Computer Services Roundtable Report

About fifteen people attended the Computer Services Roundtable discussion. To facilitate the discussion, we created a form which asked each participant: (1) to list his/her most pressing problem as a computer services librarian; (2) to identify one or two specific things that a computer services librarian can do to contribute to or participate in legal education at their law school; and (3) to identify one or two specific, doable projects.

Our discussion mostly focused on different schools' current projects and issues related to those projects. For example, one school is in the process of upgrading about 100 users from Windows 3.11/Windows NT to Windows 98. Training users was one of the issues raised in the discussion. This led to a brief discussion about training at schools which require notebook computers. The discussion also focused on specific hardware vendors and the support package received from that vendor. Dell was the vendor of choice for two of the schools represented, partly due to the quality of the equipment and also due to better support choices from Dell. For one school, these support choices included giving the school loaner notebook PCs, while for another school, it included setting up a local agent to provide technical support. Another issue raised concerned web site development. One question was whether law schools have a person(s) on-hand to develop web sites. A second question was whether all pages on a university site had to have the same look and feel of all the other pages on the university's site. Almost all of the schools in attendance reported that pages had to conform to a particular look and feel at some level. The level, i.e., all pages on the university site vs. certain pages on a department site, varied.

The discussion on web sites gave rise to the second question of our survey: what computer services librarians can do to participate in legal education at their schools. To this end, one school implemented an password-protected intranet site which hosted law school information including announcements, course syllabi, course assignments and chat groups. Other schools have used their web staff to assist faculty in creating course pages or posting exams to their web page.

We were unable to come up with a specific, doable project. We discussed a project that was raised last year, i.e., a template or path finder that all member institutions could use on their web sites to organize state legal resources. After some discussion, it was agreed that Findlaw and Cornell both provide this information in an organized way and the project ought not to be pursued. Another idea raised was the possibility that COSELL pursue a licensing agreement with WebZap - www.webzap.org. Developed by Colorado State Libraries, "ZAP ILL is a complete package which allows (your school) to offer a web - based ILL electronic request service to (the school's) users without handling any software and without doing any local maintenance." Some issues were raised about control and accounting of the materials and it was decided that the discussion could be continued on a listserv or discussion group.

For next year, perhaps just one or two issues could be raised and then developed into a COSELL project for that year. These pressing issues could be ascertained via discussion group or e-mail ahead of the conference. Also, it would be helpful to have an LCD projector, whiteboard, or flip chart to track discussion topics.