Showcase Your Great Ideas
Always a popular feature at our AALL Annual Meeting, posters are on display in the exhibit hall throughout the entirety of the Annual Meeting.
Additional information will be available in 2025. Please contact annualmeeting@aall.org if you have any questions.
SUBMISSION FORM
The deadline to submit a poster session idea has passed.
RESOURCES
-
Read the 2024 Poster Sessions Professionalism + Leadership at Every Level
Promoting Well-being Through Mindfulness: How the AALL Mindfulness Caucus Can Help (1)
We have more reason that ever to promote mindfulness in our law libraries, whether academic, firm, or government. This poster highlights the many resources available from the AALL Mindfulness Caucus. We can help you learn about mindfulness, whether for yourself as an individual, or to start a program at your institution. Several organizations now promote mindfulness as a way to promote well-being practices in the legal profession, including the Institute for Well-Being in Law and the Mindfulness in Law Society. The ABA’s Standards and Rules of Procedure for Approval of Law Schools now contain specific well-being language. A mindfulness program can help law students establish a healthy well-being practice from the beginning of their legal careers.
Heather J. Simmons: Associate Director for Instruction & Access Services, University of Georgia
Research + Analysis
Fifty Shade$ of Green: The Many Ways to Fund a Public Law Library (2)
Public law libraries are leaders in supporting Access to Justice. But who supports public law libraries? Financial support for public law libraries is rarely certain or predictable; funding mechanisms vary from state to state and sometimes even among counties within a state. It is no surprise that understanding how public law libraries are funded is a chaotic and confusing task. The County Law Library Funding Task Force, created by GLL-SIS in 2023, is attempting to identify and analyze various forms of funding for public law libraries throughout the country. Once collected, we will make the data and analysis available to everyone who needs an authoritative resource pertaining to public law library funding. We hope library supporters will use this information to innovate and transform public libraries through creative funding models for public law libraries. This poster will highlight several results of our research so far and encourage visitors to add their own information.
The poster will address:
1. Types of funding used to fund public libraries
2. Alternative sources of support
3. Typical challenges to funding models:-
-
- Unpredictability (filing fees, stock market)
- Questions of equity (ethics of filing fees)
- Time needed to advocate for funding (lobbying legislature, marketing efforts)
-
This display will also provide space for visitors to add their funding stories and experiences to our collection. All responses, reactions and comments will be included in our information repository. A final report of the Task Force will be completed in 2025.
Karen Westwood: Law Library Director, Hennepin County Law Library
Pauline Afuso: Public Services Librarian, Bernard E. Witkin Alameda County Law LibraryFine-Tuning Pre-Trained Large Language Models to Identify Jim Crow Laws in Virginia (3)
Can machine learning identify Jim Crow laws within other laws passed in a state? The Modeling a Racial Caste System (MRCS) project at the University of Virginia Library and Law Library is a collections as data and machine learning project made possible by a sub-award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries’ project, On the Books: Jim Crow and Algorithms of Resistance, which was funded by the Mellon Foundation. The team created a plain text corpus of Virginia session laws and utilized machine learning techniques to discover Jim Crow laws passed between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement (1865-1967). Disciplinary scholars on the MRCS team created a training set of laws labeled as either “Jim Crow” or “Not Jim Crow.”
This poster highlights the project’s achievements, including the creation of the first Jim Crow racism-related and legislation language finetuned Large Language Model (LLM) for text classification, finetuned from the DistilBERT model. The finetuned DistilBERT model achieved .99 accuracy and F1 scores, representing a significant leap from the earlier model’s accuracy of .87. The corpus of Virginia Laws was processed from chapter level to sentence level for analysis because of the inconsistencies in chapter length. Classification with the fine-tuned model predicted 30,814 Jim Crow sentences within the corpus of 446,000 sentences. Using a deduping program, the 30,814 predicted Jim Crow sentences were reduced to 13,533 sentences. Disciplinary scholars on the MRCS team are currently working on a manual review of the 13,533 and intend to aggregate the results back to the chapter level. The project will publish the data on the UVA Law Library Website, providing users with two corpora: one of all Virginia laws passed during the period of study and a second of the Jim Crow laws identified by the model and confirmed by scholars.
Tolu Odukoya: University of Virginia
Visualizing Legal Insight with Power BI (4)
Power BI, a business analytics tool by Microsoft, can be utilized by law librarians to enhance their data management and analysis capabilities. In my current position, I manage vast amounts of legal information and ensure that it is accessible, accurate, and understandable. This poster will display insightful dashboards and reports Power BI can create. This tool enables more efficient legal research trends, resource utilization, and collection development tracking. I want to show others how I have used the tool to inspire others then to do the same! Power BI’s data connectivity features allow us to integrate data from various sources, including legal databases, library management systems, and external datasets, providing a comprehensive information view. The tool’s collaborative features also facilitate better communication and decision-making within legal teams. By leveraging Power BI, we can provide more strategic and confidence-inspiring insights, improve operational efficiency, and support informed decision-making in legal practices.
Victoria Swindle: Library Technology Specialist, Steptoe & Johnson PLLC
Women in Baseball: Inclusion & Equity at the Plate (5)
“Girls excel at basketball, golf and tennis and there is no logical reason why they shouldn’t play baseball. …Baseball is not a game of strength; hitting is not strength. The game needs a special kind of talent, thinking and timing. Some women, as well as some men, qualify in that respect.” Hank Aaron, stated when he was vice president with the Atlanta Braves.
Since its 19th-century beginnings in the United States, women have been involved with baseball at many levels. However, prejudices, biases, outright bans and voiding of contracts prevented girls from playing Little League Baseball and women from playing Major League Baseball (MLB). Even the promise of the 1972 passage of Title IX evolved into a “separate but equal” understanding that girls play softball and boys play baseball. Expectations rose again with the 2009 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) ruling that baseball and softball are two different sports, and a student-athlete could participate on either a softball or baseball league. But the current NCAA “Guide for the College-Bound Student- Athlete” still lists baseball under Men’s sports and softball under Women’s sports.
This poster will review key historical legal developments concerning girls and women and baseball, such as the 1974 National Organization for Women v Little League Baseball case and Congressional revision of the incorporation of Little League Baseball. The poster will also highlight women who have persevered to become baseball writers, MLB announcers, umpires, front office executives, team managers, and coaches as well as NCAA baseball players and MLB partner league baseball players.
Laura Ray: Outreach & Instructional Services Librarian, Cleveland State University College of Law
Teaching + Training
A Time Keeping Exercise for Law Students Using Excel (6)
John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”.
How do Law students plan and spend their time? The Time Keeping Exercise was created to help our Lawyers as Leaders students find out. This poster will discuss how the Library got involved to bring to life the professor’s vision of a standardized time keeping system complete with data analysis and a respect for student privacy. Learn how we created our Excel Spreadsheet, the problems encountered, solutions discovered, and the improvements made though five years of the Time Keeping Exercise. Additionally, the Time Keeping Exercise is an example of non-traditional Library service put together by a non-teaching member of the Library staff.
Jennifer Dubetz: Head of Public Access Services, West Virginia University College of Law
Cobbling Together a Law Librarianship Program for the Non-JD (7)
There has been lots of discussion on preparing to enter the profession as well as the lack of entry level talent. But, what if you have the talent (and interest) but no formal law librarianship program at the ready? And no JD? This poster will explain how I designed and pursued my own training – from boots on the ground to a curated legal information course. This training took place over four semesters, and had four main phases. First, I had to move my focus as a Graduate Assistant away from central campus to the law library. I immersed myself in the work of the law library and made connections with librarians in the field. The second phase, finding a mentor, led to the third phase, creating an independent legal research class. All this experience would eventually lead to the fourth phase, completing practical work in the law library. While it’s difficult to compare this experience to a structured curriculum, it has nevertheless given me a solid basis in legal research, familiarity with academic and private law libraries as well as an introduction to the local and national associations.
Rachael Monroe: Wayne State University School of Library and Information Science
StrAIght From the Horse’s Mouth: Law Students’ Thoughts on AI’s First Semester in Law School (8)
This poster is a format to share the results of two surveys on legal AI tools completed by students in an advanced legal research class. The students’ concerns about AI tools, plans for using those tools in the future, and the state of their preexisting knowledge of legal AI may be of interest to educators considering covering legal research using AI tools in a class setting this fall.
Dan Donahue: Reference Librarian, Georgetown University Law Library
Itunu Sofidiya: Director of RISE and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown UniversityMarketing + Outreach
DEI Resources Provided by ORALL Members & Their Organizations (9)
The Ohio Regional Association of Law Libraries (ORALL) Member Resources page includes a bibliography of diversity, equity, and inclusion resources provided by ORALL members and their organizations. Created by members of the ORALL Diversity & Inclusion Committee, the bibliography recognizes the myriad ways ORALL members and their organizations provide access to DEI resources and engage in DEI activities. This poster will describe how the ORALL D&I Committee created the bibliography from a review of ORALL members’ organizational websites. The poster will also highlight different types of DEI resources provided by ORALL members and their libraries, firms, and institutions.
Laura Ray: Outreach & Instructional Services Librarian, Cleveland State University College of Law
Leveraging Patron Feedback for Change (10)
As recently appointed librarians joining a team, we identified opportunities to change and grow in positive ways, particularly with the physical space around the library service desk. Leveraging the responses from our annual patron survey enabled us to gain the necessary buy-in for implementing changes. Working together, alongside the facilities team, we utilized low-cost modifications for high impact. The renewed space included the replacement of an underutilized bookcase with repurposed comfortable seating, the addition of accessibility elements to the doors, the removal of outdated technology, and the strategic rearrangement of existing furniture to create a more open and welcoming environment.
Molly Igo: Assistant Librarian for Technical Services, University of Massachusetts- Dartmouth School of Law
Rebecca Valentine: Associate Law Librarian, University of Massachusetts- Dartmouth School of LawThe National Law Library Fellows Program: Expanding the Universe of Law Librarianship (11)
Despite being a rewarding career, law librarianship is having trouble attracting enough qualified candidates to fill positions. The Daniel F. Cracchiolo Library at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law is implementing the National Law Library Fellows Program, an innovative educational fellowship that aims to enhance access to and diversity of the legal information profession. Through this program, law libraries across the country can hire a student in the University of Arizona’s online Masters in Library and Information Science (MLIS) to work in-person at their libraries as a Law Library Fellow. This program can reduce the financial barriers to entering the legal information profession, provide an instant network for the Fellow, raise awareness of law librarianship as a rewarding career, and foster the education of the next generation of law librarians.
Jennifer Bedier: Law Library Fellows Program Manager; Professor of Practice, University of Arizona College of Law Library
Teresa Miguel-Stearns: Associate Dean & Director, University of Arizona College of Law LibraryUsing an Anniversary Celebration to Collaborate with Our Community (12)
The Minnesota Court of Appeals was created through constitutional amendment in 1982. The first six members of the court were sworn in on November 3, 1983. Last year was the 40th Anniversary of the court’s creation and the staff of the Minnesota State Law Library saw this as an excellent opportunity to build connections to the court and other members of the legal profession. As we prepared to celebrate the anniversary, library staff participated in large group and committee meetings with members of the court and legal professionals. The library used donations of archival materials from the court and materials already in our collection to create three different exhibits: an online exhibit, a display case exhibit in the library, and a travelling exhibit that could be viewed at in-person gatherings. This poster will outline the process we took to create the three exhibits and how we tailored each one to the setting.
Sarah Larsen: Outreach Librarian, Minnesota State Law Library
Erica Nutzman: Head of Technical Services, Minnesota State Law LibraryWe Value Your Feedback! : Conducting a Student Survey in 2024 (13)
Since 2004, the Law Library has conducted a biennial survey of law students during the spring semester.* The 2024 survey was unlike its predecessors in many ways. New library staff members contributed to the formulation of the survey questions. New perspectives and experiences led to a complete overhaul of previously used questions. The survey was administered for the first time using Qualtrics, the survey platform recently adopted by the University. Qualtrics allowed for new survey elements, including a heatmap of the library’s website. Once the survey ended, the responses were featured in a student outreach event. Posters at the event provided updates on how the library was addressing the feedback received. This poster will feature how questions were formulated and organized, the methods used to reach students for maximum feedback, and how the library shared survey results with students. The poster will give participants the opportunity to experience a mobile version of a Qualtrics survey.
*The 2020 biennial student survey was not conducted due to the pandemic.
Melissa Kreiling: Reference Librarian, Catholic University of America
Kristina Martinez: Catholic University of America -
-
Frequently Asked Questions 1. What is a poster session? A poster session is a visual forum for presenters to highlight their libraries and to share their successful ideas with colleagues by presenting a research study, a practical problem-solving effort, or an innovative library program. These sessions are suitable for a presentation of topics that may not be meaty enough for an entire paper or formal presentation and allow for works in progress. Posters combine text and graphics to present information in a clear, visual manner, and allow conference participants to become quickly and easily acquainted with the topic on their own.
2. What topics are appropriate? A poster can cover any topic related to law libraries and legal information. Example topics would be a description of an innovative library program, a discussion of classroom techniques, or findings from a research project. They are not vendor sponsored advertisements, although independent product discussions and analysis are welcome.
3. What should poster session proposals include? The proposal must include a title, name(s) of the creator(s), and an abstract of 50–200 words describing the information to be presented in the poster. As with the conference educational programming, posters must be categorized into one or two content areas, and support AALL’s Body of Knowledge or the Strategic Plan.
4. If my poster is accepted, what do I have to do? Create an engaging visual display that explains your topic to be affixed to a free-standing board. You will have one side of an 8 ft x 4 ft board for your display; usable space is 7’6″ ft wide by 3’8″ ft tall. Pushpins will be provided to affix the displays. Please note you are responsible for printing and shipping costs. Plan to set up your poster between 9:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m. CST on Saturday, July 20. Poster creators and co-creators will need to be present during the poster session presentation period on Tuesday, July 23 from 9:45 a.m.–11:15 a.m. CST to answer questions and discuss your poster. You must remove your display once the exhibit hall closes on Tuesday at noon.
5. Are there any available resources for creating posters? Yes, please review these two resources as well as the submissions from last year’s Annual Meeting & Conference below.