Services for Faculty: Scholarship and Instruction
The Library has services and programs to assist faculty with both scholarship and instruction.
Scholarship |
Instruction |
Scholarship
The library provides support for faculty during all phases of writing and publication of a work of scholarship.
Library Contacts*
Service |
Who to Contact |
*If you prefer, simply contact your Faculty Liaison for any library-related issue and they will work with the appropriate person or department to satisfy your request. For a complete list of staff, see the library directory.
Getting Started: Ideas and Research
To facilitate the generation of ideas, the library provides access to Lexis and Westlaw, in addition to many other electronic databases. The library subscribes to two main legal periodical indexes, Index to Legal Periodicals & Books and LegalTrac, which include article citations to more than one thousand legal periodicals and law books, and full-text articles from more than two hundred titles. Another well-known source of legal periodicals at the library is HeinOnline, a retrospective collection of the full text of more than one thousand law reviews and journals from the 1800s up to the present day, and includes back issues of U.S. Reports, the Federal Register, U.S. Attorney General Opinions, treaties, and classic texts. The library also subscribes to Ebsco's Academic Search Premier and Business Source Premier, multidisciplinary databases of citations to and full text of thousands of scholarly and peer-reviewed publications. These resources are located in the Databases section on the library website. Google's Google Scholar search feature on campus will locate full-text materials in the databases at the library. Quick links to these selected databases are provided below.
Quick Links to Databases:
Lexis | Westlaw
| Index
to Legal Periodicals & Books | LegalTrac
| HeinOnline
| Academic
Search Premier | Business
Source Premier | Google
Scholar
Current Awareness Services
E-mail notification for the tables of contents of specific journals, or about articles in specific legal and non-legal subjects can be arranged. Your faculty liaison will help you customize your requirements and select the service, or services, including: SmartCILP; Ingenta; BNA email updates; Legal Scholarship Network; and Berkeley Electronic Press. We can also arrange for email notification for individual journals or monitor specific titles or subjects on your behalf.
Current Journal Issues
The latest issues of popular journals and selected new books are placed on shelves near the User Services Desk.Email Alerts
The library offers the following services only to faculty and staff. To register for email alerts, please contact Nathan Robertson at elecres@law.umaryland.edu.
NEW! CQ HealthBeat and CQ Green Sheets offer twice-daily news alerts from Washington regarding policy, congressional action, and agency news for health care and environmental issues.
BNA Highlights delivers weekly or biweekly summaries of selected BNA publications with direct links to full-text articles online.
EBSCOhost Electronic Journals Service delivers via email table-of-contents information from titles selected from more than 8,000 electronic journals in a variety of disciplines.
The Legal Scholarship Network and the Economics Research Network, both divisions of Social Science Research Network, publish via email abstracts of working papers and articles accepted for publication in economics and law as well as announcements of professional meetings, calls for papers, and professional job listings.
Reveal Research Alert (formerly UnCover) delivers via email table-of-contents information from titles selected from more than 26,000 publications. Subscribers may receive tables of contents for up to 50 titles.
SmartCILP provides personalized email delivery of the articles indexed by the Current Index to Legal Periodicals. Subscribers receive a weekly citation list based on a profile of subject areas and/or specific journal titles. SmartCILP also provides links to full text in Lexis and Westlaw where available.
WestClip and LexisNexis Alert
Faculty liaisons can help set up customized WestClip (Westlaw) and Alert (LexisNexis) automated clipping service searches with the results delivered directly to the faculty member or the liaison librarian willl review the results and forward selected results to faculty. For more information, please contact your faculty liaison.RSS News Feeds
The number of electronic newspapers, journals, blogs, and other internet resources that send updates to their online content via RSS news feeds is growing rapidly. RSS, also known as Really Simple Syndication, is a way to receive updates to websites that offer RSS feeds. To receive updates from an RSS feed, RSS news reader software is required. For more information on setting up RSS news reader software and RSS feeds, visit the DOE's FAQ About RSS web page. For asssitance with setting up RSS feeds, please contact your faculty liaison. Selected RSS feeds offered by electronic resources at the library follow.
View legal news headlines from Jurist, an automatically updated legal news and research service of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, on the library home page by application of RSS technology. Jurist offers free RSS feeds, such as the latest US Legal News, as well as a free daily legal news digest by email.
NEW! The Chronicle of Higher Education, the premier daily publication of news, commentary, and career help for readers in academia, and its sister publication, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, offer several RSS news feeds, including the Daily News, a feed of new headlines available on The Chronicle website.
Faculty Liaisons
To view information about a faculty liaison or to see a list of exams currently on file for a specific faculty member, select a faculty name from the drop down menu below. The list is restricted to UM Law faculty, staff and students.Under the library’s liaison program, each faculty member and each course is assigned a research librarian who can help with requests for research or materials in support of teaching and scholarship. This help ranges from database searching and tracking down esoteric materials to handling in-depth research projects and working with faculty research assistants. Research librarians also offer customized sessions on use of the Internet and other electronic sources.
The liaison serves as the faculty's first point of contact with the library. Students who need research assistance may be directed to contact the liaison. To schedule an appointment, please contact your liaison.
Suggesting Items for Purchase
The library purchases materials to support faculty research. To suggest materials for purchase contact your faculty liaison. In addition, you may request that the library purchase copies of materials, including individual volumes of federal and Maryland codes, for your office. If you are interested in getting an office copy of a particular title, please contact Pamela Bluh.
Borrowing
Faculty liaisons assist with locating and acquiring materials for faculty members.
Thurgood Marshall Law Library
Faculty may borrow many items, subject to recall, from the Thurgood Marshall Law Library for one academic year, with an option to renew. All books are subject to recall after two weeks upon the request of another patron. Faculty members are responsible for fines for failing to return books owned by the Thurgood Marshall Law Library when recalled by another patron. The fine amount is $1.50 per day, $15 dollars maximum. All loan privileges will be suspended if a substantial number of fines accrue against an individual’s record. With the exception of one-volume monographs, items should not be removed from the law school and should be kept in an office location where they can readily be found by the library staff if needed by another patron. The law school faculty has waived the protection that exists under Maryland state law regarding confidentiality of circulation records in cases where another law faculty member has the item. In all other cases, library borrowing records are strictly confidential. Contact your faculty liaison to request materials from TMLL.
Other Libraries
Faculty members are entitled to direct borrowing privileges at fourteen Maryland public colleges and universities that make up the University System of Maryland and Affiliated Institutions (USMAI) either by going to the other libraries or by using the “holds” delivery system available in the Catalog. Local loan policies and restrictions apply to these transactions. Faculty members are responsible for fines on materials borrowed from other USMAI libraries. A library bar code from the Thurgood Marshall Law Library or any other USM library is required before any materials may be borrowed. Books requested via the "holds" system will be delivered to our library.
The library provides interlibrary loan service for items not found in its collection or in the collections of other USMAI libraries. The library is committed to providing materials as quickly as possible, but response time varies depending upon the supplying library. Loan periods and renewal policies are determined by the lending library. Faculty members are responsible for fines on the borrowed materials. Interlibrary loan is critical for faculty research and the library cannot risk losing borrowing privileges from other libraries because of a failure to return books. Faculty members who put the library in the position of delinquent borrower will lose interlibrary loan privileges.
The library staff will place "hold" requests and interlibrary loan requests for faculty members, if desired. Contact your faculty liaison or Teresa White to request materials from other libraries.
Photocopy Services
The library has three self-service photocopiers located on
levels 2 and 3 of the library. These photocopiers are set up
to operate with a code that has been pre-assigned to faculty
members. Debit cards for use at the University of Maryland,
Baltimore's Health Sciences and Human Services Library are also
available with advance notice. A debit card for microform copying
may be requested at the User Services Desk.
The library also offers a photocopy service to support research
and instruction. Faculty members may request copies of articles
or cases to meet these needs. For a request of up to three items,
the response time is normally one working day. Please contact
your faculty liaison for more
information.
Research Assistants
With the permission of the faculty member, research assistants may borrow books in the name of the faculty member and will be assigned a code which they can use to make copies of library materials for work-related purposes. Forms are available at the User Services Desk for authorization of any of these privileges. Research assistants are welcome to contact the faculty liaisons for help with library-related questions.
Getting It Written: Drafting and Polishing
Research Fellows
Research fellows provide scholarly support to faculty members. The fellow responds to requests from individual faculty members for assistance with law review articles and other works of scholarship, including broad and substantive research, detailed citation checking, and editing for style and format. Research fellows are available to assist with editing, footnote creation, citation checking and formatting, and proofreading. While we try to meet everyone’s deadlines, it is best to give us as much advance notice as possible if you need work done in a specific time frame. The research fellows are Sue McCarty, Class of 2004, and Alice Johnson, Class of 2005. Contact Associate Director for Research Services Janet Sinder to request the assistance of a research fellow.
Submission to LSN's University of Maryland School of Law Research Paper Series
To share works of scholarship with colleagues at other institutions, faculty members are invited to submit research in progress as well as papers already accepted for publication via the Research Papers Series maintained by the law school, under the auspices of the Legal Scholarship Network (LSN). Legal Scholarship Network, part of the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), facilitates the distribution of scholarly information to legal scholars and practitioners.
The University of Maryland School of Law Research Paper Series is an infrequent email publication of abstracts to working papers and articles accepted for publication. Articles may be submitted for posting at any time. Although any faculty member may directly post a paper to LSN, for the paper to be included in the law school's Research Papers Series it should be posted by the library. If you are interested in contributing a working paper or an accepted paper to the next issue or would like to learn more about LSN, please contact Pamela Bluh.
Issues of the Research Paper Series are distributed by email to all members of the Legal Scholarship Network. If you would like to receive email distributions from the Legal Scholarship Network or Economics Research Network, you may sign up by contacting your faculty liaison or filling out a form online at: http://hq.ssrn.com/Pub_Login.cfm?iacm=y. Articles may also be accessed directly online at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/JELJOUR_Results.cfm?form_name=journalbrowse&journal_id=364780.
Getting it Published: Submission to Law Reviews
Electronic submission services are available that make submitting papers for publication easier. Using these services eliminates photocopying, assembling, printing and mailing and provides rapid acknowledgment and periodic status updates. To facilitate delivery of manuscripts to law reviews, faculty members may submit scholarly works to law reviews by two electronic submission services, Berkeley Electronic Press' ExpressO and SSRN's eSubmission.
If you are ready to submit an article for publication and need assistance identifying journals and electronic publication options, the library can provide assistance with targeting journals, selecting an appropriate service and uploading papers. For assistance please contact your faculty liaison or Pamela Bluh.
ExpressO
The library supports submission of articles through ExpressO, a service of Berkeley Electronic Press. BE Press has arrangements with over 450 law reviews, including all the "top 100" publications. A similar electronic submission service, eSubmission, is offered by SSRN.
ExpressO allows authors to include a cover letter and a C.V. as part of the submission; accepts documents in Word (or WordPerfect); delivers papers in real time; allows authors to track submissions; has the capability to "expedite" the submission process; requires no abstract or posting of a paper prior to submission; and, delivers articles electronically, unless a law review will not accept electronic submissions, in which case the article will be delivered in print.
To submit a paper through ExpressO, a service of Berkeley Electronic Press, follow these steps:
1. go to http://law.bepress.com/expresso/,
2. if you do not have an existing account, create one using your @law.umaryland.edu
email address,
3. select manuscript file format (both Word and WordPerfect are accepted),
4. create and verify the list of reviews to which your article should be submitted,
5. upload a cover letter (if desired) and the article, and
6. click finish.
eSubmission
SSRN's eSubmission is a free service that allows you to submit a paper to law reviews that allow electronic submission. The eSubmission service allows users to send customized messages to each journal, and to submit to different journals at different times. To use eSubmission, you must first include your paper in the SSRN eLibrary.
Visit SSRN User Headquarters online to begin the eSubmission process. To eSubmit a paper, please log on to SSRN User HeadQuarters and then click "eSubmissions" on the left menu.
eSubmission has agreements with fewer journals; allows only a note to accompany the submission; accepts only PDF files; papers are subject to review prior to delivery; has no tracking mechanism; has no process for expediting submissions requires an abstract to be posted to SSRN; and, handles only electronic submissions.
Steps to submit a paper through eSubmission, a service of the Social Science Research Network’s (SSRN) Legal Scholarship Network (LSN), are as follows:
1. go to http://hq.ssrn.com,
2. if you do not have an account, create one using your @law.umaryland.edu
email address,
3. after logging in, click on eSubmissions,
4. choose the paper you wish to submit and click eSubmit, and
5. select the journals to which the paper should be submitted.
Faculty Publications Database
The Library maintains the publications portion of the faculty database for the law school's website. This database includes scholarly publications by faculty, and items display on both the faculty member's web page, and, if recent, on the Recent Faculty Scholarship page. Items are included from each month's Publications list distributed by the Dean's Office, but if you do not see your publication on the web, please send the information to Janet Sinder for inclusion.
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