The first part of this week's competency assignment was to go to LibraryThing and add a tag for our textbook. After signing in to my account, I added Heting Chu's book to my library. I then looked at all the tags in the tag cloud and under "all tags" for the book. I added the new tag "Summarization" to the textbook. It was interesting to see the great variety of terms used to tag this book.
For the second part of the assignment, I searched for a resource associated with my area of interest, law librarianship, at the LibraryThing website. I found a book titled Law Librarianship in the 21st Century by Roy Balleste. The tags for this book are:
"future librarianship"(1) Law(1) law library(1) Librarianship(1) libraries(2) management(1) non-fiction(1) not at public library(1) profession(1) to read(1) trends(1)
I thought the most interesting of these tags was "not at public library." That is not a tag which I would have thought to use, but obviously it is an association for this item which is meaningful for someone. I had used the terms "law library" and "law librarianship" to search for a resource relevant to my topic.
The LibraryThing link is: http://www.librarything.com/work/3527211
I chose this book because it is directly related to my area of interest, law librarianship! In fact, it has the same title as my blog!! There is no doubt that this resource would be very helpful to me as I consider a career in this type of librarianship. According to the description of the book on the LibraryThing web page where I found this item, (the description is a product description from Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/, which has been posted on the LibraryThing page), the book is designed for those taking a library science course in law librarianship. Topics covered in the book include "the history of law librarianship, international law, and government documents." In addition, the book discusses collection development, technology, public services, technical services, etc. as these topics specifically apply to a law library setting. This book is such a perfect match for my area of interest that I think I am going to order it from Amazon!
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
RSS Feed (Competency 4)
I added an RSS feed from the American Association of Law Libraries. I chose this RSS feed because it relates directly to my library type. The RSS feed is titled "AALL Latest News" and contains news about new issues of the AALL magazine (AALL Spectrum), the AALL e-newsletter, of Law Library Journal, and the latest events or offerings from AALL, as well as other items of interest to the law library community. The URL for the RSS feed is: http://www.aallnet.org/rss/aall-latestnews.asp
It should be a lot of fun to keep track of the latest news in the law library community this way!
It should be a lot of fun to keep track of the latest news in the law library community this way!
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Podcast
I discovered a number of useful podcasts this week which are related to developments in various areas of law, law libraries, or legal research. I used several different search engines and different search terms to find the podcasts, and this helped me locate those which were most relevant to my blog's topic of law librarianship. I looked on YouTube and a few podcast search engines such as Podscope and Podcast Alley. I found several podcasts on YouTube and one that was quite good at iTunes. Podcast Alley was my favorite podcast search engine, returning a great number of results using such search terms as "law library," "law librarians," and "legal research." The URL for Podcast Alley is: www.podcastalley.com. I also used Google and discovered many of the same podcasts I had found using Podcast Alley, in addition to a few new ones. West, the company which provides publications, products, and services to those in the legal profession, has a wonderful podcast called Westcast. It was very relevant to my blog and is a legal podcast that would be very useful to any law librarian. The podcast episodes cover a wide range of legal topics and I particularly enjoyed listening to one about legal research in our "google generation." An archive of podcasts from the Westcast podcast can be viewed at: http://west.thomson.com/about/podcasts/. A number of the podcasts I found were from law libraries at law schools around the country. Some of the topics for these were very localized, but others would be of general interest to law librarians. Also, The Law Librarian, with Richard Leiter, is a podcast which discusses "all issues of concern to law libraries, law librarians, legal bibliography and the profession." (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thelawlibrarian)
Using the search term "law librarian podcast" on Google led me to a wonderful article by Diane Murley titled, “Technology for Everyone... Podcasts and Podcasting for Law Librarians." (The link is: http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v99n03/2007-40.pdf ) A number of specific podcasts were mentioned in the article and the author discussed the ways these podcasts are being used in the profession. However, the article also gave me the idea of using "aall podcast" as a search query in Google. This helped me find a link to a podcast from Government Info Pro: LexisNexis. I conducted a search with this search term, adding "podcast" and then was able to link directly to the site. The URL is: http://www.governmentinfopro.com/federal_info_pro/lexisnexis-federal-info-p.html. After looking through the site, I found a number of good podcast episodes. LexisNexis, like West, provides a great number of legal products and services to those working in the legal world. The company is now providing podcasts on topics of interest to law librarians and other legal professionals. Government Info Pro is one of them and is hosted by Marie Kaddell. There were many very useful episodes from this podcast and I plan on returning to the site to listen to many of them. The episode I chose to include in my blog, was a podcast of a talk given at an American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) convention by Donna Scheeder, Director, Law Library Services, at the Law Library of the Library of Congress entitled: "Leadership Through Influence: The Path for 21st Century Government Librarians." It was definitely one of my favorites which I listened to in its entirety and is found at:
LexisNexis® Federal Info Pro Podcast: Special Episode 1. http://www.governmentinfopro.com/federal_info_pro/2007/07/lexisnexis-fe-1.html
The podcast was very relevant to the topic of my blog. The various challenges faced by law and government librarians today were discussed, such as: how to accomplish the electronic preservation of born digital documents; open access to court records versus the privacy issues this raises; globalization trends and the need for librarians to be able to provide access to international sources of legal information, etc. The speaker in the podcast explained that law librarians will need to exercise leadership to meet these challenges. They must find ways to add value to their services and go far beyond the traditional role of a reference librarian or bibliographer. She talked about the use of a law library's website, blogs, and web crawlers which would get scholarly blogs onto the library's own webpage. It was very interesting and I believe the other episodes from this podcast will be as well.
In conclusion, I did learn that varying one's search terms really does help lead to additional sources. For example, using "legal research" at Google led me to Berring’s Legal Research podcast. There were very useful episodes such as, “Legal Periodicals and How to Find Them.” (This episode discusses how to use indexes and Boolean search techniques in full text databases. The link is: http://www.berringlegalresearch.com/podcast.asp) There is much useful information to be found, but it may take a little extra effort in terms of trying different search engines, search terms, and scrolling through a podcast's archives.
Using the search term "law librarian podcast" on Google led me to a wonderful article by Diane Murley titled, “Technology for Everyone... Podcasts and Podcasting for Law Librarians." (The link is: http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v99n03/2007-40.pdf ) A number of specific podcasts were mentioned in the article and the author discussed the ways these podcasts are being used in the profession. However, the article also gave me the idea of using "aall podcast" as a search query in Google. This helped me find a link to a podcast from Government Info Pro: LexisNexis. I conducted a search with this search term, adding "podcast" and then was able to link directly to the site. The URL is: http://www.governmentinfopro.com/federal_info_pro/lexisnexis-federal-info-p.html. After looking through the site, I found a number of good podcast episodes. LexisNexis, like West, provides a great number of legal products and services to those working in the legal world. The company is now providing podcasts on topics of interest to law librarians and other legal professionals. Government Info Pro is one of them and is hosted by Marie Kaddell. There were many very useful episodes from this podcast and I plan on returning to the site to listen to many of them. The episode I chose to include in my blog, was a podcast of a talk given at an American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) convention by Donna Scheeder, Director, Law Library Services, at the Law Library of the Library of Congress entitled: "Leadership Through Influence: The Path for 21st Century Government Librarians." It was definitely one of my favorites which I listened to in its entirety and is found at:
LexisNexis® Federal Info Pro Podcast: Special Episode 1. http://www.governmentinfopro.com/federal_info_pro/2007/07/lexisnexis-fe-1.html
The podcast was very relevant to the topic of my blog. The various challenges faced by law and government librarians today were discussed, such as: how to accomplish the electronic preservation of born digital documents; open access to court records versus the privacy issues this raises; globalization trends and the need for librarians to be able to provide access to international sources of legal information, etc. The speaker in the podcast explained that law librarians will need to exercise leadership to meet these challenges. They must find ways to add value to their services and go far beyond the traditional role of a reference librarian or bibliographer. She talked about the use of a law library's website, blogs, and web crawlers which would get scholarly blogs onto the library's own webpage. It was very interesting and I believe the other episodes from this podcast will be as well.
In conclusion, I did learn that varying one's search terms really does help lead to additional sources. For example, using "legal research" at Google led me to Berring’s Legal Research podcast. There were very useful episodes such as, “Legal Periodicals and How to Find Them.” (This episode discusses how to use indexes and Boolean search techniques in full text databases. The link is: http://www.berringlegalresearch.com/podcast.asp) There is much useful information to be found, but it may take a little extra effort in terms of trying different search engines, search terms, and scrolling through a podcast's archives.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)