Category: Soapbox / Opinions
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What’s in a Name? On AALL’s Potential Name Change
AALL has begun the process to potentially change its name to the Association for Legal Information. Of course, the key change is the subtraction of the word “libraries”. Motivating this change, AALL reports “today, 51 percent of AALL members do not have ‘librarian’ in their titles, and 57 percent work in an organization that does…
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Law Firm Library Marketing: Taking Advantage of Existing Opportunities | Part 1
Unfortunately, good researching alone does not make a law firm library. Though the importance of the library may seem obvious to us librarians, we still must value continually marketing ourselves in the law firm setting. Fortunately, if we recognize them as such, our common day-to-day responsibilities offer ample opportunities to market ourselves. In Part 2…
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Predicting the Future with Analytics
“3D Bar Graph Meeting”, (c) Scott Maxwell The term “jargon” has complicated social meanings. Jargon primarily refers to specialized language used by a specific group of individuals; conversely, this means individuals outside of the in-crowd don’t know what the heck is being talked about when jargon starts to be tossed around. Secondary dictionary definitions attribute…
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Big Law, Social Media, and the Library
Big law’s relationship with social media is changing. Above the Law and Good2BSocial have collaborated, once again, on a review of how effectively big law firms use social media. They found AmLaw Top 50 firms have “substantially improved social media performance across the board.” Leading to this overall jump, the firms that were the best at…
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What’s in a Name: Does the GPO’s Name Change Impact Librarianship?
As of Wednesday, December 17th, the GPO is now the Government Publishing Office, a name change undertaken due to “the increasingly prominent role that GPO plays in providing access to Government information in digital formats”. Why did the GPO change their name and does this name change impact the library profession, which, similarly, has managed…
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The Implications of Bestlaw
On September 24th, Joe Mornin, a Berkely Law School student, released Bestlaw to the public-at-large (see the The Lawyerist‘s and The Recorder‘s admirable coverage of this story). In a nutshell, Bestlaw is a browser extension that improves upon the Westlaw Next interface. Remarkably, Joe Mornin designed the browser extension himself, and makes this piece of software freely available…
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Perla Makes a Point on PACER
Few things have raised such hue and cry in our industry this year as the announcement that PACER was going to be without certain courts’ materials. The concern expressed by law librarians and legal researchers clogged newsfeeds for weeks and made its way – all the way – into the halls of politics. Yet while…
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Will PACER’s records removal motivate use of software alternatives?
Earlier this month, PACER announced court documents for closed cases from the last decade in the U.S. Courts of Appeals of the Second, Seventh, Eleventh, and Federal circuits, as well as documents from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California will no longer be electronically available. More details, including the specific date ranges of…
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Thursday’s Musing: Troubleshooting Software and Troubleshooting Attorneys
(photo (c) 2009 Kordite, available here) In the last few years, have you found yourself answering more software troubleshooting-oriented questions? “How do I restrict my search results in this interface?” “Why does this program make my system crash?” “Why doesn’t this software do this?” “Where can I find this specific information using this software?” “What…
iBraryGuy 