PLI announces tool for tracking CLEs

The Practising Law Institute (PLI) has announced the launch of My Credit Tracker, a tool that you can use to track, organize, and manage your CLE credit compliance progress, in any jurisdiction for any credit type. My Credit Tracker enables you to keep all your credit information in one convenient location and is available to anyone who sets up a free account. Credits earned from PLI are automatically shown, and you can also enter credits earned elsewhere. All credits are displayed on an elegant user interface accessible from a computer or mobile device. When you complete your "compliance profile" using the Compliance Date Wizard, My Credit Tracker will alert and remind you of CLE deadlines.
And the Barco Law library's subscription to PLI Plus also gives you online access to the full collection of PLI Press publications containing over 87,000 documents including Treatises, Course Handbooks, Journals, Answer Books, Legal Forms, and Program Transcripts. The extensive PLI collection is updated regularly to reflect the latest in legal developments and includes practical materials for professional lawyers.

Impeachment information

With impeachment in the news, you can become more informed about the subject by using the libguide "Government Sources by Subject: Impeachment of a U.S. President" created by librarians at the University of Washington.

Citation Counts: Interdisciplinary Scholarship

Tax Prof Blog has an interesting post that discusses a new article on SSRN written by scholars at Vanderbilt University titled "Total Scholarly Impact: Law Professor Citations in Non-Law Journals."
From the SSRN Abstract:

"This Article provides the first ranking of legal scholars and law faculties based on citations in non-law journals. Applying the methods, as much as possible, of the widely used Leiter-Sisk “Scholarly Impact Score,” which includes only citations in law publications, we calculate a “Interdisciplinary Scholarly Impact Score” from the non-law citations over a five-year period (2012-2018) to the work of tenured law faculty published in that period in non-law journals. We also provide the weighted scores for law faculty at the top 25 law schools as ranked by the US News rankings, a school-by-school ranking, and lists of the top five faculty by non-law citations at each school and of the top fifty scholars overall."

Constitution Day

In honor of Constitution Day, the Law Library of Congress has announced that "The Constitution Annotated Is Now Easier to Search and Browse" with a link that takes us to the Congressional Research Service's new version of the Constitution Annotated.  According to the announcement,

"The Constitution Annotated allows you to “read about the Constitution in plain English…providing a comprehensive overview of Supreme Court decisions interpreting the United States Constitution.” The Constitution Annotated is a Senate document created by the Congressional Research Service that makes the Constitution accessible to all Americans, regardless of their background in law. In the past, the web version of this document, which is linked from Congress.gov, consisted of PDFs that could be challenging to search. With this release, the document is available in a more accessible and user-friendly HTML format that is convenient to search and browse."

Two nice sites created by Government Information librarians

Two library sites created by government info librarians that may be of interest to law librarians and legal scholars:
1. Weekly Roundup of U.S. Government Information is a great libguide that provides a current awareness resource about happenings in the federal government. Created by Kelly Smith, a GovInfo librarian at UC San Diego, she collects content from agency press releases, reports from the Office of Inspector General, Congressional Budget Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Government Accountability Office, and other items in the news. The page is updated weekly to provide links to important, news-worthy, or interesting federal government material published during the previous week. You can subscribe to the Weekly Roundup by going to this page and entering your email address in the "Subscribe" box.
Oh, and her entire U.S. Government Information libguide is really well done.

2.The Cold War & Internal Security Collection website from the J.Y. Joyner Library at East Carolina University includes over 1,500 volumes of congressional hearings, committee prints and committee reports published between 1918-1977, primarily covering congressional investigations of organizations deemed "subversive" or "un-American". David Durant, the Federal Documents & Social Sciences librarian at the library also keeps a blog related to the collection; his most recent post looks at the history of Russian efforts to influence public opinion in the US and its allies, from the late 1970s to the 2016 US elections. These efforts, collectively labeled as "active measures", are the subject of an exhibit currently at the Joyner library. 

Lexis interface change...

This just in from LexisNexis: "Find a Source" and "Find a Topic", formerly on the "Browse" dropdown menu, have moved to "Explore Content" on Lexis Advance "for a more intuitive and streamlined user experience."

What's your PPQ?

The Teaching Newsletter from the Chronicle of Higher Education recently had an article titled "How Calling on Random Students Could Hurt Women," in which a psychologist who studies gender differences in public performance urges instructors to encourage classroom participation in ways that avoid putting students on the spot. There is a link to a longer article "Teaching Tips: Asking Questions" that goes into detail about how students feel about being called on and ways to engage students and increase student participation without causing undue embarassment. One idea is to monitor your PPQ ratio - how much participation per question do you get in class?

"When many students offer answers to a question, the ratio is high. A consistent pattern of stony silence lowers the PPQ ratio but more importantly leaves teachers feeling frustrated... The absence of student response may well be the most common stimulus for initiating “calling on” behavior."

The article then offers a number of suggestions on how to "increase your PPQ" and promote interchange in class, as well as ways to encourage students to ask questions.