Faculty Publications Collection

One of the Law Library’s collection development goals is to acquire copies of all Valpo Law faculty publications. The library displays faculty publications on a rotating basis with other displays in the library display case. If you have an article or book published, please have a copy sent to Mary Persyn for the display.

Current Awareness Services

The Law Library offers the following current awareness resources and services for the law faculty. Please contact your library liaison if you need help using any these:

• We have print and electronic versions of United States Law Week as well as other publications of the Bureau of National Affairs (BNA), including Antitrust and Trade Regulation Report, Criminal Law Reporter, Family Law Reporter—Current Reports, Labor Relations Reporter/Labor & Employment Law Library, and Securities Regulation and Law Report. For online versions of these titles, go to http://www.bna.com/lawschool and click on CORE on the right side of the screen. You can access these titles from off campus if you have a password. Contact Mary Persyn if you need remote access to these titles.
• The Law Library offers SmartCILP, an e-mail service which prefilters the weekly Current Index to Legal Periodicals from the University of Washington Law Library. To use SmartCILP, you create a profile of subject headings and journals that interest you. SmartCILP responds with an e-mail message listing citations that fulfill your profile criteria and sorting them under the subject headings you have chosen. SmartCILP also allows you to view a journal’s table of contents. You can change your profile as your interests change. Contact your library liaison for help in setting up SmartCILP.
• Your library liaison can help you set up automatic searches to be run on a regular basis in either Westlaw Westclip or LexisNexis Eclipse. These searches can support your ongoing research or notify you when your work has been cited by other scholars.
• The Legal Information Institute website maintained by the Cornell University Law School offers e-mail bulletins designed to keep legal professionals current on the cases before the United States Supreme Court and the New York Court of Appeals and the decisions of these courts. To receive these bulletins, contact your library liaison or visit LII yourself at http://www.law.cornell.edu/.
• There are a number of listservs especially useful to law faculty. Your library liaison can show you how to subscribe to them, or you may browse the titles and subscribe yourself by visiting either http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/ or http://mail.abanet.org/archives/index.html.
• The Tarlton Law Library of the University of Texas at Austin posts law review tables of contents on their website: http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/tallons/content_search.html
• The Law Library publishes a web log or “blog” to keep faculty and students abreast of new sources of legal information, changes to existing sources, and developments within the library. You may access this blog at www.valpolawlibrary.blogspot.com.
• The Law Library will route books and periodicals to faculty. For routing of periodicals to which we currently subscribe, contact Noelle Raelson. When requesting that we order a new book or periodical, please let us know if you want it routed to you or if you simply want to be notified when it arrives.

Faculty Lounge

Each working day, a library staff member delivers copies of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor to the faculty lounge. The New York Review of Books, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Legal Affairs also come to the faculty lounge on their route through the law school.

Accessing Other Libraries in Indiana

The Law Library is a member of the Academic Libraries of Indiana, Inc. (ALI), an association of all 72 of Indiana’s academic libraries. Most ALI members allow faculty and students from other ALI institutions to borrow books on site if the faculty member or student possesses an ALI Reciprocal Borrowing Card. If you wish to visit another Indiana academic library and possibly borrow books, contact Mary Persyn to obtain an ALI borrowers card.

Accessing Law Libraries in the Chicago Area

The Law Library is also a member of the Chicago Legal Academic System (CLAS), which includes all the academic law libraries in Chicago as well as Notre Dame, Illinois, Northern Illinois, Marquette, and Wisconsin-Madison. Faculty from CLAS institutions can visit other CLAS libraries and use their collections. Borrowing rules differ from library to library. Contact the library that interests you for more information, or get in touch with Mary Persyn to arrange a visit.

Liaison Program

The library’s faculty liaison program has been instituted to insure regular, ongoing contact between the faculty and the library professional staff. Each faculty member is matched with a librarian liaison. The program is designed to be flexible to meet your requirements for library support. For example, your liaison can assist you with current awareness, online searches, and general reference services.

The liaison program is not intended to be the only means of interaction between the faculty and the library staff. Rather, it is an addition to the services we have offered in the past.

The liaison program is not meant to replace the use of research assistants by the faculty. We will be happy to help research assistants with problems that develop while they are working on your projects; however, due to other responsibilities, we are limited in the amount of time we can devote to any one research project.

A complete list of librarians and their assigned faculty members is available on our Law Librarian Faculty Liaisons page.

Research Assistants

At the beginning of each semester, the Law Library provides library orientation and training sessions for faculty research assistants. The sessions are designed to acquaint them with library procedures, to reinforce their research skills, and to improve the quality of assistance they provide to faculty. Contact Mary Persyn for further details.

Research assistants may check out reserve and noncirculating items for faculty in addition to circulating items. They are responsible for returning borrowed items in a timely manner.