AALL 2007 Conference Sessions

I will report at greater length on the 2007 conference of the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) when I get home later this week.

Inh the meantime, I wanted to draw attention to 2 presentations I attended over the past 2 days.

Handouts are available on the website of the AALL.

Session C-5 ("Government Web Sites That Have Met the Challenge") provided an overview of what are considered some of the best official web sites in the U.S. according to criteria developed by the AALL's Access to Electronic Legal Information Committee.

The same very detailed criteria could be used to evaluate and select Canadian or any other official, governmental, or intergovernmental sites.

The Committee came up with core values for public information on government sites, divided into 5 areas:

• accessibility
• reliability
• official status
• comprehensiveness
• preservation

The Committee's website contains information about exemplary sites chosen by Committee members, the evaluation criteria, a bibliography on website design and evaluation issues, etc. A huge amount of work went into this project.

In the Session E-3 ("Globalization Moved My Cheese: Or, How Do I Find International Law?"), Jean Wenger of the Cook County Law Library went through the highlights of a massive and extremely useful bibliography (again, handouts available from the conference website), covering some of the differences between public international law, private international law and customary law, the players, the various document sources, resources available (guides, secondary sources, source documents such as treaties, decisions), research scenarios, ...

This was topped off by Mary Rumsey from the University of Minnesota who presented a number of actual research requests posted on various international law discussion lists, ranging from the easy-to-answer questions to some more convoluted ones. Her workbook is also in the dowloadable handouts.

I'll post again tomorrow.

Gotta run to a bloggers' get together, followed by a reception for "foreign" librarians (non-U.S.), then to a bash at the House of Blues, then off into the nightlife of New Orleans...