Tag Archives: Technology

Keeping the Conversation Going: Session Summary from AALL 2015, In the Wake of the Kia Audit

Posted on December 9, 2015 by
Photo of laptop and tablet

 

As we get to the end of fall, it seemed timely to revisit associate and law student training topics discussed at this summer’s AALL Annual Meeting and see if anyone had implemented new associate training initiatives or new approaches to legal research classes this fall. The post about the Attorney Research Skills session is available here

By Debbie Ginsberg, Educational Technology Librarian at IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law Library

In the Wake of the Kia Audit,” a 2015 AALL session, focused on the importance of technology skills and training programs for law students and new lawyers, and on how librarians can be a part of the process. Continue reading Keeping the Conversation Going: Session Summary from AALL 2015, In the Wake of the Kia Audit

All About ILTA

Joanne Kiley photo
Joanne Kiley

The International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) formed over 30 years ago due to the shared needs and concerns of law firm accounting professionals using Wang Computers.  As technology seeped and then poured into legal entities, ILTA grew in areas of expertise and support.  ILTA’s membership includes law firms, corporate and non-profit legal departments, courts, law schools and more from across the globe with backgrounds in applications, desktop support, litigation support, systems, marketing, knowledge management, communications technology and yes, libraries. Continue reading All About ILTA

Law Firm Librarian Current Awareness Resources

My colleagues and I have been taking turns leading our weekly Reference meetings. For my colleague, Britnee Cole’s meeting, she discussed all of the professional current awareness resources we use as law firm librarians. As we all know, we are inundated with news alerts, feeds, tweets, blogs, listservs, emails, newsletters and more. But where do we start? Many of us use news aggregators such as Manzama, Zite, FlipBoard, Feedly or Pulse to keep organized.

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What are the professional current awareness resources we are using?

Continue reading Law Firm Librarian Current Awareness Resources

Digital Voices: Devices that Speak & Listen

mikeDid you know that you can have your computer read text out loud to you? Or that you can read to your computer and it will type what you say? You can, and neither of these features require special programs. Both are built into features that you already have on your computer (they are also built into your phones, too – see the linked instructions on enabling these features on iOS devices).

Continue reading Digital Voices: Devices that Speak & Listen

What’s Rotten About Legal Scholarship, and How to Cure It: A Georgetown Symposium

When Supreme Court justices cite Internet sources in their opinions, how do they ensure the integrity of those sources for future legal scholars? The answer, unfortunately, is not very well, as illustrated by this dose of digital schadenfreude visited upon Justice Alito.

404This was the central problem explored by a one-day conference at Georgetown University on October 24, “404/File Not Found: Link Rot, Legal Citation and Projects to Preserve Precedent.”

Over six sessions, the program identified and addressed the risks of citing to ephemeral online sources in court opinions and legal scholarship, frequently highlighting a key distinction between “link rot,” or the disappearance of a cited link, and “reference rot,” which occurs when the cited reference is no longer the same as it was when the author cited it. Archived recordings of each of the day’s sessions are available at the conference website. Continue reading What’s Rotten About Legal Scholarship, and How to Cure It: A Georgetown Symposium

Facebook: Who’s in Control?

facebook icon designed by dan leechAs librarians, we’re well aware of the impact relevancy algorithms have in search results. This year Facebook’s relevancy ranking – otherwise known as the “Top Stories”  in your news feed  – has come under a lot of public scrutiny. Facebook uses your actions – clicks, likes, comments – to choose what content you see, along with other factors that you have less control over.

What do they prioritize? How do we know what we’re missing? Can we push back and get more personal control? What can this tell us about larger issues like net neutrality? If you’re using Facebook for current awareness, you may not be seeing all the information you want to see.

Knowing how Facebook shows or hides what you see may change how you want to use it, so I’ll also demonstrate where you can find tools to customize your personal settings. Continue reading Facebook: Who’s in Control?

Do.ne, or what to do when your favorite service disappears

This article was previously published in the Law School Ed Tech blog. It is adapted from an Ignite talk given at a Continuing Education session on November 5, 2013 for CALL.

The Chicago-Kent Library Technology Group runs many kinds of projects.  Keeping track of what’s going on in individual projects can be challenging.  We needed a cloud-based service for project management, something that could:

  • Track projects and tasks
  • Let us assign tasks to individual workers
  • Comment on tasks when we had questions or more information.

Continue reading Do.ne, or what to do when your favorite service disappears

A Summer of Law and Technology

Last fall, my Library Director and fellow CALL member, Emily Janoski-Haehlen, stopped by my office and asked if I would be interested in co-teaching a course in law practice technology. She had taught a similar course in her previous position and thought that I might be interested, given my role as Digital Services Librarian.

Intrigued by the idea and believing that Emily was looking out for my best interests, it took me less than 48 hours to respond with a confident “Yes!”  Less than a year later, I have not only survived my first summer of co-teaching the course but also truly enjoyed the process of doing so.

In this brief column, I will provide a few thoughts and observations about my experience, including how our course proposal was received by the curriculum committee, how I learned a great deal about the topic in a short amount of time, and what class topics the students seemed to particularly enjoy. Continue reading A Summer of Law and Technology