This session will describe how Rutgers-Newark Law Library is creating an archive of regulations from military agencies within the Department of Defense. Many Federal Agencies publish their documents exclusively on departmental websites.  These documents include many regulations, policies, manuals, and other publications with legal significance.   This system of web publishing creates barriers to effective information retrieval by funneling documents into many separate databases with no overarching organization scheme.  The focus of this session will be on using linked data technology to improve access to and discovery of legal information published by government agencies.

Lawyers and judges alike rely on explanatory parentheticals to concisely convey the substance of a decision. Indeed, the common law is infested with these case-summarizing parentheticals. Because these parentheticals follow a common format, including the use of an introductory gerund - (holding, (distinguishing, (rejecting, etc. - they are amenable to automated extraction. During an ongoing fellowship project at Stanford CodeX, the speaker extracted hundreds of thousands of explanatory parentheticals from federal case law. Concise case summaries written by judges have many uses including enabling a curation of opinions that is at once automated, nuanced, and trustworthy. The parenthethicals can also enable an auto-populated citator tool that, though limited in coverage, is not limited treatment to strongly negative treatment.

The ABA Model Rules were recently changed to include a technology component. See Client-Lawyer Relationship Rule 1.1 Competence – Comment which states “To maintain the requisite knowledge and skill, a lawyer should keep abreast of changes in the law and its practice, including the benefits and risks associated with relevant technology, engage in continuing study and education and comply with all continuing legal education requirements to which the lawyer is subject.” As technology gains more importance in the work of the legal profession, law schools face new challenges about how to incorporate technology in the curriculum. Law students are still trained to look at precedent looking backwards, rather than forward to the future of legal services.” The session by Brooklyn Law School Reference Librarian Harold O'Grady and Brooklyn Law School Technology Educator Lloyd Carew-Reid will examine how law schools are now incorporating technology, business development and marketing in the law school curriculum

You can code; you just may not know it yet. This presentation will cover the fundamentals of coding by looking at some of the most popular and important programming languages used today. By looking at different examples and the ways in which they share key commonalities, participants will learn about the concepts necessary to read and understand a block of code. We will include conclude with an opportunity for participants to create and execute a simple script (please bring your laptop if you’d like to get some hands-on coding experience).

It’s OK to admit it. When you went to law school, it was because you didn’t want to do any math. But then you got to work in legal education in the age of assessment and big data, and now you’re swimming in P-values, correlations, and standard deviations, with only the vaguest idea of what it all means. How will you make heads or tails of all this data if you actually want to use it to evaluate and improve your teaching and service? This program will introduce you to the basic terms and tools of data analysis, but without burying you in a mountain of equations. Instead, you’ll see the terms illustrated using images and stories that will help you better understand the concepts while leaving the calculations to those expensive software packages your institution already bought to do all that for you. You’ll also see how the math-averse can still use the powerful tools at their disposal to analyze everything from the difficulty of a single test question to the financial background of your entering class and talk about it in a manner that is both sensible and not confusing.

Paul Deschner and Stephen Chapman of the Harvard Law School Library Lab will report on the tools and techniques that project teams have been using to describe and rapidly and cheaply digitize collections. Through digitization, we aim to deliver research collections to the classroom—and freely via the web—to faculty, students, and scholars not only interested in accessing historic materials, but also enriching them by using tools for tagging. We will highlight the most recent phase of digitizing archival documents from the Nuremberg Trials of military, political and other leaders of Nazi Germany (the “Nuremberg Trials Project”), where staff prepped 4,285 folders (in 360 boxes) and scanned 413,647 document pages in 15 weeks. As of CALI 2015, we will also be able to share findings from a three-month experiment testing tools for document discovery and tagging.

The CALI staff started using Slack in March of 2014 and it quickly became our tool of choice for chatting, sharing information and files, and tracking what's going on with CALI. In addition to the chat and file sharing features, we make extensive use of the integration feature of Slack to import news feedsfrom law schools, system alerts from our servers, updates to our Github projects, and more. All of this allows to have a lot of information at our finger tips. This session will take a look at the basics of Slack including how to get started, some of the more advanced paid features (yes, we like it so much we have a subscription), and delve into the ways that CALI uses this tool for our projects.

Trying to fit more PC units in a smaller budget? Want more power in less space? Many have been tempted over the years to reduce expenses and spacial impact by adopting the ultra small form factor computers. This session will cover the various options; discussing the hardware and software options with some observations from the personal experiences of the panelists. Specific systems addressed will include Xi3, NUC, Rasberry Pi, HP Stream Mini, and the Mac Mini. Regardless of the problem you're trying to solve, you may find that the newest generation of tiny PCs will address that need: low cost pc, specialty applications, digital signage, small server, classroom lectern PC, lab PC, and desktop PC deployments for staff and faculty.

LibGuides are particularly associated with library research guides but they can be so much more. Many member institutions have LibGuides accounts but may not appreciate the vast potential of the service. In this program the speaker will highlight a variety of actual uses for LibGuides and the potential benefits for various user groups like staff, students, faculty, patrons, and even alumni. A portion of the program will be spent looking at code, CSS style sheets, other display elements, and the advanced features of LibGuides CMS like Groups and mobile customization. This program will focus on LibGuides version 2. A private LibGuide created for the program will contain the examples, links, notes, slides, etc.

The new ABA standards require law schools to incorporate learning outcomes into all of their credit bearing courses (Standard 302) and to utilize both formative and summative assessments to “to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students” (Standard 314). As UNT Dallas College of Law was being set up, the faculty decided to integrate learning outcomes and multiple assessments into the curriculum from day one.