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Dear Colleagues,
Last week's ALL-SIS Faculty Services Committee's discussion on "Supporting the Interdisciplinary and Empirical Research Needs of Law Faculty" generated many ideas, suggestions, and perspectives on these continuing and growing areas of faculty services.
Below is a brief summary of topics addressed. I have also attached a compiled document of the discussion responses, which will be posted soon to the Committee's web site.
SUMMARY
Interdisciplinary Research
The need for interdisciplinary research support for law faculty research has been growing in recent years and continues to expand, with challenges in staffing, access to relevant databases, resource expertise, collaboration and training being of key importance.
Ideas and suggestions included:
-expand class presentations, tours, pathfinders, faculty/staff tutorials on new databases
-use federated search product with content designed to search across interdisciplinary campus databases
-work with other campus libraries/librarians to acquire databases and facilitate/co-teach staff and law student instruction sessions
-build relationships with librarian colleagues outside the institution; take advantage of access to subject specialist librarians and collections of other schools an programs of a state university system or library consortium
-in "stand-alone" law schools, purchase subscriptions to key interdisciplinary databases such as ABI-Inform, PsychInfo, ProQuest Research Libraries
-incorporate interdisciplinary research training in librarian training of faculty research assistants
-purchase interdisciplinary encyclopedias and "how to" research guides for law library
Other useful databases mentioned: Science Direct, NBER papers; ProQuest Historical Newspapers
Empirical Research
There has been a marked increase among law faculty in many of our institutions in recent years, posing new and unique challenges in librarian skill-development and in providing research, training, and other faculty services. These challenges range from working with datasets to assisting with creating surveys and facilitating faculty co-authoring.
Key points, ideas and suggestions:
-familiarity with appropriate databases and how to work with them involves adequate basic statistics knowledge
-Skill-set requirements might be solved by: adding a reference librarian with a social sciences Ph.D. and MLS to specialize in empirical research assistance and/or identifying and working with datasets; hiring a graduate assistant in political science who has methodology background to help with tutorials, databases, web pages; partnering with a knowledgeable firm librarian
-use short-term licenses for statistical and data products for specific faculty research projects
-include a lecture or unit on empirical research in an advance Legal Research and Writing class
-train faculty assistants/secretaries and faculty RA's on some information resources and statistics databases
-direct faculty to a campus social sciences data lab or to a main library web site on statistics
Databases and software programs mentioned by participants: TRACFED, SPSS, Stata, ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research)
Also mentioned: Empirical Legal Scholarship page of the Legal Scholarship blog, workshops offered by ICPSR, such as “Providing Social Science Data Services,”upcoming Empirical Research workshop at the 2008 AALL Annual Meeting
Thanks again to everyone who participated! We hope it was useful and will spark further discussion and ideas on this topic.
Joanne Dugan
Chair, ALL-SIS Faculty Services Committee
Toni L. Aiello
Reference Librarian
Deane Law Library
Hofstra University School of Law
122 Hofstra University
Hempstead, NY 11549
(516) 463-7808
Fax: (516) 463-5129
Toni.Aiello@hofstra.edu
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