Category: Education

Education Committee News

By Brian Flaherty and Ellen Phillips, LLNE Education Committee

Continuing with a great tradition of education and service, LLNE is again running their “Legal Research Instruction Program,” helping New England librarians learn about legal research. For the past two years the class has run six weeks:

  1. General Introduction and Secondary Sources
  2. Caselaw Research
  3. Statutory Research
  4. Administrative Law Research
  5. Business and Transactional Material
  6. Putting it all together.

Traditionally, each week has been taught in person by a different volunteer from LLNE.  This year, we decided to try putting one of the classes online: Susan Vaughn and Brian Flaherty put together an online class for Caselaw research.

This year’s class was slated to start on March 14th – but due to the snow storm the start date was moved to March 21st.  There are 16 people enrolled, including some Simmons students, and folks from public, academic, and law firm libraries.

Many thanks to the folks who have generously volunteered time to make this great idea into a continuing reality.  They are:

Coordinator: Brian Flaherty, Teachers (in the order of classes taught): Brian Flaherty from New England Law,  Susan Vaughn from Boston College Law School, Jessica Pisano Jones from Social Law Library, AJ Blechner from Harvard University Law School, and Elliott Hibbler from Northeastern University Law School. Education Committee: Greg Ewing from Suffolk Law, Brian Flaherty from New England Law, Elliot Hibbler (Education Committee Co-Chair) from Northeastern University Law School, Bonnie Gallagher from Connecticut State Library, Jessica Lundgren from Maine State Law & Legislative Reference Library, Ellen Phillips (Education Committee Co-Chair) from University of New Hampshire School of Law, and Susan Vaughn from Boston College Law School. Also, huge thanks to Rick Buckingham and Suffolk University Law School Library for hosting this program for the third year in a row!

Legal Research Instruction Program – Call for Volunteers

Do you know a lot about legal research? Do you want to share your knowledge with others?

If the answer is yes, then consider volunteering to teach a section of the Legal Research Instruction Program. Currently LLNE needs volunteers to teach Statutes, Administrative Law, as well as Transactional & Business Law this spring. There is also a need for substitute instructors who can fill in at the last minute if needed.

The course is taught by different law librarians from the membership of LLNE, with a different librarian teaching each section. Brian Flaherty from New England Law oversees the program and is there to lend support for all of the sessions.

The course runs on six Tuesday evenings from March 14 to April 25, 2017 (no class on 4/18) from 5:45 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at Suffolk Law in Boston.

Teaching legal research is a great way to contribute to the field of law librarianship while developing your teaching skills. Please consider volunteering your time for this great program. Contact Brian Flaherty for more information.​

Exciting News about the LLNE Legal Research Instruction Program

By Ellen Phillips, LLNE Education Committee Co-Chair

Each Spring LLNE offers a six-week legal research instruction program for librarians in the New England area who would like to learn about law librarianship. For many years, this unique course has been offering instruction in various legal topics.

Beginning this year, one class of the Legal Research Instruction Program (LRIP), the section on Case Law, will be taught online. The rest of the classes will be held in person on Tuesday evenings at Suffolk Law in Boston as it has been for the past two years.

Each topic is taught by academic law librarians who are members of LLNE and is overseen by Reference Librarian Brian Flaherty from New England Law.

Currently Brian, along with Susan Vaughn, a legal information librarian from Boston College Law Library, is working together to create a lesson plan to teach caselaw online.  All of the instructors volunteer to donate their time to participate in LRIP, and the students have the benefit of being taught by a variety of information professionals who are also experts in their field.

Class participants are varied in their background and career goals. The class traditionally has an even mix of public, academic, and law firm librarians, as well as the occasional pupil who is considering library school. This ensures a lively mix of skills and experience, but it was noted that the majority of the participants are from the greater Boston area. It is hoped that by offering a hybrid format, LLNE will be able to encourage librarians who live further away to consider attending.

This year’s Legal Instruction class will run from March 14th through April 25th. Classes will not be held on April 18th. A description the program is available at the LLNE website. The deadline to register is Friday, March 7th.

The Education Committee is excited about this change and welcomes any feedback. The members of the committee are Greg Ewing, Brian Flaherty, Bonnie Gallagher, Elliott Hibbler, Jessica Lundgren, Ellen Phillips, and Susan Vaughn.

Education committee update

By Elliot Hibbler

It is “Sunshine Week” this week! No, it is not about the weather (the warm temperatures have not correlated with clear days so far) but about open government and freedom of information. This week, we have seen the Senate pass a bill, S. 337, related to improving FOIA. Many such bills are also at various stages of the legislative process at the state level.

Which reminds me…the LLNE / ABLL Spring meeting is coming up soon!

We have a great day of programming planned. We will be looking at access to government information from a policy level, and also getting into the specifics of how access is working in practice. We’ll also look at projects shaping the future of access. There is still time to register at lawlibraryguides.neu.edu/LLNE2016!

Education committee update

By Ellen Frentzen & Elliot Hibbler

We are excited to announce a new slate of programming coordinated by the Education Committee. We are excited to have received a Bloomberg BNA Grant for our forthcoming series, Librarians Getting Latte. Librarians Getting Latte is a series of short videos along the lines of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. The videos will be formatted as a series of short conversations between a librarian and different stakeholders in the legal information ecosystem with planned guests including experienced librarians, law school faculty, and government officials. Every conversation will go a little differently, as we will be matching people based on geography. It is our hope that, once we get the initial video up and running, the program can be expanded to include other chapters as well.

Education Committee Update

By Ellen Frentzen & Elliot Hibbler

As we’re writing this, Elliott has finished up a proposal  for an AALL/Bloomberg BNA Continuing Education Grant to fund an exciting new continuing education series from LLNE. More details coming soon!

Planning for the Spring Meeting, which will be held April 8 at Northeastern University, is also well under way. It will be a joint meeting with ABLL, and the theme is Access to Government information. Be sure to save the date for this one!

Elliott is also co-teaching the legal information sources class offered to MLS students at Simmons with fellow LLNE member Scott Akehurst-Moore. If you have the opportunity, please recommend the course to your Simmons friends (and of course, suggest they join LLNE—it’s only $5 for a student membership, and there are lots of great benefits).

Dispatches from AALL Philadelphia – something I learned: presentation resources

From Diane D’Angelo: Want to create cool animated presentations? Check out Powtoon! It’s a free resource that will help you captivate & engage students. Attorneys, judges, faculty and deans will also be drawn in to what you have to say with this fun way of presenting. http://www.powtoon.com

Service Committee Update

By the Service Committee

The Service Committee has continued to focus its efforts on making connections and building partnerships with public libraries in the New England region.

For the second year in a row, the Service Committee worked with the LLNE Education Committee and the Legal Research Instruction Program (LRIP) to offer two scholarships to New England area public librarians interested in taking the LRIP course. The two librarians who received the scholarships this year were Jeanne Bent of the Hope Public Library in Scituate, RI and Kathleen Clifford of the Boston Public Library in Boston, MA.

The Service Committee is also moving forward with its yet-to-be-named web portal project. The project aims to provide public libraries with one portal for comprehensive information on the legal research and information landscape across New England. Our committee members have started working to compile this resource by reviewing existing tools and projects by law librarians, bar associations, courts and legal aid conglomerates in each of the states. The committee hopes to have some piece of the portal ready and online by the annual meeting. Once complete, the web portal will be hosted on the LLNE website.

In tandem with the web portal project, the Service Committee is interested in creating a network of law librarians throughout New England who are willing to serve as resources to public librarians with legal research questions. The network of librarians will include individuals willing to be “on-call” for questions that may arise in their state of in their area of expertise, but also individuals willing to travel within their local area to provide in-person, basic legal research trainings to public librarians. If you or any of your colleagues are interested in serving as a trainer or on-call librarian for your state or in your area of expertise, please contact Rebecca Martin of the Service Committee.

2015 and 2016 LLNE Meetings

By Elliot Hibbler

Has it already more than a month since the Fall meeting? This morning’s dark, snowy walk to the MBTA says yes.  

Looking back, the folks from Boston College Law Library and the Association of Boston Law Librarians did a great job as hosts. The meeting was held at BC’s Connors Center, in quaint Dover, MA. Attendees were treated to a day of panels and discussion focusing on ways to reinvent the law library. We heard from many different stakeholders in the continued success of law libraries, including law firm librarians, judicial law librarians, academics and attorneys themselves. Of course, none of it would have been possible without the support of the meeting’s sponsors. 

Speaking of meetings, have you been thinking “I get so much out of the LLNE seasonal meetings, but I wish for once the theme would be…?” Have you ever wanted to invite a hundred law librarians over to your organization for a day of learning and lunch? Here is your opportunity – the Education Committee is looking for a host for the Spring 2016 meeting! Let one of the Education Directors (Elliott Hibbler or Bob DeFabrizio) know if you are interested in hosting. No one would say it is an easy commitment, but you will have the Education Committee backing you up all the way. 

If you have an interest in mindfulness, you don’t have to wait long for an LLNE meeting about the topic! The University of New Hampshire School of Law and the Association of New Hampshire Law Librarians will be hosting the Spring 2015 meeting in Concord, NH on April 24th. I am already looking forward to it!