Faculty Support Services

Reference Service

Reference Service is designed to help answer short, well-defined questions quickly. All of the librarians share in reference desk duty and any of the librarians on duty can assist you. Hours vary by semester. For reference assistance call 501-916-5496.

Faculty Liaison Program

The Law Library has a Faculty Liaison Program to help you easily access the Library’s services. This program assigns one librarian as a liaison to each full-time faculty member. The liaison is that professor’s main point of contact with the Library. If you have any questions regarding a library service contact your liaison first. Even if your liaison does not provide the requested service herself, she will be able to forward your request to the appropriate person in the Library and help ensure you receive the service you need.

Faculty Liaison Assignments

Faculty Research Support

The Law Library, through its Faculty Liaison Program, provides Bowen faculty with legal and interdisciplinary research support for faculty teaching, scholarship, and service activities. Types of research support available include, among other activities: pulling, printing, copying, and organizing documents; cite checking; topical case and statutory research; performing literature reviews; and tracking legal issues.

Research projects are accepted on a first-come, first-serve basis. The timeline for completion of the projects depends on the nature and complexity of the project and how many other projects are already in the queue. Extensive projects that will take longer than 20 hours must be divided into smaller modules that can be completed in 20 hours or less. Each successive module of the larger request will be viewed as a new request and will be accommodated as time allows. The liaison has the discretion to prioritize rush projects if there is a clear need.

Generally, your liaison will provide the research support requested. However, she may refer projects to the Library Research Assistant (LRA), an upper-division law student supervised by Professor Melissa Serfass. As appropriate, she will contact you to ensure that the research results provided are satisfactory. You may contact her at any time to check on the status of a project. Any changes to an LRA project must be cleared through Professor Serfass.  No assignments will be given to the LRA during reading period or finals.

Direct all requests for research support to your liaison. Provide as much information as possible about the project, including the context and scope of the research and pending deadlines, as this will help the liaison better serve you. If it is not possible for the Library to complete the research project, either because of the scope of the project or because of time constraints, your liaison will let you know at the time the request is made.

Current Awareness

There are several current awareness services available to faculty. These services enable you to keep up with the latest journal articles, court decisions and developments in your areas of interest. Your liaison can help set up any of these resources.

CILP and SmartCILP

The Current Index to Legal Periodicals (CILP) is a weekly table of contents service. CILP indexes over 500 legal publications within 100 subject headings. Each issue contains complete tables of contents of all journals indexed. CILP is available 4-6 weeks before commercial legal periodical indexes. CILP is shelved in the faculty library.

SmartCILP, the electronic version of CILP, provides automated, personalized e-mail delivery of CILP. Personalize it by creating a profile tailored to your research interests. You can choose subjects or journals in your specific areas of interest, or you can select individual journals. Weekly e-mails contain citations to  journal articles on your chosen subjects or new tables of contents from your chosen journals. The e-mail contains built-in Westlaw, Lexis and HeinOnline links to articles.

Contact Professor Serfass for information on creating your profile or to obtain the authorization code.

HeinOnline is a collection of libraries including an in-depth collection of U.S. law reviews, the U.S. Code, C.F.R. and Federal Register. It also includes libraries containing the old English Reports, Canadian S. Ct. Reports, and U.S. state and federal session laws. All Hein content is delivered in PDF format and has the same pagination as the print publication. Creating a MyHein account will allow you to save searches and create alerts on journals. When new content is added to Hein, you will receive an email notification, with links to content, if your research is updated or if a journal has new content.

SSRN

The Library subscribes to the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN), a division of the Social Sciences Research Network. LSN publishes a wide range of law-related working papers and article drafts accepted for publication. Many of the articles are free. Some require a subscription.  If you would like access to any of the subscription LSN journals contact Professor Serfass.
Journal Routing

At your request the library will route periodicals and looseleaf report bulletins to you. Contact Professor Harry Lah to arrange to have materials routed. Please return routed materials to him.

Classroom Support

At your request and with sufficient notice, your liaison will prepare an in-class research presentation for the topic requested. Your liaison can also design a presentation and/or prepare a specialized bibliography of library resources and websites pertinent to a particular legal topic.

Purchases with Faculty Budget

If you wish to purchase materials from your faculty budget, the library can order materials for you. Please place requests through your liaison. We will place the order,  process the materials, and have the charges deducted from your budget. Materials purchased from your budget are the property of the law school, but will be kept by you and never retrieved for the use of other library users. We encourage faculty members to assist us in developing our library collection. If you wish to suggest a title for the library collection, please contact your liaison or Associate Dean Jessie W. Burchfield, Law Library director.

Faculty Publications Display Case

The library maintains a display case of faculty publications. It is located in the first floor hall, just past the stairs. To keep your section of the display case up-to-date notify Professor Woodmansee when you would like items added to or removed from the display case.