BUILDING AWESOME LIBRARY WEB APPS WITH OPEN SOURCE

Presenter(s):

Tom Boone, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles

Jason Eiseman, Yale Law School

From the CALI conference session Web site:

Historically librarians have viewed themselves as information gatekeepers. But as users come to expect information ubiquity, librarians must learn to unleash, aggregate, and even create content and push it out by creating their own applications. Open source technologies offer the opportunity for librarians build useful web applications. Presenters will show real library applications created with open source technologies and the tools used to create them. You’ll see how complex web design problems, technological limitations, and economic realities were overcome to deliver useful and awesome web apps.

If you’d like access to the presentation materials, please visit the CALI conference Web site. You can obtain the presentation links at the presenter’s diigo site.

Filed under: General

Law office technology: Why it needs to be in your school’s curriculum and how to get it there

Presenter(s):

Wayne Miller, Duke University School of Law

Kenneth Hirsh, University of Cincinnati College of Law

David Whelan, Law Society of Upper Canada

From the CALI conf. Web site:

The importance of information technology for the legal profession is beyond question. The panelists in this session will examine the history of technology in law to generate an argument for what students should know about technology in order to function well in today’s legal environment. Building on that argument, the panelists will present, on the basis of their own experiences, an idealized course as a set of modules that expose students to that set of information and those skills needed. There will be ample time for discussion. Co-presenters are Wayne Miller, Ken Hirsh and David Whelan.

You can download the materials from this presentation at the CALI conference Web site.

Filed under: General

Crowdsourcing and Open Access v2.0

Timothy K. Armstrong
Assistant Professor of Law
U. of Cincinnati
timothy.armstrong@uc.edu

Improving access to scholarship and primary source materials.

Many open-access repositories exist:

• single institution (Harvard, one day; Duke, OCU)
• cross-institution (SSRN, Expresso, LexOpus)

Faculty adopting open-access mandates

• Harvard (but John Palfrey says compliance is an issue)

Law reviews going open-access, too

• Open Access Law Program

The Durham Statement (2009)

Going Digital has four steps. First, scanning the documents–actually getting into some kind of digitized format into the computer. How, then do you get the text into a readable format? Then, you need to proofread and correct text. Finally, how do you distribute it in a way that is “findable” and “searchable.”

It is important that you do not try to do these four steps by yourself. Look outside of your institution for help. A lot of this work has already been done so why recreate the wheel? For example, the Google Books, Internet Archive, Library of Congress–places to go that have already cleared one of these hurdles. Once you have the scans there are various free Web sites that  offer services will ocr the text for you (Any2DjVu). Now we start get into tasks that scale. There are two

Distributed Proofreaders (affiliated with Project Gutenberg) and Wikisource (a sister site of Wikipedia). The pros of DP are they are very large and supportive and is fast, at least in the early rounds. The cons are that is it bureaucratic & hierarchical, new users cannot add texts and few texts of interest to the legal community. With Wikisource, the pros are that any user can add or edit any work, there is an easier user interface and many legal texts are already available. The cons are that they are much smaller than DP or Wikipedia and slower to complete proofreading projects.

You can collect his slides on his Google docs page.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, Legal Education , cali09

IT and Faculty as Partners in Education: Basic Tools For Change

Greg Clinton

James Beckwith

North Carolina Central University

From the CALI Web site session description:

NCCU School of Law has had tremendous success with the faculty adapting and embracing technology. Currently over 90% of the faculty uses technology for instructional purposes. This session will discuss the technology environment at NCCU and hear from faculty about their usage of technology to include, classroom capturing solutions, clickers, smart classrooms, group study rooms,etc. IT and faculty have become more like partners in the deployment and usuage of technolgy. This session will discuss this partnership as the basic tool for change.

You must know the benefit from the faculty member’s point of view.

See Raising the Bar.doc.

Filed under: Educational Technology, General, Instructional Technology, Legal Education , cali09, faculty

Cool Gadgets, Software and Utilities Every Faculty Member Should Have

Sydney A. Beckman
Dean and Professor of Law
SydBeckman@gmail.com

Duncan School of Law – Lincoln Memorial University

Syd Beckman

See the list of gadgets he discusses on my delicious page. You can also download his powerpoint from the CALI conference Web site.

Filed under: Educational Technology, Favorite Tech Sites, General, Instructional Technology, Legal Education, My Teaching , cali09, gadget