Law Librarian Blog

Keys to Personnel Management

Two different takes today on how to encourage positive development in the workplace.  Marie Newman at OOTJ posts on the need to nuture the professional growth of lawyers (and librarians), and provides the text of a recent NY Lawyer article on providing constructive criticism and useful feedback. 

Over at law.com, advice is given to corporate counsel managers on combating negative attitudes and behaviors in the workplace, also applicable to libraries. 

General counsel are tagged as custodians of their companies' most crucial, yet most sensitive and volatile asset: its employees. Henry Ford saw them as one big headache, immune from any analgesic's curative powers: "Why is it that I always end up with a person, when all I really want is a pair of hands?" But it's a person you get, and if you believe people are of value, then the question becomes how to go about managing, motivating and inspiring them -- and, just as important, learning how to unlock their embedded value. Here's a guide on the do's and don'ts to reach that goal.

[JJ]

LLB Poll: Extra Pair of Hands

Opinion Polls & Market Research

Building Libraries in the Age of Google

Slate has an interesting piece concerning the architecture of public libraries and how the communal meeting place that libraries have always been, enhanced by unique and often historical styles, maybe the salvation of disappearing libraries in the Age of Google. While I disagree with the premise of the Age of Google being the downfall of brick and mortar libraries the discussion and slide show are interesting.

Please provide some of your favorite visually appealing library locations in the comments. [BB]

Acquire Everything You Need for a Law Library Coffee Bar from Amazon

Want to open a coffee bar in the law library to supplement your library's budget? This one, available from Amazon.com(!), is designed as a turnkey drive-thru operation so it will cut down on noise and, with the removal of a few shelving units it can easily fit inside a law library.

For $89,000, you can buy an Espresso Americano Brevita Drive-Thru coffee shop, including building materials and equipment. All you need is to find a site. Not sure what shipping will cost but the turnkey operation weighs four tons! Here's what you get:

• Complete, self-contained business. Just pick your site and we'll provide everything else you need to start your own espresso business.
• Kit includes the drive thru unit (pictured on Amazon page), all equipment needed for start-up, start-up supplies including product and small wares, membership in the EA Brevita Cooperative Association for one year featuring product discounts and online, video-based training 24/7.
• Includes all training materials, business plan and documentation necessary to obtain financing, site selection guidelines and procedures, and regulatory information.
• Full support of a national brand, complete with branded loyalty cards good at all EA Brevita locations.
• National branded support of a large network without the expensive franchise cost.

[JH]

Harvard Law Library's InfoAdvantage

CALI Fellow and Law School Innovation blogger Gene Koo reports that Harvard Law Library is piloting a way to push specific books, articles, and other resources selected carefully by law librarians directly into each law class's online learning portal. He writes:

What I find particularly interesting about this effort is that the librarians are taking the initiative here and letting professors opt out of the program, rather than requiring profs to affirmatively opt in. (They attempted the latter last year and got few responses).

Gene would like to know if similar programs are in place at other academic law libraries and if not, what institutional barriers may be present should academic law libraries want to follow Harvard's example. Here's Gene's email address. [JH]

Wiki for Library Best Practices

Check out Library Success: A Best Practices Wiki. It was created to be a one-stop shop for great ideas and information for all types of librarians. [JH]

The No A**hole Rule

It's Friday, so here's some down and dirty management help.  For those of you interested in administration and fostering a civilized and functional workplace, this book is a quick and entertaining read, The No A**hole Rule  (2007) by Robert Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering in the Stanford Engineering School.  He's got a blog to go with it here that features a quiz to find out if you're the office a**hole, tips for surviving workplace jerks, and the very cute Arsemail for commiserating with others subject to jerks, or to apologize when you're the one who acted like a jerk. 

[JJ]

Curing Employees of Internet Access Induced ADD

Working at a computer with Internet access is a hazard to your staff's productivity. Check out The 20 Biggest Online Time Wasters, and 6 Strategies for Beating Them.

More seriously, "organizations employing knowledge workers are greatly impacted by the Infomania phenomenon, also referred to as Information Overload or Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). Infomania is the mental state of continuous stress and distraction caused by the combination of queued messaging overload and incessant interruptions." Quoting from Nathan Zeldes, David Sward, and Sigal Louchheim,
Infomania: Why we can’t afford to ignore it any longer (First Monday, August 6, 2007)(study of e-mail overload). Here's the abstract:

The combination of e–mail overload and interruptions is widely recognized as a major disrupter of knowledge worker productivity and quality of life, yet few organizations take serious action against it. This paper makes the case that this action should be a high priority, by analyzing the severe impact of the problem in both qualitative and quantitative terms. We attempt to provide sufficient supporting data from the scientific literature and from corporate surveys to enable change agents to make the case and convince their organizations to authorize such action.

[JH]

New Blog Takes a Satirical Look at Working in a Library

Dutch librarian Dennie Heye has started a new satirical library blog named Obnoxious librarian from Hades. And why not! [JH]

Library 2.0 and Last-Generation Librarians

As mentioned elsewhere in this blog, Library 2.0 is moving from novelty to SOP. Library Journal is calling Library 2.0 "service for the next generation." The key is a staffing issue, namely hiring Librarians 2.0 to implement these services with assistance from "last-generation" librarians.

Remember Plato's ideal ruler? A philosopher-king, someone who with proper education still is not fit for executive authority unless he or she is no less than 50 years old. For younger librarians cringing now, perhaps recalling the T-shirt slogan "Age and treachery will beat youth and skill," be advised that Plato's ideal philosopher-king has an open mind even if he or she is sporting a head full of gray hair. [JH]

Library Buyers Guide Website

Check out the new Library Buyers Guide website. Among the many helpful features are

• a free weekly newsletter
• a user survey
• a blog
• links to online databases and resources vendors

[JH]

George Christian, Librarian Connection Executive Director, Tells Congress that Patriot Act Invades Privacy

From the Washington Post story:

A librarian who fended off an FBI demand for computer records on patrons said Wednesday that secret anti-terrorism investigations strip away personal freedoms.

"Terrorists win when the fear of them induces us to destroy the rights that make us free," said George Christian, executive director of Library Connection, a consortium of 27 libraries in the Hartford, Conn., area.

Read the Testimony of George Christian, Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, hearing: Responding to The Inspector General's Findings of Improper Use of National Security Letters by the FBI, April 11, 2007)

Hat tip to beSpacific. [JH]

Academic Rights, Academic Responsibilities: A New Approach

New report from the Israel on Campus Coalition:

"This monograph is intended to spur a renewed national discussion surrounding academic freedom and the responsibilities required of all university stakeholders – students, faculty members and administrators – to uphold those freedoms.

The publication appeals to departments and administrations to stop the infusion of political and anti-Israel bias into curricular materials, with the goal of encouraging serious dialogue about how best to create a campus climate that enables open, civil and objective study of complex and charged topics."  [RJ]

Education Dept. May Issue Regs to Collect New IHE Statistics

From the Chronicle: "The Education Department is seeking through regulation to collect new summary data in the regular reports that colleges make to a massive database of educational statistics." (for subscribers)

See also:  Notice of Proposed Information Collection Requests, from the Federal Register. [RJ]

Rick Goheen Appointed Director of Toledo Law Library

The University of Toledo College of Law has announced that effective March 12 Rick Goheen will assume the position of Director of the the College's LaValley Law Library and Assistant Professor of Law.  In a sense, Rick is returning home because he received his undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Toledo in 1991.

Rick has a Cincinnati Law connection. He worked in our library on a part-time basis while attending the University of Cincinnati College of Law. He was a member of the University of Cincinnati Law Review and received his J.D. from Cincinnati in 1994. Rick joined the UC Law Library reference staff on a full-time basis in 1995. He rose up the ranks to Head of Reference, while also earning tenure and his master's degree in library science at the University of Kentucky. In 2001, he left UC to become Associate Director for Public Services at the University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minneapolis), the position he now leaves for his new appointment.

The UC law library staff was delighted to hear the good news. Congratulations Rick! [JH]

The New (Feral?) Library Professional

Stanley Wilder, associate dean of the River Campus libraries at the University of Rochester, examines ARL's 2005 demographic data of the library profession in the Chronicle. He writes:

If you work in an academic library and are under 35, you probably don't have a lot in common with your older counterparts. You are far more likely to work in areas beyond the confines of traditional librarianship, often in information technology. You are less likely to hold a degree in library science. You are more diverse in ethnic and racial terms. And while those of you in nonsupervisory jobs generally earn less than your comparable older colleagues, some of you in high-tech jobs earn much more.

Dean Wilder also cites a very interesting Library Journal article: Raised By Wolves: Integrating the new generation of feral professionals into the academic library by James G. Neal, Vice President for Information Services and University Librarian, Columbia University.

I recommend both articles. [JH]

Ninth Circuit Holds Right to Appeal Thwarted by Prison Librarian

In Phillips v. Hust, ___ F.3d ___, 2007 WL 446593 (9th Cir. 2007) the Court ruled that the arbitrary denial by prison officials of access to materials the prison routinely made available to inmates for the preparation of legal documents constitutes a denial of an inmate's right of access to the courts where it results in the loss of a legal claim. At issue was the use of a comb-binding machine needed by the plaintiff to bind a brief. Evidence in the record shows that the prisoner was arbitrarily refused use of the machine by the prison librarian. Download the opinion (pdf).

Hat tip to Kim Ositis, Reference Librarian, King County Law Library. [JH]

2005 ARL Statistics Now Available

The ARL Statistics Interactive Edition has been updated with 2004-05 Data.  [RJ]

Two New Titles Added to Briefs in Law Librarianship Series

SURVEY ON ACCESS AND TEACHING OF ALTERNATIVE LEGAL RESEARCH USING INTERNET PORTALS AND GATEWAYS
By Sarah Hooke Lee

1 volume (paper) | $52.00 | Item #334360 | ISBN: 0-8377-9363-7
Published: Buffalo; William S. Hein & Co., Inc.;
2006 AALL PUBLICATIONS SERIES NO. 56, VOLUME 12

This survey addresses the growth of courses and other methods used to expose library patrons to the tremendous number of internet-based legal resources now available. Law librarians, more than anyone, recognize the usefulness of these alternatives to traditional print sources and the established online databases. This Brief in Law Librarianship examines how much access to these alternative sources law libraries provide to their patrons. It also considers these questions: Do law libraries teach their library users how to use alternative products, given librarians' already -crowded schedules? If so, who does this teaching, what is taught, and how is instruction offered? Have law libraries received additional funding for new staff and purchase of new products?

Two surveys were conducted, one in 2000 and the second in 2003. This offered the opportunity to identify increases or changes in teaching these resources over this time period. In 2000, there were far more independent vendors and gateway-type commercial products available than in 2003, as many of the start-up products had been acquired by the big vendors. These developments led to a few changes in the lists of choices in the 2003 survey. The surveys were distributed via listservs targeted by type of law librarian, i.e., academic, law firm and public law librarians.

SURVEY ON COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT POLICIES AND SELECTION PRACTICES
By Vicente E. Garces

1 volume (paper) | $50.00 Item #332510 | ISBN: 0-8377-9356-4
Published: Buffalo; William S. Hein & Co., Inc.
2006 AALL PUBLICATIONS SERIES NO. 56, VOLUME 11

This survey looks at two basic topics in collection development: selection of law library materials and collection development policies. In focusing on selection, this survey provides a snapshot of the types of materials being collected and the selection processes being used in law libraries.  Collection development has evolved over the last several decades to become an increasingly complex and challenging area of specialization in librarianship. This evolution is most evident at large academic research libraries, but has impacted all libraries to varying degrees, including law libraries.

The survey questions on collection development policies cover basic issues concerning the use (or non-use), creation and content of these documents. The data in this survey comes from the answers of the 71 self-selected libraries that responded to the survey distributed to law librarians in spring 2001.

Professors and Librarians Win Narrow Exemptions Under Digital Millennium Copyright Act

From the Chronicle.com:

"The U.S. Copyright Office has issued exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that may benefit media professors, archivists, and other academics. Under certain circumstances, they will be allowed to circumvent access-control technologies on various electronic media." (for subscribers)

See also:

• Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works
• Statement of the Librarian of Congress on the Anticircumvention Rulemaking
• Determination of the Librarian of Congress and Text of the Regulation
• The Recommendation of the Register of Copyrights

[RJ]

New LLRX Guides

Here's a sampling of new articles published by LLRX.com:

Competitive Intelligence - A Selective Resource Guide, Updated
As the competitive intelligence landscape continues to shift and evolve, Sabrina I. Pacifici and Donna Cavallini's guide to selected online and subscription resources has once again been updated to highlight a range of free and fee sites, services and publications.

Criminal Justice Resources: Juvenile Law and Family Court Resources
The latest installment of Ken Strutin's Criminal Justice Resources series is a bibliography of juvenile and family law sources from professional and commercial institutions, government agencies and public interest groups.

Deal or No Deal – Licensing and Acquiring Digital Resources
This new column by Kara Phillips launches with a review of resources and techniques to help get you up to speed on licensing and put you on a level playing field with the vendor reps on the other side of the licensing table.

Public Libraries, not just Cybercafes

Lure them in with access to the Internet. Hook them on books. That's the strategy of some public libraries. Hat tip to LISNews. [JH]

IHE Litigation Will Lead to Information Disclosure

Colleges and universities are going to be hammered with litigation that will eventually compel them to give out information they now protect as private, said Peter F. Lake, a law professor and co-director of the Center for Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University according to The Chronicle of Higher Education. [JH]

Helping a Visually Impaired Law School Student

At the University of Cincinnati College of Law, we have a visually impaired 1L this year. Along the way to planning ways to help our student, I'm learning how unaccommodating some facets of the legal education process are. I'll reserve my comments to legal publications, online legal research tools, and course management.

Digital Versions of Print Materials
It appears that major legal publishers view the distribution of PDFs of their casebooks as an accommodation for the visually impaired because so far that format is the only one we are receiving from them. PDFs that are images of images (eg HeinOnline law review articles) can not be read by the software applications used by our visually impaired student. I had hopes that PDFs that are images of text files, like the ones legal publishers have supplied us, would be less problematic, but they are not. So our university's disabilities staff has to convert by hand PDFs into usable Word files. Doable? Of course? Reasonable accommodation on the part of the University? Absolutely.

However, it is not like our legal publishers only have digital copies of their publications in PDF. Somewhere there exists a digital copy of the source material in some other format; even an SGML or XML document would be easier to manipulate than a PDF file. In anticipation of such requests, our legal publishers also could require Word files from their authors. One would expect better from legal publishers. This is shameful. Are we not asking the right folks at Thomson-West, LexisNexis et al.?

As stated above, our university's disabilities staff has to capture text from the casebook PDFs. In doing so, text formatting is lost so the staff must reformat the text while being mindful of such errors as dropped text. In the conversion process the staff faces a number of commonplace documentation issues such as making sure that some sort of page notation is included in the converted file (not unlike star pagination); pushing footnotes to endnotes, etc. So where's the problem? Turnaround time. It is highly unlikely that all textbooks can be converted before the semester starts. Our workaround will be to make sure the text conversion stay one-two-three steps ahead of each course's reading assignments. Apparently this is not new to our student but is it really acceptable? This approach will not let our blind student jump ahead very far like our sighted students can.

And what about recommended or suggested titles listed in course syllabi? And what about hornbooks the library staff routinely directs students to when they are reviewing for exams? We have made recommendations but the university's disabilities staff is working as hard as it can just to format the required texts.

Online Legal Resources
West provides text-only access to Westlaw. LexisNexis has no such service. I am utterly dismayed by this and I wonder whether Lexis can legally omit a text-only service because it is a government contractor. See, Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973,  29 U.S.C. 794d; Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Standards, 36 C.F.R. § 1194. See also, W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (WCAG 1.0).

At least there is a text-version of Westlaw. Our legal writing profs have agreed to let our student use Westlaw for research when other students are restricted to print-only research tools. To another day, I will leave my criticism of teaching format-specific legal research skills.

Course Management
Right now I am very worried about how our law profs will adjust to the needs of our student during the semester. The common practice of last-minute document distribution will not be very helpful if course handouts are distributed in PDF, WordPerfect, or in certain other hard-copy displays. Photocopies in scanner-unfriendly formats (eg two column displays, images of text stored in a word processing file of PowerPoint presentation) will be a nightmare if sufficient lead time isn't allowed for their conversion. Hard-copy reserve materials present a similar problem. I will say that our profs are being very helpful and cooperative but classes haven't started yet.

Our law library hopes to wedge itself into the faculty-student distribution chain so that, with sufficient advance notice,  we can promptly provide our student digital versions of course handouts and other reading materials, when they are available. That will reduce the amount of conversion work the University's disabilities staff will have.

At the moment, we do not know if TWEN will be usable because we haven't been able to tested it out. Westlaw says it should be except for the Live Discussion module. However, how are student accesses TWEN is a matter we have not addressed yet. This problem exists because there is no link to TWEN from the text-based version of Westlaw. A seamless link from one to the other would be very helpful. We also do not know what version of Westlaw, our student will find himself in should he click on a Westlaw link in TWEN.

As for Lexis's Web Courses, the apparent answer is that the course management software will not be accommodating. Stay turned.

As we all know, in terms of course materials (quantity, variety of sources, etc), the first year is much easier than the second and third years. I hope we get it right this year.

Reflections
This experience is making me notice little things. For example, administrative and faculty offices plus library staff offices and other library spaces are not identified in braille. We need a braille version of our internal telephone directory so our student can call members of the UC Law community. I'm sure this list will grow.

At least in one respect our law library is fortunate. Our mission, like every academic law library, is to provide a place conducive to study. We are providing our student with a room where he can go to study and to scan materials for reading on site. We are equipping this room with a workstation, installed with the software he uses at home, plus a scanner and printer. We had used the room -- way too small for group study -- as a place where students could view AV materials without disturbing anyone. We'll use our Rare Book room for that purpose for the next three years.

As the year progresses, I'll try to journalize our efforts to help our 1L. I hope the situation is better that what it appears to be; I hope my ignorance is contributing to our current situation. If you have any suggestions or if I have been misinformed about any of the above, please use the comment function for this post or contact me directly at joseph.hodnicki@uc.edu.

One final question: Is there any AALS oversight of legal publishers in this matter? [JH]

DOJ Drops Demand for Library Records

The FBI is no longer seeking library records from the Library Connection, Inc. of Windsor, thus ending this disturbing chapter of attempting to use national security letters under the USA Patriot Act to invade patron privacy. The library group had maintained that the requested records would have been released if the FBI had obtained a search warrant issued by a judge, a course of action the Justice Department argued was unnecessary under the original USA Patriot Act.

In yesterday's press release announcing this development, Ann Beeson, Associate Legal Director of the ACLU stated

First the government abandoned the gag order that would have silenced four librarians for the rest of their lives, and now they've abandoned their demand for library records entirely. While the government's real motives in this case have been questionable from the beginning, their decision to back down is a victory not just for librarians but for all Americans who value their privacy.

Library Connection has now released the NSL letter via the ACLU site. The letter shows that the FBI was seeking all records associated with one computer for a 45 minute time period during one day. In dueling press releases, the FBI explained that although its investigation was "less efficient" because Library Connection refused to comply with the NSL,"the FBI was able to investigate and over time, discount the threat that was transmitted over this computer that was part of the Library Connection’s network."

Text of National Security Letter

ACLU Press Release | FBI Press Release | New York Times article

File under "Privacy trumps inconvenience." [JH]

Court Rules Against Library that Fired Librarian Who Refused to Work on Sundays

In May of 2003, Constance Rehm, a librarian, was fired after refusing to work on Sunday because of her religious beliefs. The Alliance Defense Fund (ADF) and the Christian Law Association together filed the case, Rehm v. Rolling Hills Consolidated Library, in August 2004, arguing the library unlawfully discriminated against Relm on the basis of her religion. Under Title VII, an employee’s request for accommodation based upon a sincere religious belief can only be denied if the employer can demonstrate that the request would cause undue hardship The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Missouri, St. Joseph Division, ruled in favor of the librarian. The jury awarded Rehm damages for back pay.

Source: ADF press release.

Comparing Law Libraries - A Librarian's Query

From Jonathan Franklin, Associate Law Librarian, Gallagher Law Library, University of Washington:

I am part of a group looking at ABA statistics and law libraries.  We are grappling with the changes brought on by digital resources given that law libraries have traditionally been compared by volume count.  In addition, because almost all law schools subscribe to the same large electronic resources, they level the playing field in some ways.  Thus many newer schools argue that traditional volume count less important that it used to be.  I'm curious how would one start thinking about ranking law libraries (or accounting for law libraries in law school rankings)?

We have started with the goal of finding a new measure or combination of measures, as qualitative measures don't work well when most faculty and students have extensively used two or three academic law libraries during their careers.  A starting point is whether title count should replace volume count.  For example, should it matter if school A has one copy of each of three different books (title count =3, volume count = 3) vs. School B with three of the same title & edition (title count = 1, volume count = 3)?  Maybe School A offers more "information" while school B offers more copies for a larger student body that needs more than one copy of that one title.  Since both have access to interlibrary loan, I'm not convinced title count is any better than volume count.

Step two rejects counting books in general and considers expenditures. Just as the Provost does not care what the Law School Dean's tactics are, the Dean should leave the tactics to the Law Librarian.  This has lead some to  think more about expenditures for the collection and for staffing?  Once you go down that route, there is the question of whether the raw number matters or whether it really should be staffing/# of faculty?

Some have suggested that the emphasis on the collection is outdated and that there should be core services offered by the library and that libraries should be compared on which of those services they offer. This is as challenging as the collection examples, due to the divergence in library/law school missions, especially the scholarship expectations of some schools when compared to others.

Finally, some have advocated for dropping collection-based figures or service counts entirely and instead looking at the library's total budget (either absolute or per faculty member), leaving it to the Law Librarian to determine how best to use the available resources (or have that assessed as part of the sabbatical ABA site visit).

Thanks for any thoughts. Please submit your thoughts in the form of a comment to this post.

- Jonathan

[Comments are held for screening to delete spam, so there will be some delay in posting.]

Law Schools and Money Management

The March issue of National Jurist has an article titled "Is your law school just out to make money?" In my opinion, the title should be "Is your law school running out of money?"

One of Cincinnati Law's recent grads is interviewed in this article. Tara VanHo was an excellent law student, a member of Honor Council, a student articles editor for Law Review, and a very dependable, hard working student employee for our library. Except for the error about free printouts (it's 1,100 free printouts, not 100 free printouts) I have no problem with most of Tara's factual statements about the library, just about the inferences drawn from them.

We, like many other libraries, have been faced with tough choices because of budget cuts. We implemented pay-for-printouts because that was a university-wide policy, one that we ignored until it became too costly for us to continue to do so. Pay-for-printouts is now accepted as par for the course by our current student body.

Tara's comments about the Cincinnati Law Library acquiring less books is dead on. Due to budget increases that neither compensate for past budget cuts nor for the rate of inflation in legal publishing, we now buy 66% less new titles than we did in 1997. I'm sure we are not alone.

Bottom line: The Cincinnati Law Library is not "making money."

Get Rid of Lazy Old Farts! Law Deans' Association Fights Tenure Requirement as Counterproductive to Educational Needs of Law Students

Ann Bartow (South Carolina) has posted on Feminist Law Professors a copy of a March 30 memorandum  from Marina Angel (Temple) challenging the actions of The American Law Deans Association (ALDA) in contesting the ABA's authority to use its accreditation power to require tenure or long-term contracts for deans, faculty, clinical faculty, legal writing instructors, and law library directors. From ALDA's submission to the Department of Education:

Our concern is very straightforward: the ABA continues to impose requirements on the law schools it accredits that are not only extraneous to the process of "assuring the quality of [legal] education," but also that improperly intrude on institutional autonomy in seeking to dictate terms and conditions of employment. Such extraneous requirements are in fact counterproductive in that they discourage precisely the innovation and flexibility that are called for in contemporary professional education. We therefore believe that certain ABA requirements do not "effectively address the quality of the institution or its program." as required by 34 C.F.R. § 602.16(a)(1), and that the ABA has failed to demonstrate that it "maintain[s] a systematic program of review that demonstrates that its standards Are relevant to the educational or training needs of students" as required by 34 C.F.R. § 602.21(a). As such, we respectfully request that Secretary require the ABA to revise or rescind these standards prior to granting continued recognition.

ALDA objects to the ABA using its power as an accrediting body recognized by the Secretary to seek to enforce upon its accredited institutions terms and conditions of employment that are extrinsic to educational quality. Specifically, we wish to call to the Committee’s attention to Standards 205(c), the entirety of Standard 405 and 603(d), which, respectively, essentially define the terms of employment of the law school dean, faculty (including those who supervise clinical programs), legal writing instructors and the director of the institution’s law library. The referenced ABA Standards either state, or have been interpreted in the course of accreditation actions to mean, that compliance requires either the granting of tenure or incorporating a tenure-like equivalent in Personnel policies. At a minimum, it is a short step from requiring long-term contracts to mandating tenure.

The submission was made on behalf of the Board of Directors of the American Law Deans Association by:

• Saul Levmore, Dean of the University of Chicago Law School, President, ALDA
• David Van Zandt, Dean of the Northwestern University Law School, Vice-President, ALDA
• Katharine Bartlett, Dean of the Duke Law School
• James Huffman, Dean of the Lewis & Clark Law School, Treasurer, ALDA

Hat tip to TaxProf Blog which has additional information.

File under Out with the Old, In with the Immature and Inexperienced.

Lee Peoples Reporting from the Bricks, Bytes and Continuous Renovation Conference: Third & Final Installment

I began the day with a tour of Seattle University’s Law Library located within the recently remodeled Sullivan Hall.  Our tour began as Law Library Director Kristin Cheney pointed out that soon the Law Library would be handing some space over to the career services office.  Loosing library space to other law school functions and services was discussed throughout the conference.  In fact one defense of retaining a large print collection was that it held a place for things or spaces you don’t know you need yet.  The Law Library recently added some beautiful customized carrels, contrary to the trend at other institutions moving away from carrels and toward tables. 

Repurposing Law School & Library Space: Renovating in a Finite World was put on by Jan Fleckenstein and Thomas French of Syracuse University and Blair Kauffman of Yale Law School.  Professor Kauffman doesn’t believe that print is completely dead yet. According to the ABA survey, the mean number of volumes added was more than seventeen percent in the last five years.  Over half of the twenty six law schools he surveyed reported an increase in circulation over the previous year.  He noted that law libraries are often targeted for their vast space, reporting the results of a survey where a third of ninety one library directors said they lost space over the past three years to other law school functions.  It is possible to loose space without suffering detrimental effects.  Developing a space or growth plan is essential.  Using compact shelving and off site storage is also key.

The Syracuse librarians offered examples of how they have repurposed their library over the years.  Repurposing can be easy and involve just rearranging furniture to more complex renovations including relocating HVAC, fire suppression systems and intense structural changes.  The more you stay with standard furniture, fixtures and library stacks the easier repurposing will be.  Library maps from previous years were compared with current maps to show how space has been repurposed.  Trends at Syracuse include turning computer labs into library offices and remodeling larger study rooms into smaller ones.  After this presentation and lunch with wine (don’t you love Catholic schools) I was off to the airport.  Bricks and Bytes was excellent and is a must for anyone contemplating a building or remodeling project.  It will be held again in 2009.

Today’s recommended resources include:

• I am told the ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar’s website will feature streaming video of the three plenary sessions, accessible at: http://www.abanet.org/legaled/home.html
• Each May AALL Spectrum publishes an architectural issue: http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_spectrum.asp

Lee F. Peoples, Associate Director for Faculty, Research & Instructional Services, Oklahoma City University Law Library

Nine Tulane law profs leaving, 3 permanently, 6 visiting other schools, X-number returning after their visit

In Leaving Tulane Temple law prof Dave Hoffman studies faculty flight from Tulane Law School. Hoffman identifies three junior faculty members leaving Tulane and six faculty members (one junior) visiting other schools next year.

Nine profs off campus in the same year is pretty unusual. That's also 20% of the law faculty. Is Katrina the cause?  Is the post-Katrina culture at Tulane the cause? Or is the cause the impending transformation of Tulane into the Marvelous Land of Oz?

Of course we should anticipate hearing from Tulane Law that "the School wishes everyone well, and welcomes the opportunity to find top notch replacements while awaiting the return of all visiting profs." But what if the vacated positions are left unfilled or are eliminated? For the record, I think the over-under for the six profs returning is two and the faculty will be "right-sized" by attrition.

For more about layoffs and position eliminations at several Tulane departments and the Law Library, see my earlier posts:

• On the Current (and Future) State of the Tulane Law Library (Jan. 12, 2006)
• Damage Control at Tulane Law Library (Jan. 23, 2006)
• AAUP Investigating Tulane Layoffs (Feb. 2, 2006)

Lee Peoples Reporting from the Bricks, Bytes and Continuous Renovation Conference: Second Installment

Friday’s plenary session featured Janice Johnston discussing law library as place in the legal academy.  She took on the question of why we need library space at all.  For her, libraries are unique and significant classrooms within the law school where students learn in a less structured environment.  Libraries transmit culture by conveying professionalism and a respect for learning.  Libraries allow users to simultaneously be alone in a quite space while being with others.  Libraries are neutral ground in the law school open to everyone and exist for the common good.

Traditionally libraries were focused on protecting their print collections.  As the focus shifts toward digital collections and print collections shrink, less space is devoted to guarding the print collection.  Remaining library space can be porous with numerous entrances and exists.  The additional space will perform other functions including knowledge creation, providing comfortable seating space, places to eat, drink see and be seen and other functions.  Her answer to those who ask, why do these things in a library when they can be done elsewhere is that libraries are learning spaces focused on the life of the mind.  When events occur in the library they have an academic punch that would not be present in other spaces.

Steve Margeton, Professor and Library Director at Catholic University of America, and Lee Coyle, Architect with Cannon Design, presented Good Needs Assessment: Great Library Program – Getting it All Together.  The presentation walked us through the inns and outs of how to put together a needs assessment and what to do with it.  Professor Margeton is the author of THE BOOK on the subject, Introduction to Academic Law Library Design: A Features Approach.  I overheard mention that a second edition is due out this year.  If you ever embark on a construction project you must read this book.  It is a careful and detailed analysis of how to approach the project. 

Mike Chiorazzi, Associate Dean at the University of Arizona, and Dick Danner, Associate Dean at Duke University, and two architects from the firm of Gould Evans and Associates presented Paradigms Lost: Thinking about Library Space in an Evolving Information Environment.  This lively program was lead off by Mike Chiorazzi who is in the process of re-designing his library and transitioning his collection from print to a heavy emphasis on electronic resources.  To quote Mike, “If it’s a serial, it’s toast.”  He offered a creative approach to adding space and keeping volume count up by placing unwanted volumes in the walls or making walls out of them.  He also contemplated a collection housed 100% in compact shelving except for home state materials.

Some concepts Mike and the architects hope to implement are:

• Sticky Space (spaces that make students want to stick around the library);
• Collision Space (spaces where students, law faculty, staff and faculty from around the university meet and collaborate); and
• The Commonist Manifesto of C’s for creating the law commons including: pods of Collaborative units that spill out into quiet & celebratory spaces; getting Comfy with coffee and food; inviting Climates that blur the lines between indoors and out; library as the law school’s largest Classroom; the library space as a checkerboard composed of pods of movable Compact shelving and more.

Dick Danner discussed library as a third place separate and apart from classrooms and other law school spaces where people come together without formal restrictions. Professor Danner addressed the question first raised in the plenary session, if you make the library like a Starbucks or a lounge, what makes students come to the library and not the coffee shop.  He answered this question with an observation of an architect examining law student behavior who noted that students come to the library when they want to get serious and gain a competitive advantage.

One questioner posited, how do you create space that creates learning.  I think this raises the larger question of how much architecture and aesthetics really have to do with learning at all.  Sounds like a good topic for an empirical study. 

The last program of the day I attended was Like Coffee and Seattle: How User and Collection Spaces Work Together put on by Penny Hazelton and Kristin Cheney.  They discussed allocation of space to specific areas in the library.  Table space has become more popular than carrel space.  Computer labs and stand up computer stations are now less popular because of the prevalence of laptops.  Penny noted that when they built Gates Hall she allocated 50% for the collection, 25% for users and 25% for staff.  She now believes libraries should be allocated more along the lines of 38% for collection, 34% for users and 28% for staff.

I ended the day passing the cherry trees in bloom en route to the University of Washington Club for a librarian’s dinner.  The club had a beautiful view of lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains.  Several students from the University of Washington’s law librarianship program were in attendance.

Recommended resources for the day:

• Steve Margeton’s book mentioned above, Introduction to Academic Law Library Design: A Features Approach; and
• Law Library Collection Development in the Digital Age edited by Mike Chiorazzi and Gordon Russell discusses the implications of transitioning from print to electronic resources. Here's Mike’s chapter of the book.

Lee F. Peoples, Associate Director for Faculty, Research & Instructional Services, Oklahoma City University Law Library

Evaluation of Crisis Management after a Small Fire at the University of Cincinnati College of Law

Last Thursday, a very small fire broke out in the basement of the University of Cincinnati College of Law. How? Smoking in a stairwell. Access to the stairwell was readily available because the door to it does not have a lock. Why unlocked?  Don't know but apparently locking it is now a good idea. Let's put that administrative eureka moment into context: the building is over 20 years old and the last action taken when cigarette butts were discovered in the stairwell was to put up a "No Smoking" sign. Clearly this fire was avoidable.

Damage to the library: a far amount of smoke producing a very thin layer of soot. Clean-up cost, unknown at this time; ability to pay for clean-up, not a given.

What I learned:

Check your cell phone! My ringer was on "soft" so I never heard the phone ring the four times staffers called to ask me about the status of the situation.

Have all the cell phone numbers of your staff stored in your cell phone so that you can communicate with them. I did not. I do now.

Insist that whoever is in charge of the school's facilities carry and use his/her cellphone, and make the number available to other administrators so that communications between public safety personnel and the College administration during an emergency are centralized and information can be easily accessible. Our college has no such requirement or procedure in place.

Make the college administration aware that stuff in one's office isn't necessarily the highest priority of law library staffers. Our Archives and Preservation Librarian was assured by a law school administrator that her office was fine when she asked about the status of the situation. She didn't give a damn about her office. I think we all know what she was concerned about.

Don't assume that your library staff believes they have a responsibility to library patrons in the event of an emergency. I'm ashamed to say that this sense of responsibility was not a universally held belief by library staffers; however, I'm proud to say that almost all staffers did hold that belief. No, I am not expecting the library staff to run into a blazing room to save a kitten. In this instance there was no smoke or fire in the library when the alarm went off so no member of the library staff was in imminent danger. Luckily we had no disabled patrons in the library at the time. We did, however, have some students who were reluctant to leave until the staff insisted that they take the situation seriously.  (Four faculty members ignored the alarms and stayed in their offices.)

Specify a central meeting place for staffers to gather within the library when an emergency occurs. We did not have one. We do know. This is essential for coordinating efforts to evacuate library patrons. Once again, my scariest nightmare is that no help is provided to disabled patrons because of a lack of coordination and commitment by the library staff. I should note that our library is relatively small and staffers can reach any floor to check on patrons and still be able to exit the building in well under five minutes. Our library has many well-placed emergency doors. This may not be the case at your library.

At this point in my evalution I should be saying that once library staffers are safely out of the building, they should congregate at one location. In fact, it was advantageous to have staffers spread out at the various exits around the building because that was the only way we were able to gather and share information about the emergency. See above comment about centralized communications.

One dangerous irony: we once had a problem with library patrons entering and leaving the library's emergency exits because it was convenient to do so. We cracked down on that practice, so much so, that almost all students left the library without using the emergency exits on Thursday. Only one emergency exit was used!

Luckily no one was hurt last Thursday. Luckily this incident was so minor that the flaws in the College's emergency response in general, and the Library's response in particular caused no significant harm. Hopefully we will have learned from our mistakes before the next emergency.

I am publishing this note so that other libraries can learn from our mistakes.

[Note to self: explain the obvious to students ... emergency exits should be used in times of emergencies.]

Ever wonder how many reference librarians it would take to earn the pay of a football coach?

Inside Higher Ed reports on a salary survey conducted by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources today. Of interest is the following comparison:

The head football coach’s salary (and we stress here that these figures do not cover endorsement contracts and other benefits that in many cases dwarf the salaries) would cover the salaries at doctoral institutions of three counseling psychologists or four academic advisers or three reference librarians or four accountants or three help desk managers.

Read Salary Pecking Order for details including a table for median salaries for mid-level administrators, by job title. The table includes librarians. 

If a Library Is Bookless, What's In It?

From National Public Radio:

"What helps make the evolution of libraries so complicated are two related questions: What is the library's role -- and who should pay for it? The squeeze on county and municipal budgets prompts many to wonder if they will continue to pay for these institutions. Others insist that the public library plays a vital role as a community center and as an intellectual oasis, a place to reflect as well as a place to learn. But if it's to survive, it has to adapt. A range of approaches are meant to help design a library for the 21st century."

Guests for this program:

• Tom Frey, executive director, The DaVinci Institute
• Jo Haight-Sarling, director, access and technology services at the Denver Public Library System
• Charles Brown, director, Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, N.C.

Ron Jones, Reference & Electronic Services Librarian, University of Cincinnati Law Library