Good ideas to share

Sharing...the cornerstone of librarianship and knowledge management. There are some excellent sharers in the legal community! I have a couple of sharing sites to share that you should know about.

Slaw Tips
tips.slaw.ca

advice you can use — short and to the point — every Tuesday, Wednesday & Thursday

Slaw Tips offers a technology tip each Tuesday, a research tip each Wednesday and a practice tip each Thursday.
I edit the Research Tips section of this blog and am very happy to accept suggestions. If one of your 2011 goals is to build a social media presence, a short tip submission on this site is a great place to start.

Attorney at Work
www.attorneyatwork.com

"Attorney at Work promises you one really good idea every day."

The Daily Dispatch from this site is available by email. Examples of good ideas include this post from February 28, 2011 on starting your Outlook in a for followup folder.

Both of these sites offer a regular dose of professional development. Think of it as a desktop vitamin. It is a quick way to learn new things, or be reminded of good practices that will make your work life a little healthier.

AALL webinar on KM for law librarians

Continuing education is very important. Unlike lawyers, law librarians do not have a professional regulatory body requiring professional development credits or intention. Law librarians do face a continual learning cliff. Changes in technology, library best practices, economies, publishing, and all of the changes that affect our lawyers have impact on our jobs and our success in them.

For all of the good reasons to "keep up" the Field libraries staff practice continuing professional development regularly. We try to attend annual law or library association conferences, we take in seminars from local legal and library associations and we attend webinars for the Canadian Association of Law Libraries and other organizations.

Yesterday, the American Association of Law Libraries Private Law Libraries Special Interest Section offered the 2nd in a 4 part webinar series titled "Moving Beyond the Library Walls to Support Strategic Knowledge Management". This session happily affirmed the approach that I have taken with the marriage of Libraries and KM at my firm.

Benefits of KM that I was reminded about in the session included the idea that KM "Improves client/customer service by streamlining response time". The session reminded me that even though KM uses library jargon, what we are really dealing with from the organizational perspective is categories, directories, and synonyms to help our lawyers work smarter. 'New to me' ideas that were addressed included using intelligent computer analysis software to help wade through the terabytes of information that we have at our fingertips.

The session was moderated by Greg Lambert, Library and Records Manager, King & Spalding and Steve Lastres, Director of Library & KM, Debevoise & Plimpton LLP and presented by Julie Bozzell,Chief Research and Knowledge Services Officer, Hogan Lovells US LLP and Toby Brown, Client Teams/Alternative Fees/KM Manager, Fulbright & Jaworski LLP. Thanks to all of them for the excellent presentation.