Thanks to all of you who responded so quickly to my need for a list
of schools who do their own CALR training. As usual many of you provided
more than a simple yes or no answer. In those answers, I found support
for the immediate decision I had to make and a lot of ideas for handling
our program in the future. Several people have expressed interest in
what I found. I haven't counted yet, but the list of schools who do
their own training is long. This is particularly true of 1L training
that is part of a required Legal Research and/or Writing course for
which credit is given. Our training is part of a for credit course.
In fact, I think only one school responded that vendor reps were involved
in training that was part of a required or for credit course. All of
our training is part of either our 1L Research course or part of an
upper division graduation requirement. However this slant could very
well be because of the way my question was asked.
So now I have two more questions to ask:
1) Which schools have required training or training that is part of any
for credit course that is done by vendor reps?
2) Which schools write their own scripts and require that vendor reps
follow those scripts? If you are one of these schools, how do you
evaluate how well the vendor reps are following the scripts?
And for those who are interested, I have nearly completed a manual for
the way our program was supposed to work with the help of vendor reps.
It includes a description of our program; the principles we follow
in our teaching; the conventions we follow in our teaching, vendor
specific outlines for a wide variety of one hour advanced classes, scripts
for our 1L training and the scripts for our most popular classes -
Cost Effective Lexis Searching and Cost Effective Westlaw Searching.
The cost classes were never taught by vendor reps. The others were.
Who will teach the other classes in the future and under what conditions is
not yet determined.
When it is done, I intend to post it on LAWNET.
Mary Brandt Jensen University of South Dakota
Director of the Law Library School of Law
Professor of Law 414 E. Clark St.
MJENSEN@CHARLIE.USD.EDU Vermillion, SD 57069-2390
(605) 677 6363 Fax (605) 677 6357
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