Legal research is a fundamental skill for all law students and attorneys. Regardless of practice area or work venue, knowledge of the sources and processes of legal research underpins the legal professional’s work. Academic law librarians, as research experts, are uniquely qualified to teach legal research. Whether participating in the mandatory, first-year law school curriculum or offering advanced or specialized legal research instruction, law librarians have the up-to-date knowledge, the broad view of the field, and the expertise to provide the best legal research instruction possible. This collection offers both theoretical and practical guidance on legal research education from the perspectives of the law librarian. Containing well-reasoned, analytical articles on the topic, the volume explains and supports the law librarian’s role in legal research instruction. The contributors to this book, all experts in teaching legal research, challenge academic law librarians to seize their instructional role in the legal academy. This book was based on a special issue of Legal Reference Services Quarterly.

The Changing Role of Academic Law Librarianship is an authoritative, insiders perspective on key strategies for understanding and navigating the current trends in law school librarianship. Featuring library directors and managers representing some of the nations top law schools, these experts guide the reader through the history of law school librarianship and outline major elements of the librarians role today, including monitoring budgets, allocating resources, harnessing new technologies, and enhancing research education. These top librarians give tips on addressing some of the challenges inherent in a changing landscape, such as improving interlibrary loan services, cultivating modern pedagogy, and evaluating titles and volume counts. Additionally, these leaders give tips on stimulating student legal research skills, digitizing rare materials in collections, marketing, and communicating services, and maximizing the librarians managerial role. The different niches represented and the breadth of perspectives presented enable readers to get inside the minds of some of the leading information managers of today, as these experienced law school librarians offer up their thoughts around the keys to navigating an ever-evolving profession.

In a world where technology advances appear daily, deans and provosts often have questions about law libraries, their purposes, and whether technological innovations should lead to changes in library spaces, collections, and/or services. This book seeks to answer those questions, which came straight from deans, examining the factors involved in an analysis of what a community needs from their library, and demonstrating why the answer to these questions might vary from library to library. The commentaries by multiple directors will be useful to highlight different approaches in analysis as well as changing cultures in law libraries. This valuable title will be of help to newer and experienced law library directors, law school deans, and university provosts (where the university has a law school).--Publisher.

The advancement of innovative education, librarianship, and scholarship has become increasingly entangled with copyright law. Research and education seem to be routinely reinvented with the creation of new software and technological devices. Private agreements are becoming a dominant force on the shape of legal rights and responsibilities.

Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources is an essential guidebook to teaching lawyers and legal researchers how to find the information they need. Law librarians and reference librarians will welcome its timely, effective, and innovative techniques for facilitating their patrons’legal research. According to the MacCrate Report, legal research is one of the ten essential skills for practicing law, and educating users in research skills is a crucial part of the law librarian’s job. Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources provides you with techniques for training your patrons in effective search strategies. This comprehensive volume will help you offer much more than a list of information on where the data is located. This helpful volume covers the full range of both users and resources, from helping first-year law students find cases in print to helping attorneys learn to use new Web sites and search engines. Its range includes academic, company, and public law libraries. Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources discusses formal ways to teach the skills of research, such as scheduled workshops, one-on-one tutorials, for-credit courses in law schools, and CLE-credit courses in law firms. In addition, it offers hints for seizing the teaching moment when a patron needs help doing research. Teaching Legal Research and Providing Access to Electronic Resources presents practical advice for all aspects of patron education, including: the rival merits of process-oriented versus results-oriented learning strategies; coordinating library education programs with courses in legal writing; teaching foreign and international legal research; using learning style theory for more effective classes; helping patrons overcome computer anxiety; lower-cost alternatives to Lexis-Nexis and Westlaw; using technology to deliver reference services.

Gain an international perspective on law library practices and precedents! Because law librarianship is an increasingly international field, working and learning abroad can enrich you culturally and professionally. Whether you visit for a few weeks or move halfway across the world for a year or more, Law Librarians Abroad gives you information about exchange programs, tips for adapting to a different culture, and ideas on how to make the most of a life-changing experience. Law Librarians Abroad explains a number of types of work you may find in other countries: US Information Agency or UN library programs informal visits formal exchange programs teaching clients or colleagues to use new technologies temporary library positions combining personal research with library work Some of the contributors to this exciting volume visited completely different cultures. Their new experiences included seeing snow for the first time and scuba diving the Great Barrier Reef. One went home to Korea after 25 years in the United States. Law Librarians Abroad offers practical suggestions as well: pitfalls and pleasures of living in a foreign country how to set up an exchange or plan a visiting librarian program how to build friendships with librarians abroad before you go In countries from Canada to Zimbabwe, on every continent except Antarctica, the authors of Law Librarians Abroad combined work and travel--and you can too!