crankier with age) and trying to stay current on matters of interest to us. Hopefully some of the topics we blog about are also of interest to you. In my case, tossing something into a blog post is oftentimes just a way of preserving it for later recall -- no short term memory left! Eventually I'll forget how to login to our blogware provider and then that will be the end of this for me.

Thanks to All. Mark and I would like to thank LLB's many readers and contributing editors for their continued support and their always welcomed suggestions on the fifth anniversary of Law Librarian Blog. For the record, one of our former contributing editors, Julie Jones, coined "LLB" as a shorthand reference for this blog many years ago. I would like to personally thank Julie for that. Counting spaces, that's 15 less keystrokes to make each time we mention LLB. Odd how little things like that matter.

Another day, another post. -- Joe Hodnicki

Mark Giangrande Joins LLB as Co-Editor

I'm happy to announce that Mark Giangrande (DePaul) has joined LLB as a co-editor to help with the daily grind that is blogging. Mark contributed to this blog in its early days before moving over to Tech Law Prof Blog to serve as editor. You can still see him reporting on IT legal and industry developments there.

I've know Mark for almost 30 years. We go way back to the days when he worked the Reference Desk at Chicago-Kent Law Library while I was a law firm librarian in Chicago. Back then, Chicago-Kent was the phone number to dial whenever law firm librarians needed help, real help in real time. Mark received is JD from Chicago-Kent and library-information science degree from the University of Texas-Austin, where he served as a Tarlton fellow under Roy Mersky's tutelage.

Mark was the first law librarian I met who really got it about IT in the early 1980's. He made me pay attention to what was then a "disruptive" development and I learned much from him. In fact, he configured my first personal desktop (and it was a Mac IIci so I should have been able to do that myself). I think he is still running my old Mac at his house. From time to time, we've worked together, For example, Mark joined Virginia Thomas (Wayne State) and me to provide law library and information technology consulting for the Appalachian School of Law during its start-up phase in 1995, free of charge I might add. 

Unlike this burnt-out law firm research librarian turned 50-something paper pusher, Mark's first love is and continues to be performing legal research and reference in academic law libraries, writing, and teaching legal research to law school students. Simply put, after all these years, that amazes me to no end. I don't know how Mark does it but he does it very well at DePaul.

I believe you will find Mark's LLB posts informative, insightful and oftentimes thought-provoking. Thanks Mark -- Joe Hodnicki

Hi, My Name is Ron and I'm a Blogoholic

Emma (age 9), Jack (5) and Drew (2) want their daddy back. So Ron Jones (Cincinnati) is stepping down as co-editor of LLB. After contributing to this blog almost since its inception in 2005, Ron joined me in the daily grind as co-editor on May 15, 2006. Three years at this is a very long time, just ask Ron's long-suffering wife, Erin. Ron is staying on a contributing editor because he is a blogoholic but I'm not sure his wife knows this.

Ron's a great professional colleague and one of those rare individuals you meet at work and remain close friends after moving on. We've had great fun blogging together, drinking a few beers  over lunch after work, and "attending" professional conferences together.

I can't say enough about how I appreciate all Ron has done for LLB so I'll just close with this: Thanks Ron. -- Joe Hodnicki

Law Librarian Blog Turns Four Years Old Today!

Today is the fourth anniversary of the first post published on Law Librarian Blog. Ron Jones and I would like to thank our great team of contributing editors, current and past, for all their help and most of all our readers for making our efforts worthwhile. We have enjoyed the many comments and private emails this year and look forward to more in 2009. [JH]

Reflections on LLB's 1,000,000th Page View

Sometime today Law Librarian Blog should receive its 1,000,000th page view. It's a milestone I have been looking forward to but I don't exactly know why. Except as a marketing metric for advertisers, traffic stats tell us nothing about a blog's influence and it's contributions to our profession and for those outside our profession who are interested in providing or gaining access to information on the web. In the early days of this blog, I guess I just want to know whether anyone "out there" had found LLB.

It's not an uncommon interest. None other than Tim Berners-Lee started logging page accessions to the planet's first web server, info.cern.ch, in the summer of 1991. If the person who cooked up the web wondered about traffic stats, I guess it is OK for the rest of us too. But let's not make too much about traffic stats. In his Weaving the Web, Berners-Lee mentions traffic growth on CERN's web server only three times and the book's indexer didn't think the topic deserved indexing.

I know bloggers who check their traffic stats every day, several times a day even. It can be quite an obsession. I've succumbed to it from time to time but it is an urge well worth resisting. Just post and establish a web destination by doing so regularly. Visitors will find the blog via search engines and some will turn into regular readers.

About law library/law librarian blogs, Dennis Kennedy writes "across the board, these blogs have developed into strong information resources, often with links to primary source information that I'm not sure how I would find otherwise." While Ron Jones, our great team of contributing editors, and I thank you for making our efforts worthwhile by visiting LLB, why not also check out some of the other 140 law library/law librarian blogs today if you haven't already done so. Here's Bonnie Shucha's Directory. Together, law library/law librarian blogs are creating a valuable information space for users of legal resources. [JH]

April Fool's Prank on Law Professor Blogs Network

From ContractsProf Blog:

The Law Professors Blog Network (LPBN) is suing bloggers Franklin G. Snyder  and Keith A. Rowley for breach of contract in connection with their blogging activities on the Commercial Law blog. ... According to the complaint, although Snyder and Rowley are listed as Blog Editor and Contributing Editor respectively of the ContractsProfs Blog, they have joined "a ragtag crew of renegades seeking to undermine the LPBN's dominance in law prof blogging, promote communism and end civilization as we know it."

Not having funds for litigation fees and expenses, Blog Emperor Paul Caron and I are representing ourselves and you know what they say about that. LOL. [JH]

LISNews Picks Law Librarian Blog as One of the Ten Blogs to Read in 2008

About our selection as one of the ten blogs to read in 2008 by LISNews, Blake Carver explains

We had a hard time picking a law librarian blog. Our "final cut" list included three choices, and each seemed worthy to be our single final choice. In the end Law Librarian Blog edged out the others for several reasons. For me the biggest reason was collaboration; Law Librarian Blog has 2 editors, and several contributors. They cover a wide range of topics in the law library niche, and point the way to good tools and resources.

There are many, many fine law librarian/law libraries blogs in our crowded corner of the blogosphere. Ron Jones, our great team of contributing editors and I are honored to be selected.

Here's the LISNews Ten Blogs to Read in 2008. Check out the announcement for details about each one.

• The Annoyed Librarian
• David Rothman
• iLibrarian
• Judge a Book by its Cover
• Law Librarian Blog
• Library Stuff
• Marylaine Block
• Off The Mark
• ResearchBuzz
• Stephen's Lighthouse

By the way, check out LISten, LISNews' trial run of podcasts. [JH]

Law Librarian Blog is Three Years Old!

Today is the third anniversary of the first post published on Law Librarian Blog. See Putting Law Librarian Blog in Perspective. Ron Jones and I are happy to see that in 2007 our blog's page views broke the 400,000 mark, up from 329,000 in 2006 and 126,000 in 2005. Page views are an imperfect metric but we hope our blog traffic indicates that we are providing news and resources our audience finds informative and helpful.

Ron and I would like to thank our great team of contributing editors -- Neal Axton (William Mitchell College of Law Library), Julie Jones (Cornell Law Library), Stina McClintock (King County Law Library (Seattle)), Jean M. Pajerek (Cornell Law Library), Carol A. Parker (University of New Mexico School of Law Library) and Karen R. Schneiderman (Drexel University College of Law Library) -- for all their help.

And thank you blog readers for visiting our blog! [JH]

Law Librarian Blog Garners 5th Place in OEDb's Top 25 Librarian Bloggers Ranking

Online Education Database reports that Law Librarian Blog ranks fifth in their Top 25 Librarian Bloggers ranking study. Our blog is also the most popular law librarian blog according to the report. Thanks readers!

In answering the question, "which librarian bloggers have the biggest reach?", OEDb writes "our goal was to show — using objective data from reliable sources — which blogs are the most popular, according to visitor traffic and site backlinks. To this end, we used data for these four metrics to calculate the rankings: (1)Google PageRank, (2) Alexa Rank, (3) Technorati Authority, and (4) Bloglines Subscribers."

The OEDb study apparently excluded blogs by libraries. It would be huge undertaking but hopefully library blogs will be the subject of a future study using the same metrics. BTW, check out OEDb's recently launched Library 2.0-themed blog, called iLibrarian. [JH]

The Blogger's Choice Awards Are Underway

Somewhere in the bowels of this contest you will find Law Librarian Blog which was nominated for a couple of awards by my assistant, "Mevil." Mevil must be trying to get a raise ... show I hereby publically remind her that she got a 50-cent raise a couple of years ago and that should suffice for the remainder of the decade. [JH]

Law Librarian Blog is Two Years Old!

Today is the second anniversary of the first post published on Law Librarian Blog. See Putting Law Librarian Blog in Perspective. Since its inception, the editors of the Law Librarian Blog have posted 3,884 stories and the blog has been visited 329,744 times with an amazing 455,749 page views. Thanks Ron, Neal, Mark, and Lee, bloggers who have served so well since 2005, and Stina, Jean, and Carol, bloggers who joined the Board this year. And thank you blog readers for visiting our blog!

Law Professor Blogs Network. May I also call attention to the editors and contributing editors of the Law Professor Blogs Network. What a great job! Being a co-founder of the Network (with Cincinnati Law Prof Paul Caron) I can say I never imagined the growth and popularity of the Network back in July 2004 when we started this venture. We now have 57 editors and 25 contributing editors writing for 36 law blogs with several more blogs expected to go into production soon. Together our editors have posted 57,971 stories. Cumulative Network blog traffic closed the 2006 calendar year at 12.4 million page views (click on chart for 2006 Network growth). I believe I'm justified in claiming that the Law Professor Blogs Network is the largest and one of the best law blog networks of its kind.

Thank you Network readers for making our collective effort so worthwhile. Check out our new Network blogroll which lists the five most recent posts from each of our blogs.

Joe Hodnicki
Co-founder & Chief of Operations
Law Professor Blogs Network

Editor, Law Librarian Blog
Member, Board of Advisors, and Contributor, Law School Innovation
Editor, Law Blog Metrics (coming soon)

Associate Director for Library Operations
Robert S. Marx Law Library
University of Cincinnati College of Law
Editor, Securities Lawyer's Deskbook

Thanks Ron Jones!

I want to publicly thank my blog co-editor and Cincinnati Law colleague Ron Jones, Reference & Electronic Services Librarian, for keeping all of us informed of law library and legal developments while I was "off the net" recuperating from gallbladder surgery. Great job Ron! Hi Erin, Emma, Jack & Andrew.

The laparoscopic cholecystectomy procedure for the removal of the gallbladder because of gallstones is relatively minor surgery [WebMD MedlinePlus] but if you find yourself about to go under the knife, I hope you don't come down with bronchitics the day after surgery. Aaagh. Captioned images here: Download gallbladder.jpg (large file).

Bottom line: glad they weren't kidney stones! [JH]