Event Summary - Whats trending in US and Canadian Law Libraries

On 22 January, we started the CPD year with a fantastic talk from Jean Willis, hosted by the Law Courts. Jean, a Director at the Sacramento Public Law Library and American Association of Law Libraries Board Member, discussed the trends in the 3 primary sectors of the US and Canadian law library industry:

• law firms
• academic and law school law libraries, and • public law libraries.

Law firms
Private law libraries are moving past the disruption created by the global economic crisis to a point of stabilisation. Within the industry there has been experiences of downsizing and near shoring which has impacts both law firm libraries and other law firm support services. There have also been ventures into outsourcing by a few firms. Work outsourced to international companies/ offices includes the pro-forma work of temporary/contract attorneys, research attorneys as well as law library services.

What has received the most publicity, including news coverage, is the push within the law library industry toward digitisation and digital collections. Due to a range of factors including reduced space allocation, near shoring etc the law library industry is moving quickly towards digital collections.

Academic law and law school libraries
Within academic libraries a primary issue is the decline in students enrolling in law degrees. This decline has been attributed to a combination of:
• of the high cost of university education
• laws position as a post-graduate degree, and
• increased competition and decreased immediate reward/consideration from being a law graduate.

Whilst the decline hasn’t yet reached the prestigious law schools it is effecting other schools around the country. Schools are actively ‘selling’ the degree to students. This downturn in demand is impacting upon law school and academic libraries with downsizing taking place to combat the reduced student numbers.

Outside of this issue, the academic and law school libraries are working to create practice ready law students.

Public law libraries
US public law libraries operate on a funding model very different from that of Australia. A rapid rise in the numbers of self represented litigants in the 1990s caused law courts to transform from libraries solely serving the bar to providing support to the public.

The capacity of the public law libraries is dependent upon the funding structure of the library – particularly whether its funding comes from court filing revenue. Depending upon their budget and capacity public law libraries within America also have active outreach programs.

The primary service provided by public law libraries is facilitating access to the legal resources and information through physical and online collections as well as creating legal guides. The library may also provide access to pro bono lawyers either through having attorneys on staff or providing space for practicing attorneys to offer pro bono services.

We also discussed as a group the similarities and differences between the US/Canadian experience with that of Australia. Thank you to all our attendees for ensuring that it was a lively discussion.

Key resources that Jean referenced in her talk available here. The podcast from the session is available to members.

Are you a member? Email us at austlawlib.nsw@gmail.com and we will send you the podcast

Text, context and purpose - Event summary and tweets

Yesterday, 12 August 2014, Patricia Lane delivered a fantastic lunchtime seminar on statutory interpretation and the examination of text, context and purpose. 

 An editor at Timebase has written a summary of the event available on the Timebase website.

A snapshot of all the Twitter action is available on Storify, so please take a look at the story “Tweets from the event #textcontext” on Storify

 

A recording of the event will be distributed to NSW members via the ALLA NSW list.

 

If you are a member of ALLA NSW and not sure if you are on the list email austlawlib.nsw@gmail.com for assistance.

Published: 13 August 2014

Print to eBooks - Lunchtime Seminar

On 12 February 2014,  Stephen Mason General Manager, Co-info Head of Business Development Co-op presented at our first CPD Seminar for 2014 on eBooks: Challenges to bookstores and libraries.

In a wide ranging seminar Stephen discussed the challenges Bookstores and Libraries face in developing a response to eBooks and Publishers.

My main takeaway from the seminar was the major Law Publishers are just as in the dark as the rest of us. For obvious reasons Licensing and DRM loom large in any decision the Law Publishers make. The fear of losing control over the content has left us with a multitude of platforms to deal with (Red and Proview for example). The different platforms confuse our clients and make implementation a challenge.

To their credit the Co-op is not waiting for the Publishers to agree on a model. The Co-op is negotiating with a number of publishers to develop an ePurchasing model. Version one is directed at students and version two is directed at corporates and libraries. Contact the Co-op if you would like to be part of this trial.

It was an interesting seminar and a lively question and answer session followed the presentation.

Members only content: ALLA NSW members also have access to the podcast. If you are a member of ALLA and would like to access the podcast email austlawlib.nsw@gmail.com. If you would like to join ALLA and get access to these and other great resources complete the membership form.

Published: 27 February 2014

Guest blog: Outsourcing the law firm library: The UK experience

Image Source:http://www.becomeablogger.com/

Following on from the presentation on the 19 November by Fiona Brown, Cindy Martin, Allens Library Site Coordinator has contributed her notes on the event.

If you too would like to contribute to the ALLA NSW blog please email  austlawlib.nsw@gmail.com

Research on Outsourcing libraries in the UK

By Cindy Martin

Fiona Brown has undertaken a Masters study on outsourcing of legal process in Law Firms and was invited to speak to ALLA NSW on the 19th Nov 2013 at Gilbert and Tobin. Fiona has focused on the UK experience and there are many interesting observations she has made in this area. I am really pleased to see a body of work produced, and know that it was not easily obtained because of so many contentious factors and the sensitive nature of this business as it was evolving. It is valuable I think for Australia to have this insight and be aware of some of the experiences and given that one provider has been establishing itself here. I have provided some points below and if you feel the need to read the entire work it is available from the Monash Uni.

The research focus is where a complete library has been outsourced in the UK.  US is a bit more of a coexisting model 68% outsourcing eg. Cataloguing, procurement..

Fiona’s research has been governed by university standards meeting privacy requirements and engaged in qualitative analysis

Transcripts have been analysed for common and different issues, also used software program that assessed for themes across the research

10 of the Top 50 UK companies are in the business of total outsourcing (including other business support services)

Some companies brought services back  in- house

Outsourcing companies

Evaluserve not operating in Australia
Integreon now staffed in Sydney and looking to grow, also have a focus on legal process and knowledge management, have Indian office support services

Services outsourced

Current awareness, procurement….
Contracts range from annual to 10years
Medium to large eg 45%  had single partner law firms.  Less than 10 % of law firm libraries were outsourced totally
Where did it come from? A few law firms saw themselves all doing the same thing and they wanted a business service that could rationalise this.

Reasons for outsourcing

Improving efficiency and gaining more services for the library including more access to skills of wider group of librarians
Accessing business intelligence services
Some wanted extended hours of service from libraries
Outsourcing non-strategic services was intended to remove responsibility for time spent understanding support services and instead shift this to the experts who can concentrate on making this business work and the lawyers can just focus on Client work as this is their strategic focus
While law firms may have expressed dissatisfaction with the scale of the library service and their ability to pay for the library service that they wanted there was no dissatisfaction with the library staff as individuals or professionals.
Law firms were looking for business intelligence research
Law firms really wanted to share and rationalise costs
Law firms didn’t want to reduce the service anymore through the cuts but outsourcing would provide a better service
The library was not considered as strategically competitive and for this reason would be a candidate for outsourcing

Expected benefits

More resources and services for their library budget
More leverage for budget
They were interested in electronic sources savings and reduce escalating costs, reducing management , PD issues,

Was this realised ?

No shared libraries were established
No inter library loans could be accessed by the providers
Librarians who worked for the providers were cut out of professional networks
No shared electronic resources arrangements were negotiated with publishers – publishers did not agree to these arrangements
Has caused some divide amongst law librarians in some areas, but in other areas there is still collaboration amongst the library community in London.

Costs savings

Staff costs were reduced
Modest saving on Hardcopy
Modest to zero savings on electronic resources
Some reduced management costs
Were satisfied with specialist quality of service

Responses from Lawyers and Partners that were interviewed on their views on libraries

You’re best customers are trainees sent to the library – higher level lawyers in the organisation were not seen to be utilising services
Lawyers are protecting their team and pa’s and so other services were targeted in the name of rationalisation
Libraries in the study were seen as basic retrieval services and not embedded in deep research and other service provisions

Conclusions….

Outsourcing models only brings benefits if more law firms get on board in hope that there will be more negotiating power and print collection and staff sharing
Outsourcing are rethinking cost and changing the cost structure to user pays to look at ways to remain financially viable as the financial gains have not been realised by the providers
Outsourcing providers acknowledge their IT systems are not supporting the services they provide and they have to look at improving this to gain customers and financial benefits.
Standardization of service will enable the outcomes to be more achievable and efficient but all the customers have very tailored solutions.

Outsourcing the law firm library: The UK experience

On 19 November 2013, Fiona Brown delivered a presentation to the NSW Australian Law Library Association on the findings of her thesis Outsourcing the law firm library: the UK experience. Fiona’s thesis considered the growing trend within the United Kingdom for law library services to be provided by outsourcing companies.

Fiona’s research sought to understand the growing trend within the UK legal industry towards outsourcing library and research services, a common practice within the United States. Following on from her presentation at the national ALLA 2013 conference, Fiona the results of her interviews within the UK legal industry surrounding:

• the reasons given within the legal industry for legal research outsourcing
• the claims made for and against outsourcing by industry participants including in-house librarians, outsourced librarians and lawyers using both in-house and outsourced research services.

To read more about Fiona’s findings, her thesis is available on the Monash University website.

Posted: 25 November 2013

LexisNexis eLending Solution: A review

By Phil Mullen

At our recent CPD the NSW ALLA Group looked at how the new LexisNexis (LN) eLending solution worked. In attendance from LN were James Milenkovic, eLending Product Manager and Sue Ann Yap, Relationship Director for Large Law.

Sue introduced the eLending platform program by showing us how easy it was to borrow and lend eBooks. The process was very simple and seamless, she was able to lend a couple of eBook during the session. See the screen shot from the iPad.

At the moment we are only able lend the loose-leaf practice material on LexisNexis Red. Later next year all eBooks will be made available. Both Sue and James were able to answer many technical questions about access and costs and we thank them for their time.

I suppose the issue now is to try and determine whether we have a market for lending eBooks in our Libraries and Information Services Departments. There is certainly demand for mobile services and our clients are certainly more mobile. But does this mean eBooks fit into how our lawyers work? Obviously we are in a period of transition and how this plays out is very difficult to determine. But what cannot be denied is that we can all now offer to eLend our loose-leaf services and mark our ground as technological innovators.

Posted: 21 October 2013

#getyourtweetsout - What happened at the workshop

Thanks to everyone who came to the Twitter workshop as well as a special thanks to my co-presenters, Larissa Reid (@larissa_reid), Sherry Sarmiento (@sherrysarmiento) and Alicia Cohen (@Alicia_Cohen). 

For those who missed our discussion on twitter you can see our Storify at sfy.co/hQTg . Thanks to everyone who contributed!

Below is an overview of what we covered in the session.

Communicating in 140 characters or less

When faced with only 140 characters it can be difficult to get your point across to your followers. There are however some key tricks:

• Release your inner journalist
  The first sentence of a newspaper article provides an overview of the primary point of the article so release your inner journalist, get rid of all the unnecessary words and get tweeting!
• Your characters are precious so shorten your links!
  If your sharing a link be sure to use a link generator to get your links to keep as many of your characters as possible. TinyUrl (http://tinyurl.com/) and  Bitly (https://bitly.com/) are two popular link shorteners.
• Use hashtags..but not too much
  Hashtags can be a quick an effective way to convey emotion or tone quickly and character-efficiently to your followers.

Favourite, Retweet or Quote?

What are they and when do you do it?

• Favourite – Similar to a ‘like’ on Facebook, you Favourite someones tweet when you want to show approval but don’t necessarily want to share the tweet with your followers
• Retweet – Share the entirety of someone’s tweet with your followers. 
• Quote – Sharing someone’s tweet with your followers and comment upon it. The tweet will appear in quotation marks ” “. You can include your comment at the beginning or the end of the quoted tweet.
  If you run out of characters when you are quoting the tweet it is okay to shorten the tweet. However when you do, be sure to put MT in the tweet to show that it is a modified tweet.

#Hashtags – The serious and the sarcastic

Hashtags are used for a number of reasons:

• To join the discussion
  They can be used to group tweets together for an event (#getyourtweetsout) or to contribute to discussion on a particular topic, for example #auspol if you wanted to contribute to the discussion about Australian politics on twitter.
  When you have a hashtag in your tweet your followers can select the hashtag an see all the other discussion that has occurred with that hashtag. 
• Convey emotion
  #happy365 #mondays #confused #grr #nerdy
  Hashtags are a quick and easy way to convey emotion in your followers.

Managing the feed monster with lists OR separating your ‘lives’ with lists

Twitter is used for multiple purposes… well, pretty much everything. As a consequence it is often difficult to sort through all the different people and organisations you follow to make sure that you don’t miss anything. Lists can help you do this! Sorting the people you follow into lists you can get a quick overview of your library/professional feed, your book/reading feed, your news feed and whatever other list you want to create. Creating a list is easy. The toughest question you need to ask yourself if whether you want your list to be public or private.

Follow the below steps to create a list. Please note that these instructions are for making a list when you access twitter from your internet browser, if you use an app (tweetdeck, hootsuite etc) the process may be different:

Step 1: Go to your profile and select the lists tab

Step 2: Select create profile

Step 3: Customise your list. When selecting whether your list is public or private the key difference between the two is that with a public list the people you put in there will be notified that they have been added to your list and other people are able to view and subscribe to your list.

Step 4: Add people to your list by going to their profile and selecting the drop down menu and add to list

Step 5: Enjoy an organised twitter feed!

Direct communication

On twitter, you don’t always have to broadcast what you want to say to the whole twittersphere, you can contact a single individual.

You can do this by selecting from the interaction options on the persons profile, see above image. If you do want to share what you say to one person with your followers simply put a full stop at the start of the tweet. This will prevent Twitter recognising your tweet as a direct message and the tweet will appear in the feeds of everyone who follows you. Alternatively, if you put a person's twitter handle anywhere in a tweet they will receive a notification.

Taking photos

A picture can say 1000 words. Twitter allows you to share pictures with the twittersphere. Simply select the camera icon when you compose a tweet and it will be shared with your followers as an image.

That’s the end of our Twitter 101. If you do have any questions, put them in the comments and we will help

Also now that your a twitter expert don’t forget to register to be a guest tweeter at the ALLA 13! Contact Karen Rowe-Nurse on nsw.president@alla.asn.au to register to tweet at a session

Happy Tweeting!

Alex Cato (@curious_meow)

NSW News, Web and Social Media Co-ordinator

Posted: 2 September 2013

Relevance and Value - Event Summary

Relevance and value: who is going to believe you?By Alex Cato

On Thursday 8 August 2013, Robert McEntyre of Robert McEntyre & Associates Pty Ltd delivered a presentation to the ALLA NSW on ensuring the relevance and value of your library. Asking the question ‘who is going to believe you?’ Robert discussed the current economic and business environment in which law library’s operating as well as the key stakeholders within the library sphere and the importance of stakeholder engagement.

Robert’s presentation slides Relevance and Value – Presentation and a related paper Clark Kent and Lois Lane in 2010 – Information Professionals working in the ‘technology fashion house’ are available on the blog.

What's going on out there

In March 2013, Robert undertook a survey of the library and information science sectors seeking professionals perception of the industry over the next 5 years. With 152 respondents from Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Scandinavia and Europe the survey asked three questions:

1) What are the known or assumed major influences on both the success and sustainability of your library or information service.

2) What services and facilities will be new, different and/or innovative that will benefit the users of your Library or information service?

3) What will be new, different and/or innovative in the management and operational practices of your Library or Information Service?

The in-depth results of this survey are outlined in Robert’s presentation slides. With respect to each question there are a few key trends:

• Major influencers: The economic environment and technological change have resulted in a massive change in operating model for libraries effecting both their service offering and the manner in which their service offering is delivered. This is particularly disruptive for those libraries that have not evolved with technological opportunities and economic influences.

• Services and facilities: With a user driven virtual operating model library services and facilities are increasingly virtual (if not 100% virtual). This is creating a necessity for staff to possess high levels of technological literacy.

• Management and operational practices: Whilst there were some alarmist responses to this question (“I will be out of a job”) the majority of respondents possessed a more realistic perspective focusing upon reassessing and reevaluating their operational model to best meet their clients needs and integration with the organisations core business.

Where to from here?

The responses to the survey serve to reiterate the challenges faced by library and information professionals are facing everyday – we are operating in uncharted territory.

So what do we do? Now is a key time to revisit who you are serving (your stakeholders), their needs and how ‘you’ as a library are addressing those needs (what is your relevance and value for those stakeholders). Robert proposes an additional question needs to be asked: ‘how are you engaging your stakeholders?’.

The Stakeholder model – A model to meet the challenges of our environment

Taking a holistic perspective of your stakeholders, the stakeholder model encourages examination of how the library’s service offering is relevant and subsequently valuable to stakeholders. The creation of such a service model is facilitated through stakeholder engagement.

Posted: 13 August 2013