University of Chicago Law School: The Electronic Projects Blog

Law Library Launches New Research Guides Page

The D'Angelo Law Library is excited to announce a new look for the Research Guides page on our website. We hope that the new design makes it easier for users to access relevant guides when conducting their research.  Reference librarians have authored these guides  to provide an overview of useful resources for a variety of legal topics. If you would like to suggest a new topic for a research guide or if you have any other questions or suggestions, please contact the reference department using Ask a Law Librarian. Also, feel free to comment below.

Wikis in the Law School Classroom

Hillary Burgess, an adjunct prof at Rutgers School of Law, has posted a very interesting article on the Law School Innovation blog about the ways that she uses wiki software in the legal classroom.

If you teach a class at the University of Chicago, Chalk has a wiki tool (check out the documentation for help, or contact Aaron Rester at 702-4782.

University Launches the Copyright Information Center

The following excerpt of an NSIT announcement may be of interest to the Law School community from both personal and academic angles:

The University of Chicago Library, NSIT, the Provost's Office, and the Office of the Legal Counsel have collaborated to launch the Copyright Information Center. The main goal of the Copyright Information Center is to inform the University community about copyright regulations in general and how they relate to the University more specifically. The website describes how copyright regulations may affect the type of media that professors use or distribute in class, what students can copy or share with other students, and how to go about obtaining permission to use materials for which you do not own the copyright. You can also learn about exceptions to copyright regulations that apply specifically to materials used for educational purposes.

Blog News

Two quick items regarding Law School blogs:

1) The Faculty Blog is one of half a dozen blogs featured on Typepad's "Tour of Chicago" on their Everything Typepad blog They write:

"Lofty legal issues are discussed and debated by the faculty at the University of Chicago Law School on their TypePad blog. Plenty of lively discussion, thinking, and research take place on a wide variety of legal topics, from whether the current Supreme Court session will usher in a paradigm shift, to whether liberals should start being originalists."

2) The Law School now has a new "Blogs" page on its website. You'll be able to easily find and keep track of the various blogs (and podcasts) affiliated with the Law School. The page shows the five most recent items posted to each blog, as well as links to visit its site and subscribe to its feed.

In Your Face(book)

One of the ideas we've been kicking around here in the Communications department is establishing a presence for the Law School on Facebook. As you may have heard, institutions of higher education have recently begun taking the plunge into using social networking sites, mostly as an admissions tool.  With over 42 million registered users (according to Wikipedia) it certainly seems as though Facebook is here to stay, and that universities ignore it at their peril.

Why might we want to dip our toes into the social networking waters, and what might it look like if we did?

1) Quite a few of our students are already on Facebook. There are about half a dozen Chicago Law School-related groups there, and an informal survey of our students indicates that many of them log into their accounts at least several times per week. A Law School Facebook presence could thus be a way to facilitate communication between the Law School and our current students, and between the students themselves. For example, it would be an easy way to get the word out about upcoming events.

2) It would provide a means for prospective students to "meet" current students and get a taste of the Chicago Law experience.

3) It's another way to distribute some of the great content we produce via the Faculty Blog and Podcast and get the word out about the fascinating work our faculty is doing.

4) It would allow  students (and the School itself) to keep in touch even after graduation.

The model that would seem to work best for these goals would be to establish a Facebook "group" for the entire Law School. It could tie together the various smaller groups (for individual classes, etc.) that currently exist and make it easier for students, prospective students, and alums to connect with each other. It would not reinvent the wheel, but rather be a means of supplementing already existing means of communication. And of course, it would be completely voluntary -- students could decide on their own whether to join the group or not.

So -- what do you think? Is this something that the Law School should pursue? 

Website Redesign: Episode I

One of the main reasons this blog was started is because the Law School is preparing to overhaul its website. We want to keep the Law School community informed about the process as well as get your feedback, so we can ensure that the new site provides a great user experience to each of the diverse audiences that use our site.

The Process

The first step in the process will be replacing the current website's content management system, ("CMS") the tool that allows our staff to create and edit webpages (if you're geeky enough to care, we'll be moving from a custom-built CMS to one built on Drupal, an opensource CMS platform). The changes resulting from this move won't be immediately obvious to the casual user of the Law School website -- if the website was a car, we'd basically be swapping out the engine and the transmission while leaving the rest of the car untouched -- but it will make a big difference in the performance of the website and the flexibility that it provides our staff in creating and distributing content. It should also make things like scheduling and displaying events on the website's calendar much easier as well. We hope to have this step completed by the middle of winter quarter, but please note: reworking a website the size of the Law School's is a huge job, and we can never fully predict what problems might arise in the course of it, so all time frames described in this post should be taken as approximate. Hey, it wouldn't be a law school without some disclaimers, now would it?

The second step of the redesign will be an overhauling of the site's information architecture (the way it is organized) and its "look-and-feel," to update its design and make it as easy as possible to find the information that you need. This will be sort of like giving the car a new paint job and a new dashboard, and we hope to have the process completed by the beginning of the 2008-9 school year.

The third step will be developing additional functionality as the need arises. In this day and age, websites are never really "finished," as new needs constantly arise for both users and content creators. Our new, more flexible CMS will allow us to add in new "modules" to address these needs as they crop up. For example, we hope to provide student organizations with a simple tool to update their websites without any knowledge of HTML. This process of expanding the site will continue throughout its life, or at least until people get tired of this whole "Internet" thing.

How You Can Help

If we're going to make this site useful for all involved, from prospective and current students to faculty, staff, and alumni, we need to hear from you. What features of the current site could you not live without? What do you wish would disappear? How can we the site better? What would make it worse? Please take about ten minutes to fill out this survey we've prepared. You can also leave suggestions in the comments  below.

Thanks for your help, and we look forward to working with you to create a great new website that truly reflects the excellent scholarship, community, and people of the University of Chicago Law School.