This year the ALLA (WA) Committee was pleased to offer ALLA (WA) members Kate Hewit and Vidagdha Bennett bursaries to attend ALLA's first ever, and slightly delayed, virtual conference. We congratulate them both on their successful applications for the bursary.
As part of the bursary both Kate and Vidagdha have written a short blog post recapping their experience of the conference.
To help them write this piece, the ALLA (WA) provided the following questions as prompts:
- How did you find attending the conference virtually? What were the advantages and disadvantages? Would you been keen to attend a virtual conference again or prefer a face-to-face conference?
- Who was your favourite speaker / favourite session and why?
- What did you learn that you will find helpful in your current position?
- Did you meet anyone interesting in the breaks / virtual meeting rooms? What was your overall experience with these meeting rooms?
- What session would you recommend people go and re-watch on the conference portal? Why that session?
Kate Hewit
Digital & Information Literacy Librarian (Business & Law), Edith Cowan University
So good to (re)connect!
When the 2020 Canberra ALLA Conference moved online in 2021 it immediately made attending from WA a viable prospect for me, in terms of both distance and cost. The conference presented an ideal opportunity to connect with fellow Law Librarians across Australia. And after a year and a half of adapting to solely virtual meetings and online webinars, the Conference’s online setting seemed perfectly ‘normal’.
The program for 2021 was well planned and there were several presentations that proved both interesting and useful going forward. The sessions by the university Librarians were particularly relevant to my current role of course, so I enjoyed hearing about developments in legal research teaching, resources and graduate skills from Gillian, Jess and Steph (University of South Australia), Annette (Charles Sturt University), Heidi (Flinders University) and Paula (University of Adelaide). The work being undertaken to support Law students across the universities is impressive!
A number of ideas and technologies were discussed that integrate well in a university library setting, and aim to make teaching Law students more interactive and more effective. Software like H5P is being used to develop micro-resources, such as quizzes, for checking student understanding and identifying any gaps in learning. This software has been around for a while now and whilst we do have access, I hadn’t yet had time to get to grips with it - but now, the discussions at the conference have convinced me to look into this in more depth, teach myself how to use it, and learn how to integrate these micro-resources with existing library resources. There is additional scope to work with unit coordinators on incorporating the technology into curriculum content for key legal research foundation units to increase student engagement.
The presentations sparked new ideas for re-structuring Law library guides, particularly the legal research support pages, moving from a research resources focus to a research strategy-based approach, and addressed my thoughts on establishing a framework of capabilities for teaching legal research skills. This framework will support clearer scaffolding and review students’ attainment of those skills across the first, second and third years of study. One of the key contacts I made during the conference was with Annette Goodwin from Charles Sturt University, who raised many of these ideas in her session. We have since caught up to discuss some of the ideas further.
One topic I would like to have heard more on was emerging technologies in the legal sector, from the perspective of the impact of digital technologies on the sector and how academic libraries can support future graduates with their work preparedness skills. Shan Mukerjee from LexisNexis gave an insightful presentation on legal AI and the work being undertaken to identify and link legal concepts – thankfully reassuring us that the matter of applying ‘context’ will ensure lawyers won’t be out of work any time soon!
Alongside the main conference were an online meeting hub and an exhibitor/sponsor hub. The meeting hub was a great idea to facilitate connecting with other attendees; unfortunately, it didn’t seem to be well used. I chatted briefly with a few people, but they seemed to be mainly the event organisation team and some exhibitor staff, although as I was sitting at home alone, it was good to find someone to talk with 😊. The exhibitor/sponsor hub seemed to work well from a conference attendee perspective, and I was able to connect with the staff I wanted to meet.
Adding an element of gamification to the online conference through the collection of points for things like attending sessions, connecting or networking, posting questions etc., made the forum more engaging and did seem to encourage more interaction. This aspect of the platform worked well.
Overall, for me personally, the move online was a positive step, and I took away some great inspiration and ideas. I would certainly attend the conference online again if it were held in that format, or a hybrid format of in-person and online to allow attendees more flexibility.
It’s hard to recommend one particular session to go back and watch, so many of them contained great insights covering a range of topic areas, but if I had to recommend one session, I think it would be the Keynote address by Justice Stephen John Gageler AC (High Court of Australia), giving a thoroughly supportive commentary on the work of Law librarians and libraries.
Dr Vidagdha Bennett
Knowledge & Information Manager, Bennett + Co
Question One:
I found the ALLA Virtual Conference to have a very sophisticated portal with many easy to use features, including the ability to ask live questions, detailed information on each speaker, the capacity to take notes during the session, and countdown timing to the next session (which allowed attendees to schedule short breaks). There were also some features that I did not discover until the Conference was well underway. As a fun element, we were given points for attending various elements of the Conference, and afterwards the recordings were made available so that we could re-visit certain sessions. I feel that this is a very strong way forward for ALLA (and especially WA librarians), as it makes it possible for librarians around Australia to attend relevant sessions and at the same time attend to urgent requests back in the office. Possibly, the Virtual Exhibition was less successful. I did not attend that as I did not want to be placed under additional pressure from the commercial providers. An additional comment is that I found the choice of presenters was weighted towards university librarians and service providers, with only one session I could find that was given by the law librarian of a law firm (Freehills).
Question Two:
My favourite session was offered right at the very beginning of the conference by Her Honour Chief Justice Helen Murrell. I found her to be an extremely engaging and eloquent speaker at the height of her legal career. It was difficult to imagine that she will be retiring early next year. She is certainly an inspiring pioneer for women in the legal profession. Her talk promised a wonderful start to the Conference and her discussion about negative information was extremely relevant. Justice Murrell made the salient point that future law libraries need to be re-imagined as research and education services, with librarians as the primary researchers who are providing the service. She talked about “the daunting explosion of legal tools” and the need for “savvy researchers” to help lawyers navigate this vast amount of material. She also addressed the reduction in the size of print collections – a point that I hoped would be taken up and expanded upon by subsequent speakers -- and that the provision of a quiet space for reflection and study may also be outmoded.
Question Three:
I learnt that the universities are not willing to address difficult questions. I was especially keen to attend the seminar “The present moulds the future: what can we do now to develop future ready law graduates?” It was given by the Senior Client Services Librarian of Charles Sturt University. For me, that promised to be the most directly relevant session of the entire conference. During the live Q&A I asked the question: “What kinds of gaps in learning and research are being identified by students who secure places as clerks in commercial law firms for one or two days a week?” Two other attendees gave this question a thumbs up. Another attendee re-framed the question by asking: “Does the university gather feedback from graduates about if they think the needs of the practice are being met?” The speaker read the question and responded, laughingly, “I haven’t actually been out to survey them, so a law firm librarian might like to. I did have plans of doing a research project on that but I’m doing something else now.” For law firms, the gap between university studies and commercial practice is something we notice increasingly in our clerkship and graduate intake. But it was not addressed in this session or in any other. When I reported the lack of response to my question to the principals of our firm, they were equally shocked that no time had been allotted to assessing how ready law students are to enter the legal profession.
Question Four:
After Sue Yap’s sparkling and rapid-fire presentation, I attended her lively meeting room and also followed up with her afterwards. I did accept a Microsoft Teams invitation for a discussion from one online service provider. However, when I later informed them that this was on a WA Public Holiday, I did not receive any further follow up.
Question Five:
I do recommend Justice Stephen Gageler’s address. It provided a wonderful insight into the mind of His Honour and was underscored by his deep love of the law. Justice Gageler offered a number of very memorable statements and quotes, including a fascinating quote from Professor Simeon Baldwin from Yale University who compared law cases to the specimens collected by a natural scientist. Justice Gageler also disclosed that he threatened to tender his resignation as Solicitor-General of the Commonwealth if the Lionel Murphy Law Library were to be abolished. He felt that the library fostered a sense of stability and continuity – a remark that surely resonated with law librarians everywhere as we struggle to contain the diminishing footprint of our physical libraries.
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