Time for Change at AALL?

In reading all the late controversy about AALL's programming issues, it seems to me that the obvious cause of the complaints can be traced to the peculiar nature of the membership structure of the association itself.

Several years ago, I proposed in Spectrum a fundamental change in the way AALL was structured. It required all members to select a section when they joined the association or as part of their membership renewal. There would be four sections: academic, private firms, courts and independent. Publishers and consortia could be granted their own sections. Officers and programming for each section would be solely the responsibility of the membership of that section. This would mean that ALL-SIS, for example, would represent issues of interest to all academics, not simply the ones that decided to join Academic Law Libraries as a "special interest." It seems weird that SIS's like ALL, PLL and SCCL would be "special interests" on the same level as TS, OBS or LISP, etc.

The present section structure defines members by their desires and does little to help develop programming based on professional needs of various types of law library practice. For example, the TS or RIPS sections have members that are not also members of either ALL or PLL! As a consequence, neither section accurately represents either Academic or Private law librarians. The fact is, both PLL and ALL should have TS or public services sections.

This new structure would allow each section to have blocks of programming during annual meetings. AALL would have responsibility for its own blocks of programming that spans section interests. I urge you and your readers to consider this proposal. Last time the idea was floated, the Board was afraid of how to dismantle the existing power structure of SIS's. I think that the fears were misguided.

In the end, the Association would be stronger and do a better job of representing it's membership. For what it's worth.

Hitting the Wall, Technologically Speaking

Note, this is a draft of a column to be published in Legal Information Alert. RL]

Well, ok. It happened. I hit the technology wall.

It didn’t hurt or anything, but it was kind of stunning, and it made me laugh. In the back of my mind, however, there’s now an ache, a melancholy low-keyed, distant panic is now resting there. Waiting. You’re gonna hit it, too. So be prepared.

Here’s the thing. Yesterday I got official word that I had just won a professional award for “distinguished” service to a special interest section (SIS) of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL). It caught me completely off-guard because, while I’ve been a member for years, the last time I held an office in it was 1989. (It looks like it’s true, if you stick around long enough, eventually people notice....) The special interest section is called, Computer Services SIS. When I was president of the section, it was called the Automation and Scientific Development SIS, and the section’s newsletter, which I also edited, was called The Automatome. The title of the section and the newsletter each provide an interesting perspective of the state of technology back in the day. In fact, at my last meeting as chair of the section, I proposed that the section should no longer exist. My rationale was that since technology was becoming so prevalent in our professional lives, it was analogous to having a special interest section on paper!

The experience got me thinking nostalgically about the ‘old days,’ and I thought that it would be fun to bring copies of the old newsletter to the meeting and share some of the quaint observations it contained. For example, I remember writing a review of a new 20 megabyte hard drive and describing how it would change the world. I know there are other gems contained in those old issues. I’ve never been shy about commenting on technological developments and predicting the future, so I thought that it would be fun to resurrect The Automatome and have a laugh.

And then I hit the wall. I have a few paper copies of The Automatome in a trunk in my basement, but I don’t know if I have a complete set, and I don’t know what is their condition. Not to worry, I have them in electronic format, of course. In 3.5 inch floppy disks! Formatted in who knows what number Mac OS?! It could be system 4 for all I know. And who knows what version of Word for Mac I was using? (These are rhetorical questions, obviously, because, at this point, only I know the answers to these questions. But, simply looking at the discs won’t necessarily tell me how they’re formatted or what software I used. Perhaps I was still using MacWrite....) But in order to actually use the files to do anything, I’d need to boot up my old Mac, which hasn’t been turned on in nearly twenty years and see what happens.

But let’s suppose that I was able to fire up the old Mac Plus, load the software and open the documents; all of which is possible, I should add. Then what am I supposed to do with it? As far as I can remember, in those days, I was using Compuserve for email and haven’t kept up my account; so emailing a copy of the documents to myself wouldn’t work. The computer didn’t (doesn’t) have any USB ports or any way that I could use to transfer the documents from the computer to another kind of present day storage media.

I could try to print the documents. I still have the original Image Writer that I used for years. It was a cool, state of the art dot-matrix, Postscript printer. I’m sure that I don’t have any print cartridges, and I’m not sure where I could get one. I could try to use a new printer, but I am pretty sure HP doesn’t make a printer driver that for an old Mac OS computer.

See what I mean? I hit the wall. The best I can hope for at this point is to fire up the old Mac Plus and take photos of the screen! I suppose I could lug the computer around and fire it up when I wanted to show people the issues of the old newsletter. As a practical matter, many people don’t realize that one of the original accessories for the Mac was a canvas case that actually had a should strap and a pouch for an external disk drive; in short, the original Mac Plus, all 20/25 pounds of it was conceived of as a portable computer. Hauling the Mac around to show my friends and colleagues vintage computer newsletters on a vintage computer, has a certain elegance to it, doesn’t it?

In short, it’s a wall that we’ll all hit more than once, going forward. In fact, I’m sure that it’s happening with many documents, some of them even more important that old copies of Automatome. Is this a sort of personal morality play for law librarians, to be on guard against saving documents in formats that potentially may become obsolete?

Perhaps. In any case, be forewarned that taking any present format for granted may lead you into a narrow alley with no exits....

Open Access Plus

The Fourth Rail of the Digital Revolution in Legal Materials

Much good work is being done to insure that as the internet develops and digital information becomes the norm, it remains freely accessible to all citizens. After all, how can citizens participate in their government if they can't have access to their own laws? Efforts by AALL, PublicResource.org and NCCUSL and others are focused primarily on making sure that all government and primary legal materials are free, reliable and that they are authentic. Again, how can citizens participate in their government if cost limits their access and they can't be assured that what they are accessing is the real thing? Law.gov, NCCUSL and AALL's Washington Affairs Office are working hard on all fronts, known collectively as "access, authentication and preservation."

I want to discuss the all but overlooked aspect of the digital revolution in legal materials: meaningful access to the the law. If we think of access, authentication and preservation as three legs upon which the ideals of "open access" stand, meaningful access as described below would constitute the fourth leg of the equation, without which all the access in the world may not be enough to truly address the needs of American citizens.

We librarians know good and well that the key to efficient, effective legal research is not finding cases and statutes. Rather, a skilled researcher knows which tools lead you to the right statutes and cases, and, preferably, especially if you're new to the subject, tools that also explain what is the 'law' of that subject. In this context, the 'law' is not merely a rule, but, a series of calculations and interpretations about what all the cases and statutes (and politicians and society in general?) say, and standards of practice or behavior that result, about the subject.

The debate, therefore, about free, unfettered access to primary legal materials is, therefore, something of a red herring. Access to the primary law is really secondary if the goal is to give citizens free, unfettered access to the 'law.' In this context, practical knowledge of the law can be described as the ability to predict outcomes of law suits, relational expectations or legal proceedings. This knowledge causes people to live and pursue livelihoods in accordance with legal standards.

As the body of primary legal materials grows and access to it spreads, what will be the result? Will citizens actually be better able to understand the law without access to the scholarship, analysis and the sophisticated objective finding tools of legal research?

In addition to advocating the free, unfettered access to primary laws, perhaps we should also focus our efforts toward using new technology to develop new finding tools and access to secondary materials.

I propose that the internet provides us with the means to create aggregated, federated meta-search engines that could mine legal scholarship and commentary found in emerging web-based resources such as digital commons, blogs, news and RSS feeds, Twitter feeds, podcasts, etc. We librarians are in a unique position to understand the "informatiosphere"; how it's structured, how to evaluate authenticity, authority and the 'new' provenance. There are many ways that search engines and search algorithms may be designed to provide access to new, free materials that make access to the law more useful, and, contrary to the prevailing commercial model, encourages the development of more free materials.

And herein lies the rub. in the coming 'digital age', one of its byproducts is the ability of commercial publishers to closely regulate access to various information sources. Commercial legal publishers' products rarely have value exclusively in the publication of primary legal materials. The value that commercial legal publishers offer lawyers and lay people interested in learning about he law lies in their secondary materials and finding tools. As open free access to primary materials becomes the norm, legal publishers will likely tighten the circle around their proprietary commercial products. As their income declines from the sale of primary materials, which most also publish in addition to secondary resources, these corporations will make up the difference by increasing the prices of finding tools, treatises, form books, looseleaf reporters, etc. As the print versions of these secondary resrouces disappear from library shelves, access to them by lay people will be all but blocked because most cannot afford access to online products produced by the major legal publishers.

When efforts to make access to primary legal materials free succeeds, it is possible that only legal professionals will have access to commercially produced finding tools and secondary materials. As described earlier, these may actually be the most important materials to which people interested in learning the law must have access in order to equip them to make reasoned, legal decisions about their lives and livelihoods.

Should this come to pass, if we fail to provide to ordinary citizens access to some form of secondary materials that help them find and understand the law, our success in providing them with free, unfettered access to primary materials may, in the end be a pyrrhic victory.

Using Social Media in Law Libraries

This month on "The Law Librarian," on BlogTalkRadio, we discussed using and uses of social media tools in law libraries. We had a lively discussion about the use of "socnets" (social networks) for a variety of purposes: marketing, general information, announcements, etc. But we also eventually got around to discussing the use of these tools for gathering information and, even preserving it. Clearly, we are at the very cusp in the development of these tools, and it appears that they are swiftly becoming a new currency for library services and communication.

Click here for a transcript of the chat room of the show. Click here if you want to take the short survey about uses of "socnets" in law libraries.

Gizmodo: Sony Virtual Library eBook Check Out

In an interesting twist, eBooks are now available for virtual check out from libraries. Gizmodo's article says it all:

My favorite part of Sony's Reader announcement was probably Library Finder, powered by OverDrive, which lets you check out eBooks from your local library—and "thousands" have signed up—for free, wirelessly, direct to your reader. But there's a catch.

There aren't an unlimited number of ebooks—each library has an actual "stock" of ebooks (because the library had to pay for each copy). So, if they have a stock of 5 books, and they're all checked out, you have to wait in a queue for somebody else's book to expire when they hit the 21-day mark. When it's available, you get an email, and then you can go check it out.

Today also marks the launch of Sony's Library Finder application. Sony, working with OverDrive (www.overdrive.com), the leading global digital distributor of eBooks and to libraries, will now offer visitors to the eBook Store by Sony easy access to their local library's collection of eBooks. Thousands of libraries in the OverDrive network offer eBooks optimized for the Sony Reader, and visitors can now find these libraries by typing their zip code into the Library Finder. Through the selected library's download website, visitors can check out eBooks with a valid library card, download them to a PC and transfer to their Reader. At the end of the library's lending period, eBooks simply expire, so there are never any late fees.

The New Mode of Conference

[Below is a draft of a column that will be coming out shortly in Legal Information Alert. The published version will be well-edited and cleaner. I encourage you all to check that publication out....]

Two weeks ago I attended the 19th annual CALI conference in (beautiful/splendid/amazing) Boulder, Colorado. As conferences go, this one was remarkable for several reasons.
First of all, the venue was fantastic. If you haven’t been to Boulder, add it to your bucket list and move it into the top ten. And if you go to Boulder, even if you have no interest in visiting just for the fun of it academic law libraries, be sure to visit the law school at the University of Colorado.
But more pertinent to this column, there were many surprises. I have been attending CALI conferences for years. When I began attending CALI in about 1992 or 1993, I initially found it to be a disturbing experience. The general topic of the conferences was fairly routine for the early 90’s: books were dead and the world was going paperless. IT attendees tended to look upon librarians with pity, and librarian attendees fell into two camps, either they were revolutionaries who agreed with the prevailing prevailing point of view that libraries were dead, or they were left in the uncomfortable position of having to defend themselves, knowing all the while that their mere attendance at the conference was a tacit admission that things were, at least, changing in mysterious or threatening ways.
As an Associate Dean of library and Information Technology, I attended regularly every year for a few years. But after a while, I grew tired of the rhetoric and attended every other year, and, lately every three years. There were other ways to keep current with technological developments in computer hardware and administrative systems, and none of the rhetoric convinced me that simply by “putting everything on computer” would necessarily make researching or running a law school any better. It always seemed to me that technology should be adapted to appropriate purposes, thereby creating new tools for administration and research, that sometimes, but not necessarily always presumptively replaced old tools. Some tools were destined for complete metamorphosis, or death: print versions of Shepard’s, various indexes, directories, paper filing, bluebook test-taking and admissions tracking to name a few. I remember one member lamenting the near-unanimous of rejection of e-textbooks by 1L’s in a poll after they were part of an experimental class which was given no print casebooks for the entire first year, “Until someone can invent an e-book that has the look and feel of print, students will never accept them!” The fact that the person thought that simply mimicking the look and feel of paper would somehow make the experience better somehow, simply rang hollow. Computerization for it’s own benefit just simply made an existing thing faster. And there were some things that just didn’t need to be done at light-speed.
In those early days, I was also one of the few Mac users. (People accuse me all the time of being a Mac fanboy. Well, I suppose there’s some truth to that. I sure do like Macs.) When I would warn of the impending rise of the Mac, I would usually be dismissed with a sniff.
This year, however, I was very surprised at what I found. First off, the content of the program had generally shifted from the general rhetoric of “death of books,” to “here are some cool things that we can do on a computer.” It was inspiring. The focus was on new products, new capacities and capabilities, completely new tools that do things in ways that we never dreamed of. It was cool. In all fairness, new products and services were always being revealed and talked about at previous conferences, but, in general, the rhetoric and the quality of products tended to focus on their ability to displace old things with new, better ones, simply because they were “automated,” “digital,” or “online.” I only heard a soft-beat of the death of the book drum at the keynote, and, even that one was somewhat apologetic. This changed tenor of the conference for me by allowing me to focus on the neat, new things we can do with technology.
The concept of e-books is no longer how to simply digitize casebooks, but how to use technology to enhance teaching and the learning experience. We learned about fantastic new cloud based products and services like DropBox and Buzzword, we learned about using technology in teaching, about new tools to help build better websites, like Aquila Drupal and about how to build electronic course supplement packages. We also learned about new online products coming from CCH, Westlaw, BNA and Hein that, potentially will make a difference in how we research.
Not only was the tenor of the meeting splendid as a result, there was an amazing new dimensioned that none of us could have dreamed of even a year ago: Twitter. During the whole meeting, there were at least a couple dozen people that were tweeting about every program and activity and nearly every conversation! When you were in a program, you could simultaneously monitor what was happening in every other program. All you needed to do was follow tweets with the hashtag #calicon09, and you found a play by play of the entire program. One time, a speaker got way off the mark with some bizarre ideas about changing law school pedagogy and, during the talk, a debate raged about them. I had left early because my blood had begun to boil and went to a program on cloud computing that was very informative and enjoyable. The tweets confirmed my opinion of the other program.
And then there were the Macs. Roughly thirty percent of the attendees had Mac. Astonishing. The people that didn’t were the ones with new netbooks or ancient albatrosses that nearly looked antique. In an amazing irony, one of the pioneers of use of technology in legal education proudly showed me his new Dell Mini (I think it was), on which he had installed OSX! There were lots of iPhones, too, and lots of talking about and sharing of apps. (MouthOff and Bump, to name two.) The fanboy in me rejoiced!
I felt for the first time that the technological issues that we must face in the future are not a question of “us versus them,” or “brace yourself, you are about to become unemployed,” to, here are some tools and techniques that can really make us better educators, administrators and librarians.
Much information about this year’s program and various CALI resources as well as information about next year’s twentieth CALI annual meeting are available at http://cali.org. I encourage you to check it out.

What's More I'm Need of Preservation, Primary or Secodary Legal Materials?

I'm inclined to think that secondary materials are in greater danger of disappearing from the Public's access than are primary materials - if only because they are being distributed in ways that keep them out of reach: restrictive licensing agreements; great cost in obtaining access; and, pragmatic obstacles, such as lack of bandwidth or lack of adequate equipment. Since secondary materials are the true keys to unlocking the meaning of primary law, might not the consequences be dire?


-- Richard Leiter

The 200-Title Law Library?

As I was signing invoices the other day, it ocurred to me that if all titles from the Big Three (or four) law publishers end up costing $3000 per year, we won't be able to afford much more than a 200-title law library!

But of course, I'm not sure what is a title anymore....


-- Posted From My iPhone