Faculty Guide
Law Library Quick Contact Directory
Faculty Guide Contents
| Research Services | Instructional Support | Library Collection | Faculty Allowance |
| Current Awareness | Research Assistants | Information Services | Faculty Publications Database |
Detailed Contents
Research Services
The Law Library's skillful and proficient Research Librarians provide you and your students with the highest level of research and instructional support. Our services encompass individualized reference and research assistance, as well as formal classroom instruction sessions and creation of resource materials tailored to your specific needs.
Trained and experienced in many areas of legal, general, and subject specific research, the Research Librarians are here to help you with your immediate as well as long-term reference and research needs. Our familiarity with non-legal resources and relationships with subject specialists at the University Library are particularly valuable to help you with multi-disciplinary projects. Stop by the library, e-mail the Research Services staff or make an appointment with a Librarian to discuss your project. (CONTACT: Marie Rehmar ext. 6879)
Faculty Liaison Services
In addition to our regular Research Service, we offer a specialized program of research and reference assistance for our faculty. Upon request, we can designate a member of our Research/Instructional Team to assist you as your Law Library contact. This Faculty Liaison will provide current awareness services customized to your subject-specific areas of interest, serve as a referral contact for your students, assist you in developing research resources, work with your Research Assistant, and otherwise help you to take maximum advantage of our services. (CONTACT: Jan Novak ext. 6913)
Research Guides
Research Librarians can develop research guides on a wide variety of legal topics, focusing on print and electronic resources available to Cleveland-Marshall students. We post general guides on the Law Library's Web page, and can tailor a course specific research guide for you to use on your own course page or as a handout for your class. (CONTACT: Jan Novak ext. 6913)
Support for College of Law Conferences and Programs
The Research Librarians work collaboratively with faculty to provide research and bibliographic services supporting programs and conferences. Our services include compiling information on speakers, assisting to identify and/or locate articles for continuing education materials packets, as well as developing and preparing exhibits and displays to promote and complement the events and highlight additional resources. (CONTACT: Marie Rehmar ext. 6879)
LexisNexis & Westlaw Research Assistance
Research Librarians can assist you with LexisNexis or Westlaw search strategies, arrange training and refresher courses, as well as provide assistance and referrals for resolving equipment questions and problems. LexisNexis and Westlaw printers for Cleveland-Marshall faculty are located behind the Law Library Information Services Desk. If you choose the stand-alone printer option on Westlaw, or the Law Library faculty printer on Lexis/Nexus, your print requests will automatically be sent to one of these two printers. Law Library Information Services staff will then deliver your prints to your Cleveland-Marshall faculty mailbox. (Regarding LexisNexis and Westlaw services, CONTACT: Laura Ray ext. 6880 or Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894; regarding delivery of prints by Access Services personnel, CONTACT: Jessica Mathewson ext. 2250)
OhioLINK, Internet, & Other Electronic Research Assistance
Research Librarians can assist you with OhioLINK Research Database, general Web, and other electronic research search strategies and resources, as well as help you incorporate electronic resources into your classroom instruction. (CONTACT: Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894)
Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)
The Law Library's subscription to the CALI Library of Lessons encompasses over 600 lessons covering 32 legal education subject areas. Faculty and students can access CALI exercises from the Web at http://www2.cali.org, upon registering a personal password. If you have not yet accessed CALI via our Law School subscription, Click here for the authorization code and instructions. (CONTACT: Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894)
Educational Programming and Instruction
Research Lectures
The Law Library Research Librarians are uniquely qualified to present research lectures for your class. We discuss general and subject-specific legal research strategies and resources, highlighting both print and electronic resources. We can also work with you to develop assignments related to such research instruction. Some recent lectures offered include Administrative Law, Environmental Law, Labor Law, Legislative History, and Form/Transactional Materials. Please make arrangements early in your course planning to help ensure your desired schedule. (CONTACT: Laura Ray ext. 6880 or Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Course Web Pages
Research Librarians can help you develop course pages tailored to your specific class needs. A number of platforms for course pages, including TWEN, Blackboard, blogs and others can be discussed. (CONTACT: Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894 or Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Database and Internet Searching Instruction
Research Librarians can instruct you and your students in the effective and efficient use of LexisNexis, Westlaw, and OhioLINK research databases, as well as searching the Web. Please make arrangements early in your course planning to help ensure your desired schedule. (CONTACT: Laura Ray ext. 6880 or Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894)
Educational Technology
Reference Librarians provide student group instructional sessions in the use of PowerPoint and other educational software. Please make arrangements early in your course planning to help ensure your desired schedule. We also provide individualized faculty instructional sessions in the use of PowerPoint, as well as advise on the use of audiovisual and Web-based materials to enhance the learning process. Faculty interested in learning about the educational applications of Web 2.0 technology are also welcome to contact us. (CONTACT: Laura Ray ext. 6880 or Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894)
Training Labs
Adjacent to the main Library PC Lab, we have 2 Training Labs to facilitate your class electronic instructional needs. Each Lab is equipped with 15 workstations and a data projector. Please note that Training Labs cannot be reserved during Reading and Exam Weeks. (CONTACT: Laura Ray ext. 6880)
Library Orientation and Tours
Research Librarians offer individual or group orientations and tours of the Law Library for you, your Research assistant, your class, or your visitors. Tours can provide brief overviews of the collection and services or more specialized focus on particular topics or materials. Group tours are not scheduled during Reading or Exam Weeks and we ask that groups not exceed 15 people per tour. (CONTACT: Laura Ray ext. 6880)
Current Awareness Services
SmartCILP and Custom Current Contents
SmartCILP is a customized email service for Current Index to Legal Periodicals, with direct links to articles in LexisNexis and Westlaw. Customizing your SmartCILP email allows you to focus on only those areas of law that are of interest to you for your research and teaching. To sign up for SmartCILP, you will need an institution authorization code. Please contact Amy Burchfield at 687-6885 or the information services staff for the code.
You may also receive Custom Current Contents, our in-house created supplement, covering those journals owned by the Law Library that are not indexed in CILP. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Monthly Acquisitions List
The Monthly Acquisitions List contains descriptions and call numbers of recently received and cataloged items and is available online. We notify faculty via email when we post a new list. Faculty can request books via the Web page. We will sign the books out to you and deliver them to your faculty mailbox. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Faculty Research Interests
You are invited to participate in our faculty research interests inventory if you wish to be informed of new developments and publications in your research interest areas. We assign a Research Librarian liaison to monitor your designated subject areas as well as work with you or your research assistant to develop a current awareness plan. (CONTACT: Kevin Garewal ext. 7393 or Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Blog
The CM Law Library Blog seeks to inform the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law about key legal education, research, practice, and law library news, with a particular focus on Cuyahoga County and Ohio as well as faculty research interests. Guest faculty bloggers are welcome to post on the CM Law Library Blog. (CONTACT: Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894)
Publications Routing
The Law Library provides regular and on-demand routing of publications to meet the current awareness needs of law faculty. Online newsletters such as Tax Notes Today or BNA's Daily Labor Report are available to law faculty through the PCs in their offices or through library staff. (CONTACT: Schuyler Cook ext. 7388 or James Pape ext. 7306)
Information Services
A highly trained and motivated customer service oriented staff operate the Information Services department. Information services staff are responsible for staffing the Information Services Desk, Document Delivery Services, OhioLINK and Interlibrary Loan, Stack Maintenance, Reserves, and Overdues. Central to the staff's mission is providing timely and professional service to the faculty of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Circulation Policies
Cleveland-Marshall Law faculty may check out circulating materials for one academic semester (15 weeks). Non-circulating materials may be checked out for 7 days. You may renew materials as long as another patron has not placed a hold on an item. All library materials in circulation are subject to recall. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Document Delivery Services
The Information Services staff handles Law faculty requests for both Law Library books and photocopies. Staff will retrieve the requested material and check it out to the Law faculty member, or photocopy the requested article, case or chapter of a larger item. The Law Library complies with copyright law when photocopying items. Items will be delivered to the Law faculty mailboxes located in the College of Law's Support Services Department. The Law Library strives for a 24 hour turnaround on all requests for items in the Law Library (with the exception of weekends and holidays). You may request materials by sending an email message to: faculty.services@law.csuohio.edu or by calling the Information Services Desk at ext. 2250.
If the Law Library does not own an item but the University Library does, we will send the request to the University Library's Document Delivery Plus Office for handling. To have the item delivered for your use, you must obtain and fill out an authorization form from the Faculty Services Department of the Law Library or the Document Delivery Plus Office of the University Library. If the item is available, the Document Delivery Plus Office will deliver it to the College of Law's Support Services.
If an item is not available at the Law Library or the University Library, we will make an OhioLINK request in your name. OhioLINK materials may take up to five business days to arrive. If an item is not available via OhioLINK, then the Law Library's Interlibrary Loan Department will handle your request. Items may take two weeks or more to be received. We will send a status report to you if the request is to be filled via Interlibrary Loan. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Course Reserve
Course reserve items are any materials requested by faculty to be put on reserve for a specific class. Course reserve materials may come from the Law Library collection, personal collections of the law faculty (which will be returned at the end of the semester), items from other libraries (the lending library's due date may not allow for a full-semester use) or photocopies of cases, articles, or chapters of larger items.
Course Reserves can be online via the Law Library's Web site. Whether and which course reserve materials to post online is at the discretion of the individual professor. Online Course Reserves are password-protected and are only accessible to Cleveland-Marshall faculty, staff and students. Use your normal PC login and password to access the page. Course reserve materials can also be in hard copy to check out from the Information Services desk for a two hour period. The Law Library complies with copyright law when photocopying items.
A member of the Information Services staff will contact each member of the Law faculty before the semester begins to get a list of items to be put on course reserve. Course reserve materials are taken off reserve at the end of the semester and returned to the library shelves and/or to the Law Faculty member’s mailbox. (CONTACT: Jessica Mathewson ext. 2250)
General Reserve
The general Reserve Room collection contains items selected by library staff because of their high use or importance to the collection. Items circulated to faculty from the reserve collection are restricted to a 7 day loan period.
SCHOLAR, OhioLINK and Interlibrary Loan
SCHOLAR is Cleveland State University's online catalog, including both the Law Library and University Library holdings. OhioLINK, the Ohio Library and Information Network, is the library consortia network created by the Ohio Board of Regents to increase availability of information resources to faculty, students, and staff at Ohio's state institutions of higher education. OhioLINK is accessed via the Web, from the library PCs, your office computer, or other Internet-connected computer. If SCHOLAR does not show available copies of a desired title, you can search the combined OhioLINK Central Catalog for that title.
The OhioLINK Central Catalog includes over 12 million items held by its member libraries (i.e., Ohio's state universities, the State Library of Ohio, some private universities and colleges, such as Case Western Reserve University, many community colleges, and Cuyahoga County Public Library). If a circulating item is available, follow the steps indicated on the screens to request that it be sent to you here at the Law Library. Delivery for these materials generally takes two to three workdays. OhioLINK items circulate for a period of three weeks, and may be renewed up to four times, subject to other requests. Please note that OhioLINK charges non-negotiable overdue fees of $.50 per day, as well as replacement and billing and processing fees.
OhioLINK also provides access to a wide variety of research databases. Among these are WorldCat, containing holdings for libraries throughout the U.S. and abroad, PsycInfo, and Medline. (For OhioLINK borrowing requests CONTACT: Tom Hurray 523-7396 or Jessica Mathewson ext. 2450; for assistance searching OhioLINK research databases CONTACT: Laura Ray ext. 6880 or Sue Altmeyer ext. 4894)
Materials not owned by the Law Library, the University Library, or an OhioLINK library may be requested through Interlibrary Loan. Request forms are available at the Law Library Information Services Desk or you may request materials via the Law Library’s Interlibrary Loan Web site. Non OhioLINK Interlibrary Loans may take two weeks or more to arrive. The lending library establishes due dates for Interlibrary Loan items and these must be strictly observed in order to maintain our Interlibrary Loan relationships. If you wish to use an item for a longer period of time, we can request a renewal of that item in advance of the due date, but granting a renewal is at the discretion of the lending library. Overdue fines and/or replacement costs may be passed on to the law faculty member. (CONTACT: Tom Hurray ext. 7396 or Jessica Mathewson ext. 2450)
Law School Exams
The College of Law's Administrative Office sends law exams to the Law Library at the end of each semester. With the faculty member’s permission, we place these exams online, accessible only to Cleveland-Marshall College of Law faculty, staff, and students. We also bind the exams and put them on reserve for 10 years for law student review. Older exams are shelved in the library's stacks. If you do not wish to have your exams placed on reserve you must let the College of Law's Administrative Office know. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Course Evaluations
The College of Law's Administrative Office sends course evaluations to the Law Library at the end of each semester. We bind these evaluations and keep them on reserve for 5 years for law student review. Older evaluations are shelved in the library's stacks. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Audiovisual Viewing Room
The Law Library's AV viewing room may be used by your students to view class related materials. Groups or individuals are welcome to use the room depending on availability. The room is equipped with DVD players and VCRs. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Special Services for Faculty Research Assistants
Legal Research Skills and Resources
Research Librarians provide library orientation and research instruction sessions for Law faculty research assistants. The sessions acquaint research assistants with library procedures and help sharpen their research skills. (CONTACT: Laura Ray ext 6880 or Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Special Borrowing Privileges
Research assistants may check out reserve and non-circulating items for two days that are needed by Law faculty or to be copied by Support Services. To confer such borrowing privileges on your research assistant, you must provide authorization to the Access Services Department. The research assistant is responsible for the item's return. This privilege should not be used for the research assistant's personal or school work. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885).
Law Faculty Copy Card
We provide a copy card at the Information Services Desk for research assistants and Law faculty use. This card is signed out to a research assistant to photocopy materials for a faculty member. The research assistant must present a CSU ID card in order to use the copy card. When the copy card is returned, we record the amount used and return the ID to the research assistant. The card is to be used only by the research assistant for law faculty photocopying, not for personal copying. The copy card amount is charged back to the faculty photocopy account maintained by the College's Administrative Office. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Lab Printing Privileges
Upon request from the faculty member, we will add 200 pages to the research assistant's Law Library Lab printing account. These additional pages are for printing requests made by the research assistant's faculty member. (CONTACT: Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
Our Collection
The Cleveland-Marshall College of Law Library is the second largest law library in Ohio. The library collection consists of over 500,000 bound and microform volumes and electronic subscriptions providing access to all published reports of United States federal courts, statutes from all fifty states, all available codified federal and some state administrative rules and regulations, as well as periodicals, treatises, and other Anglo-American legal materials. The Library is also a United States federal government documents selective depository. The collection grows at approximately 12,000 volumes per year. The Law Library subscribes to more than 70 electronic journals and provides access to roughly 3000 additional journals and documents titles online through our OhioLINK membership and government documents depository program. (CONTACT: Kevin Garewal 523-7393 or Jan Novak ext. 6913)
Reference Collection
We select materials for our Reference collection to help ensure that highest use materials are centrally located adjacent to the Information Services desk. The Reference Collection includes essential federal and Ohio primary and secondary materials, as well as selected ready reference titles such as dictionaries, directories, indexes and encyclopedias.
Reserve Collection
The Reserve collection supports the College of Law curriculum and helps ensure that materials are always available when needed for course work. The Reserve collection includes non-circulating copies of hornbooks, nutshells and other study aids, faculty designated course reserve materials drawn from the library collection or provided by the faculty member, bound volumes of course examinations, current faculty evaluations, current issues of periodicals and newspapers, unbound or current binders from selected high use looseleaf services and reporters, selected high usage Ohio practice materials, as well as selected treatises which are consistently referenced in multiple areas of the curriculum and designated by faculty or library staff as requiring reserve status to ensure their availability.
Ohio Room
The Ohio collection includes all current and retrospective Ohio legal primary and secondary materials, Ohio practice materials, and materials on Ohio state and local politics and government. The purpose of this collection is to provide students with access to a comprehensive working collection of Ohio practice materials and support research on state legal issues. Selected superseded secondary sources in this collection may circulate. Some duplication of resources in the Reference and Reserve collections is necessary to support patron demand and curriculum needs.
Professional and Study Skills Collection
This collection assists students master fundamental legal concepts and practice skills. This collection has two major components: (a) materials and resources on research and writing texts, law exam and bar exam preparation guides and sample tests, study skills materials, career materials, and texts on how to set up and manage a legal practice; and (b) circulating copies of study aides and faculty-donated casebooks with particular emphasis on substantive areas covered by the Ohio bar examination. The Professional and Study Skills Collection is located in room AO66 in the Library.
Archives and Special Collections
We place publications of the College of Law, including archival materials such as programs and brochures, faculty publications, and College of Law student publications, in the Archives and Special Collections Room. Most materials housed here are identified in SCHOLAR or the faculty publications database. Materials are kept at a controlled temperature at all times and must be used in the reading room; they may not leave the room without special permission. Additionally, the Law Library has accumulated some valuable and rare materials through donations, transferring materials from the general collection when appropriate, and by acquisition. Subject matter is primarily Ohio legal history. (CONTACT: Kevin Garewal 523-7393)
Government Documents
The Law Library selects government documents to support the subject areas of administrative and judicial law, as well as legislative and legal-related topics addressed by a variety of government agencies. (CONTACT: Schuyler Cook ext. 7388)
Casual Reading
A sampling of popular fiction and non-fiction that has some relationship to the legal profession, as well as a limited collection of legal and general interest periodicals and newspapers, are housed in the Casual Reading Collection.
Faculty Lounge
The Faculty Lounge is located on the first floor of the Law School. The Law Library provides daily newspapers, law and business related periodicals, and law reviews for faculty review in the Faculty Lounge.
Book Purchase Requests / Faculty Allowance Stipend
Law faculty wishing to request a specific item not currently owned by the Law Library to be added to the collection may contact Kevin Garewal (523-7393).
Each full-time law faculty member has an annual library stipend of $500.00 for the academic year beginning on July 1 and ending June 30. Materials purchased from the stipend are kept in faculty members' offices. Titles can include print, electronic texts or other non-print media. (CONTACT: Kevin Garewal 523-7393)
Faculty Publications Collection and Database
Designed to facilitate access to our faculty's scholarship, the Faculty Publications Database provides citations to faculty writings, locations within the Law Library or University Library collections, and links to full text wherever possible. The database is searchable by author, publication type, date, subject and keyword.
The Law Library strives to acquire copies of all publications by Cleveland-Marshall College of Law faculty. We encourage donations. Recent faculty publications are added to the faculty publications database, displayed in the Law Library and also used in the University Library annual publications display. Publications not cataloged in the regular collection are maintained in a Faculty Publications file in the Library’s Special Collections room. (CONTACT: Jan Novak ext. 6913 or Amy Burchfield ext. 6885)
revised June 2008 (aeb)