Professional Edge: For Your Listening, Viewing, and Learning Pleasure

Professional organizations offer convenient webinars, podcasts, and videos for career development.
by April Schwartz

The career-long continuing education needs of law library professionals are often met with the help of professional organizations, namely, library, legal, and information technology organizations. In addition to their annual conferences at which colleagues and outside experts present essential educational programs, these organizations have begun to offer self-paced print tutorials on their Web sites and frequently offer online educational opportunities to meet the demands of their members.

Now, thanks to the popularity of continuing education via various media formats, these same organizations are adding podcasts, videos, and webinars to enliven the learning process. Seeing presentations by experts while hearing their voices is the next best thing to being there. Web video clips, audio, and online chat can be combined to allow interaction from the participants during a webinar. Recorded lectures can be archived for continuous access by the membership. Synchronous learning is often supplemented with blog and wiki assignments and Twitter comments.

The presentations are produced by organization members, sometimes with funding from commercial vendors or organization membership fees. It is likely that such multimedia presentations will be increasingly offered, due to the convenience and cost savings made possible by distance learning.

Here are a few of the online continuing education opportunities now available to law librarians, including podcasts, video, and webcast formats (for fee or free):

AALL2go is the new continuing education portal from the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) that provides online educational programming, including many excellent webinars, podcasts, and videos of law library programs and workshops (e.g., those presented at past annual meetings). In addition, the Computing Services Special Interest Section Web site on AALLNET contains an archive of the Web 2.0 Challenge courses on technology for law librarians who partake in webinars and Web 2.0 interactions.
The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) has produced podcasts of their past annual meeting programs, which are available to all.
The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI) runs webinars that are archived on its Web site. Its Legal Education Commons includes podcasts and videos on legal topics of interest to law librarians.
The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) produces e-learning in one- to two-hour webcasts. It is currently posting free online videos on the topics of scholarly communication, author rights, digital repositories, and open-access on its Web site.
The Special Libraries Association (SLA) (possibly soon to be renamed the Association for Strategic Knowledge Professionals), offers its Click University, with free and fee courses using webinars, innovative online experiences, and many types of online training to members and nonmembers. SLA also offers (for a fee) certificate programs to nonmembers; these programs include lectures, discussions, and exercises. Certificates are offered in knowledge management, competitive intelligence, and copyright after a specified number of courses are taken. SLA's Innovation Laboratory allows SLA members to experiment with new technologies, both open-source applications and licensed software packages to be "experienced" on SLA's Web site. Classmates communicate through blogs and wikis. The Laboratory offers a step-by-step, paced learning strategy, from which information professionals learn new information tools by testing them out on the SLA platform.
EDUCAUSE, an organization for information technology educators, provides free podcasts about topics in higher education, including leadership, policy and law, teaching and learning, emerging technologies, open source, research computing, cyber-infrastructure, and digital libraries.

This short list is indicative of the growing trend toward recorded webinars, videos, and podcasts that professional organizations offer our colleagues. We no longer rely solely on face-to-face annual meeting programs (as excellent as they are) in order to access quality continuing education opportunities throughout the year. We can now go to AALL2go to review the annual meeting programs that we missed, and we can experience new programs that are recorded and shared whenever they are offered.

If we want more online multimedia programs to advance our own professional knowledge, we need to take the initiative. We can participate in the production of more quality recorded programs using media formats of all kinds to suit our many learning styles. At the same time, we can take advantage of the array of offerings already available to us through the Web platforms of law libraries and related professional organizations.

It's exciting to know that our learning opportunities are expanding every day. Imagine the luxury of setting aside an hour or two during each week or month to close the office door and learn something new about the profession of law librarianship! Videos, podcasts, and webinars are as close to live learning as we can get, and these experiences are now at our fingertips.

April Schwartz is associate professor of law and library director at the Gould Law Library, Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center, in Central Islip, N.Y. Her e-mail address is aschwartz@tourolaw.edu.