This post is coauthored by Hanibal Goitom and Andrew Weber.
Later this month the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) 110th Annual Meeting and Conference will take place in Austin, Texas. This year’s theme is Forgo the Status Quo. The Law Library of Congress had multiple proposals accepted for this year’s conference.
Jennifer is participating in two panels. The first is The Power of the Crowd: Crowdsourcing Metadata for Library Materials on Monday, July 17 from 2:00pm – 3:00pm in ACC-Grand Ballroom F. The conference program describes this panel as discussing the pros and cons of crowdsourcing by federal institutions:
With limited budgets and increased workloads, many federal organizations are turning to crowdsourcing to help complete digital projects. These experts in legal and government crowdsourcing projects will discuss their projects, the advantages and disadvantages to crowdsourcing, maintaining engagement, and how to apply the lessons they have learned to your own project.
Jennifer also has a presentation with Janice on Tuesday, July 18 from 2:30pm – 3:30pm at ACC-Grand Ballroom E. It is titled Digitization Is Done—Now What? Understanding Metadata, Online Delivery, and User Experience. The conference program describes this presentation as follows:
Digitization of materials is the easy part. There are many steps to process materials once they have been digitized. This session will discuss post-digitization activities, including metadata creation methods (automation, insourcing, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing), the selection of formats for online display and searchability, and principles of user experience/user-focused web content delivery.
Along with Tariq, we will do a presentation, Tech Trends + Transparency: Enhancements in Government Legislative Websites. We described the program as:
In recent years, governments around the world have enhanced their websites in order to improve access to legislative information. Innovative features allow constituents and researchers to locate and utilize detailed information on laws in various ways. These include tracking tools and alerts, apps, bulk data/API, search technology, and multimedia. Presenters from the Law Library of Congress will show examples of these features in action and highlight trends in the use of evolving technology for legislative research. Audience feedback will be sought on their favorite tools and enhancements, which will be shared with Library of Congress website developers.
Tech Trends will take place on Monday, July 17 from 11:15am – 12:15pm in ACC-Room 18AB. As part of the preparation for the presentation we have worked with the foreign law specialists to examine websites that are similar to Congress.gov in 50 countries.
What are you looking forward to at #AALL17 this year?
P.S. If you take any great photos while in Austin this year, be sure to share them with us (like via Twitter @LawLibCongress). It might end up in our AALL Lessons Learned post like this one from Philly.