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Increasing the Promotion of Law Faculty Publishing

I ran across a program at the American Association of Law Libraries Annual Meeting about law libraries increasing the promotion of faculty scholarly impact.

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Made me think of using a law school’s aggregated publishing of its faculty – including faculty blogging – into one digital publication to promote faculty scholarship.

U.S. News, which ranks law schools, has abandoned their plans to use law review and law journal citations of tenured and tenure-tracked professors as a part of its law school ranking system.

As a result, law schools and faculty are free to demonstrate the impact of their scholarship in their own way.

But as the program description, ”Increasing Library Impact by Promoting Faculty Scholarly Impact,” makes clear, many law professors and law schools don’t know how to tell their story, or even what their story is. As information experts, some law librarians are helping faculty discover their impact and increase the visibility of their scholarship.

Librarians have already responded to the increase in citation-based scholarly impact rankings by increasing outreach to faculty, making connections in their institutions, and expanding their scholarly visibility programs.

One other possible way to showcase the faculty’s publishing would be to aggregate and curate the publishing in a digital magagazine/media center ala McGeorge Law Today (MLT) published by the University of the Pacific – McGeorge School of Law. It’s run on LexBlog’s Syndication Portal product.

MLT aggregates law professor and alumni legal blogs. But there is no reason the same tech platform could not be used to aggregate law review and law journal like content of professors. Assuming the content is open and free by the school to be published. (Maybe that is a big assumption – don’t know)

The site would kick out updates by email of additions to the site with links back to the site.

Another thought is to include legal blogs by academics in such sites. There are some excellent legal blogs being published by law professors – blogs and the publishing professors already with greater visibility than many professors writing for law reviews and journals.

Sure, I am mentioning a LexBlog platform, but its use is a savings of money for organizations looking to promote publishing of its people.

The speakers at this program were Amanda Watson of the University of Houston Law Center, Maggie Kiel Morse of Indiana University Maurer School of Law, Bonnie Shucha of the University of Wisconsin Law School, and Elizabeth Manriquez of the University of Wisconsin Law School.

Shucha did a nice summary of the program on Wisblawg.