Survey of Law School Faculty: Evaluation of Information Technology Services

This112-page study looks closely at how law school faculty view information technology and information literacy assistance offered by law school information technology staff and law libraries. 114 faculty from 60 law schools give their opinions of a broad range of information and specify their needs in areas as diverse as law database search strategy to document preparation, use of PDF technology, and remote access to law school content and resources. The report enables information technology departments, law libraries and law school management to benchmark their own efforts vs. those of their peers. Data is broken out by size, type and ranking of law school, and by personal characteristics of the survey participant, such as gender, academic title and other variables. Some of the areas covered in the report include: use of the following: PowerPoint and other presentation software, Microsoft Word and other word processing applications, legal database searching, videoconferencing and live streaming, special technology equipped classrooms, scanners and printers, audio and video files, pdf’s, citation software, course management systems, blogs and social media, the intranet, and more. Just a few of the report’s main findings are that: • 28.57% of female faculty but only 8.62% of male faculty felt that videoconferencing or live streaming capability was an important service for them. • In information technology training, private schools performed better than public ones; Nearly 56% of faculty at the former but only a little more than 35% at the latter considered service to be good or excellent. • Faculty at top 40 law schools were more likely than others to seek IT assistance and they did so a mean of 19.89 and a median of 20 times in the past year. • 37.66% of professors and 38.46% of lecturers felt that they would need help from the IT staff in the future in using the law school or university course management system. The report includes faculty from these and many other law schools: Australian National University Law School, Birmingham Law School, The University of Birmingham, England, Boston College Law School, California Western School of Law, Charleston School of Law, Columbia University Law School, Cornell Law School, CUNY School of Law, Denver Law, Griffith University Law, Harvard Law School, Hofstra Law School. Northeastern University Law School, NYU Law School, Oklahoma University College of Law, Rutgers Law School, School of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, St. Louis University School of Law, Stanford Law School, Texas Tech University School of Law, The John Marshall Law School, The Ohio State University Moritz College of Law, University of Alberta Law School, University of Maryland School of Law, University of Miami Law, UNLV Boyd School of Law, University of Washington Law and many others.