Session 1A
14.00 – 15.00 Parallel Session 1A
"KS and Tell : Harnessing Web 2.0 at the College of Law"
Tony Simmonds – College of Law
Following an MA at Loughborough University, Tony began his career at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies. This provided a thorough grounding in the theory and practice of law librarianship. He joined the College of Law in 1998, and is now Deputy Director in the Knowledge Services department. His special interests are designing legal research course materials; copyright advice; and harnessing the benefits of Web 2.0 technologies. He also sets policy and standards for College library services. From 2009, there will be seven College centres across England (Manchester being the newcomer!) Outside work, he enjoys theatre and walking in the Scottish hills.
Outline:
How to showcase valuable information resources? The problem isn’t new. But now we have to somehow grab attention and communicate among a generation accustomed to instant easy solutions, and sophisticated web content driven by clever marketing.
This year the College of Law Knowledge Services team were faced with overhauling our presentation of online resources. With costs of online services soaring, we looked for ways to maximise the use of buried content.
At the same time our interest in Web 2.0 tools grew. Conferences alerted us that law firms were beginning to use blogs and wikis as publication tools. How to realise that potential in vocational legal education?
We also wanted to find better ways to collaborate and communicate among dispersed teams at six College centres around England (seven from summer 2009, when we open in Manchester!)
So we dug into our traditional library skills to turn library webpages into something more exciting. We sent our e-Information Officer for Dreamweaver training and set up a wiki (of course!) to engineer our approach.
We all agreed to dare to experiment.
We’re now using blogs, wikis, Pageflakes, Delicious, Sharepoint, virtual classroom tools and designing interactive research guides, to communicate and collaborate with students and colleagues. None of this has been easy and some are still being evaluated. There have been false starts and frustrations. Lawyers are risk averse, and we ran up against cultural resistance in some areas. We will share how one organisation overcame locks and obstacles to harness the promise of Web 2.0.
