…after a blogging hiatus of eight months. I apologize, dear reader. (I use the singular of reader in the literal sense.) Much has gone on that has escaped my comment: in public news, the national elections; the Newtown, Connecticut shootings; the inaugural and state of the union addresses; the bombing in Boston last week. I have strong opinions on political actions and the lack thereof in the wake of all these events, but I will not go down that path today. Instead, I will focus on matters pertaining to legal education and law librarianship.
The logical place to begin is where I left off: the AALL membership bylaws proposal. It passed. You may recall that the proposal was fairly controversial, and this was reflected in the final vote tally: 50.64% voted to approve. Time will now tell whether the decision is good for the association; I remain optimistic. In other AALL news, I will join Holly M. Riccio, Gail Warren, and Femi Cadmus as new members of its board in July, following our election last fall.
The recently approved revision to the AALL Guide to Fair Business Practices for Legal Publishers has been discussed by Joe Hodnicki, and with the Principles for Licensing Electronic Resources it is the subject of a series of blog posts (aggregated here) by Michael Ginsborg on the recent LexisNexis announcement of their “eShift.” I highly recommend reading through these posts. The Lexis announcement is but one example that commercial publishers have yet to come to grips with the needs of libraries and the restraints under which they operate. Rather, it appears that publishers are more interested in using the shift to digital formats to eviscerate a traditional function of libraries, i.e., making information available to multiple users by sharing resources among them.
In legal education, law schools continue to struggle in adapting to the new reality thrust upon them by many factors, and manifested most noticeably by drastic drops in student application numbers the past few years. As at many law schools, we at Cincinnati are working hard to adjust to the new reality and to preserve a strong future for the institution and its efforts.