AALL 2016: New ideas for legal research instruction

by Jason Zarin

As a recent transplant to Virginia and new member of VALL, I was very fortunate to receive a grant this year to attend the AALL annual meeting in Chicago. The reference librarians at the University of Richmond Law School are reevaluating the way legal research has been taught over the last few years and are investigating ways to improve the course taught to first-year law students. Accordingly, this year’s theme “Make It New: Create the Future” was particularly apropos.

I had the opportunity to attend two presentations that were exceedingly useful on the topic of improving legal research education: “Leave treasure hunts to pirates: creating experiential research courses” and “How Are We Doing?: Using Outcomes Assessment to Improve Legal Research Instruction.” 

“Pirates” focused on the ABA standards requiring students to take six credits of “experiential learning” and how to incorporate these requirements into legal research instruction. The presenters recommended making students’ final legal research project be the research for a legal memo presented as a research log. The attached picture is their suggested grading rubric for the log, which required the students to identify and use relevant secondary sources and find the leading state cases, statutes, and journal articles.

How do we know if our students are actually learning was the theme of “Legal research course assessment.” A few years ago, the University of Florida changed its legal writing course to make first-year legal research a separate stand-alone class taught and run by the law librarians. In order to determine success and shape the course for future years, UF makes regular assessments: (1) Are we teaching the right things? (2) Are students learning and retaining the information? (3) Can students apply what they’ve learned? UF sends a short survey to returning second-year students on whether they felt adequately prepared and confident for the research work they did during the summer. They also survey employers as to their own evaluation of these summer associates’ research skills.

I also had the opportunity to present at the Cool Tools Cafe on using Clio (a law firm practice management tool) to manage research assistants, assign them tasks, and track their time. I also attended the advocacy workshop and worked as a mentor to a first-time conference attendee.

Overall, the 2016 annual meeting was one of the more valuable AALL conferences I have attended in terms of interesting and useful programming. I returned from the conference abuzz with new ideas and directions for our legal research instruction. I am very grateful for the financial support VALL was able to provide me to attend the meeting.

 

 

AALL 2016: Hopeful for the Future

by Greg Stoner

This July, with extremely generous support from both VALL and my employer, I attended the AALL Annual Meeting in Chicago. As I had previously attended the Annual Meeting only once before (in 2010), I was particularly excited to be able to participate once again. The theme of this year’s meeting, “Make It New: Create the Future,” also really resonated with me as it emphasized the ever-evolving and important role information professionals play in defining our roles and helping to identify and shape the services we can provide in our institutions.

During the conference I attended a number of sessions: some focusing on areas I felt I knew a great deal about, as well as others where I admittedly knew very little. Several of the sessions I attended were related to topics that I found particularly relevant to my current work, such as programs dealing with the evaluation of electronic research resources and the utility of usage statistics and other metrics in determining value. The variety of programming was particularly noteworthy as I felt I gained valuable exposure to new areas of interest and further insight in other areas of benefit to me, my colleagues and my firm. I also valued the opportunity to spend a good bit of time in the exhibit hall, learning firsthand about various research resources and services and discovering new products and solutions that may be useful in the future. In the end, I was mentally exhausted but all the better for it.

I also thoroughly enjoyed attending the annual meeting as it reinforced a conclusion I drew when I first attended the meeting as someone just entering the law library field (see http://valltalk.blogspot.com/2010/08/mapping-future-at-aall-annual-meeting.html). I’ve progressed in my career during the past few years, learned a lot, and met a ton of amazing helpful, supportive and encouraging people along the way – many of them VALL members! I’m still impressed by what we do as professionals and encouraged about what the future holds for our profession. I’m honored to be part of this community and appreciative of VALL’s support of my attendance at the meeting.

AALL 2016: A Noob’s Perspective

by Alex Jakubow

Attending the recent AALL meeting in Chicago symbolized my formal transition into academic law librarianship.  I never attended law school.  I never received any formal training in library science.  Instead, I spent most of my twenties earning a Ph.D. in political science.  The data science skills I acquired during the course of my studies and in my first few jobs after graduation prepared me for my current role as an empirical research librarian, but this path to law librarianship missed many of the important foundational milestones commonly crossed by most other individuals in our profession.

Attending AALL helped me fill in several of those gaps.  The pre-AALL Conference for Newer Law Librarians (CONELL) provided a fun and inviting environment for learning about our profession and forging connections with other librarians who are new to the field.  Each session I attended, each vendor with whom I spoke, and each introduction I made helped me conceptualize our profession with greater clarity and vividness than anything I have read about law librarianship.

Substantively, the AALL programming provided very accessible, yet informative, introductions to many of the current issues, ideas, strategies, and tools circulating in the field.  As a data scientist, I gravitated towards sessions that focused on the role of big data in law librarianship, metrics for benchmarking the performance and practices at different academic law libraries, and new database solutions for documenting and showcasing faculty scholarship.  Additionally, I found Will Evans’ keynote on ‘Lean Startups’ particularly inspiring and insightful.  I returned from Chicago with a handful of new ideas about how to provide more efficient data service to library patrons without sacrificing added value.

All of this rumination and reflection about the field occurred within a friendly and supportive environment.  I engaged with brilliant, devoted, and fun minds who not only shared their insights and experiences about law librarianship with me, but took equal interest in my own experiences as a social scientist.  I attended the business meeting of AALL’s Empirical Research Caucus, and I look forward to continuing transdisciplinary conversations about the role of data science in law librarianship with other interested individuals.  The Caucus is strongly considering proposing a program on empirical legal research for AALL 2017, and I am excited to be part of the planning process.  My involvement with the Caucus is a pleasant reminder that the transition to a new career is substantially easier when the professional culture values the diversity of experiences and perspectives among its constituent membership.  For that, I am particularly grateful!

With generous support from VALL, I was able to attend my first AALL conference this year.  I thoroughly enjoyed engaging with so many brilliant and fun minds, as well as learning about our discipline. Being present at AALL this year has only reaffirmed me in my decision to leave political science behind.  Law librarianship is my new professional home.