Category: Library
By - Friday, February 12, 2010 - 4:27am
I love my iPhone, but its core functionality doesn't always provide the tools necessary for me to function as a mobile librarian. Faculty requests for articles are an almost daily occurrence for me, and I'm not always in my office when I get them. Yesterday, for example, I was in a lunch presentation when I got an email from a colleague with an urgent request. I didn't have my laptop with me, so I used my iPhone to track down the article. JSTOR had the document I needed, but when I displayed the PDF file in Mobile Safari, there wasn't much I could do with it except read it. I certainly couldn't save a copy or attach it to an email:
So even though I'd found the requested article, I couldn't send it to the person who needed it it until I got back to my office an hour later.
I knew there had to be a way to get a PDF out of my browser and into an email. Josh Brauer tipped me off to an app called GoodReader. It's not free, but at 99 cents it's hardly expensive. GoodReader is a PDF/TXT reader and file storage application, and because it has its own web browser one can access PDFs on the web and save them.
Once the file downloads, it resides in the app's file library. From there, select it and choose the email option, which drops the file into a new email as a file attachment.
There's also a method for saving documents to GoodReader directly from within Mobile Safari, but I find it easier to use the app's browser since I'll have to switch to GoodReader to email the file anyway.
I've only described a small fraction of GoodReader's functionality here, but this document delivery feature alone makes it worth 99 cents. There's also a free version of the application that limits storage to only five documents.
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By - Saturday, February 6, 2010 - 4:05pm
Last July, while traveling home from the AALL Annual Meeting, I had a layover in St. Louis. During this travel break I checked Twitter from my phone to see if anything conference-related had happened while I was in the air. Well, the best I could find was a vendor who had used a hashtag that some of my friends and I had used to identify our clique that week. In response, someone used the anonymous @aallsecrets account to criticize the vendor for co-opting "our" identifier, and I quickly fired off a couple tweets of my own belittling the vendor, even calling him a not-so-nice name. By then it was time to board my flight to Los Angeles, so I turned off my phone and forgot all about it.
While waiting for my luggage at LAX a few hours later, I checked Twitter again. My name-calling hadn't gone over so well. Someone called me out for rudeness from the @aallsecrets account, while the vendor in question explained that he used the hashtag as a way of inviting all of us to a party that evening, something I might have realized had I bothered to pay much attention to the content of his tweet. Nevertheless, I was angry at being called out. While crafting what I thought was a witty 140-character evisceration of anyone who disagreed with me, my phone battery died, leaving me unable to crush all opposition.
Before I could publish this brief manifesto, I discovered the airport police had towed my car from the long-term lot. By the time I made it home several hours later, my self-imagined feud with this vendor felt absurd, and I was ashamed of what I'd said. So when I did finally power up my laptop and return the internet, the first thing I did was email an apology to the vendor.
That episode of name-calling wasn't the first time I'd used the web to express self-righteous anger. By then it had become something of an art form for me. Any time I disagreed with someone, it was easier to tweet something inflammatory (and passive aggressive) than to communicate directly with the person I imagined I was feuding with. In the best of possible worlds, I'd raise an issue in the most condescending tone I could muster and start a revolution of re-tweets and replies that carried my message well beyond my own meager reach.
In the days following the namecalling incident, I decided I had some growing up to do and promised myself I'd stop making everything so personal in my communication with colleagues and vendors. Anger would not be my defining emotion and hyperbole would not be my preferred writing style.
My record since then has been spotty, but improved. I've only made a handful of passive aggressive tweets about AALL (one of my biggest targets in those heady pre-AALL 2009 days) in the months since, and I believe my blog writing since last summer has become more measured and logical than it was in the past.
But I'm troubled by the overall tone of our profession's communication of late. Now, flame wars are nothing new. The law-lib listserv has seen more than a few blow ups between librarians with differing opinions over the years, and Twitter might be unrecognizable without its piles of overreaction. (Just ask Scott Baio.) Nevertheless, I don't always understand the motivations of librarians who attack one another on a personal level and generalize vendors as evil empires with illegal intent. (Yes, any statement that a vendor is trying to bribe a state employee is an accusation of criminal behavior.)
The last week has seen some intense debate regarding vendor swag and librarian ethics. One need look no farther than the comments to any of Sarah Glassmeyer's posts on the subject (here, here, here and here) to see that there is a wide array of opinions on the matter and that we have no hesitation in challenging the moral integrity of one another in the process. Those that disagree with us are labeled "biased" and "trolls" rather than just a person with a different opinion. Exaggerated conflagrations become the norm on Twitter, with educated and influential legal information professionals questioning the character of our entire profession while providing no concrete evidence of our moral decay. And when an alleged employee of Thomson Reuters Legal (TRL), the grand villain in the eyes of so many librarians, posts a comment defending the company's marketing strategy without identifying herself as a TRL employee, there is an automatic assumption of so-called "sock-puppetry," with no consideration that the alleged employee might like her place of work and decide on her own to defend it. Instead, we feel compelled to unmask her treacherous ways in the most humiliating manner possible with no concern that we might put her job in jeopardy. (Never mind that IP addresses can be spoofed.)
There is, of course, the possibility that the commenter was a sock-puppet, and that's a troubling possibility that deserves investigation. As do many of the ethical questions raised in the last week.
But within the social media wing of our profession, vendor hatred has become a badge of honor. On the announcement of new products, sight unseen, we state publicly our suspicions that vendors designed such products to increase profits at the expense of effective research, never considering for a moment that maybe those two ends aren't always in conflict.
The inflammatory rhetoric lobbed at TRL, LexisNexis and others is sometimes well-grounded, but we've reached a tipping point where any opinion short of "West sucks!" is dismissed by many. We become outraged when a vendor attempts to bypass us in their marketing, as West did with a promotional email last year. Yet if vendors talked about librarians the way librarians talk about vendors, we would be up in arms.
I understand a great deal of the anger. I find myself regularly frustrated by the decisions made by many vendors, be they marketing, pricing or design decisions. But at the end of the day, we still have to work with these vendors. We have contracts to negotiate, products to vet and dollars to allocate. Sometimes the products are good, sometimes they aren't. (More accurately, sometimes parts of a single product are good while other parts of the very same product are bad.) Sometimes we are charged too much, sometimes we aren't. Sometimes we buy the product, sometimes we don't.
But we also have choices in how we respond to our anger, even the most justifiable anger. What law librarian interest is served in publicly shaming a vendor over a disagreement?
Society loves its villains. Tiger Woods can vouch for that. So can NBC. But what did Conan O'Brien accomplish by announcing via press release his rejection of NBC's time slot change other than winning public opinion? As much as I support Conan's decision to walk away from "The Tonight Show," I can't help but notice that even after the press release, he still lost his job and the jobs of his staffers and faced a contentious negotiation with the executives at NBC. Maybe if he had called Jeff Zucker and privately said, "No thanks, Jeff," instead of speaking to the "People of Earth" he might have obtained better severance packages for his staff, a larger payout for himself, a shorter non-compete period and the rights to some of his show's recurring characters. Perhaps not.
Intelligent people can disagree on just about anything, yet they can do so in a civilized manner. That's the kind of career I signed on for seven years ago when I decided to become a librarian. Since then I've been something less than perfect in that regard, but I'm trying. And when I arrive in Denver this July for the AALL Annual Meeting, one of the first things I'll do is buy a beer for the vendor I insulted last year.
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By - Friday, January 29, 2010 - 4:46pm
As I mentioned in my previous post, I traveled to Eagan, Minnesota (on Thomson Reuters' dime) earlier this week along with several other writers to get a sneak peek at Thomson Reuters' new legal research product, WestlawNext. I've already participated in a video roundtable discussion on the system, but I wanted to go into a little more detail in writing. Several others have provided comprehensive reviews of the product already, so I don't want to duplicate too much of their information. I do, however, want to look at things from the perspective of legal research instruction, since that's a big part of what I do in my job each fall, and because I've written in the past about Lexis and Westlaw's usability from that perspective over at VoxPopuLII.
The simplest assessment is this: Once law students gain access to WestlawNext (and "New Lexis," launching later this year), legal research instructors will have some 'splaining (or at least some adapting) to do.
Research instruction is marginalized and splintered at most law schools as it is. If law librarians -- the most qualified research instructors within any law school -- are part of a required 1L research curriculum, the length of that instruction is often brief. At Loyola Law School, for example, we have five weeks in the fall semester to cover the basics. At other schools, librarians might play no role. Instead, a legal writing program might rely on second-year students to teach the material. At the far end of the spectrum, some schools have no required research curriculum, offering only advanced research electives. Regardless of these requirements, electronic research instruction is often farmed out to vendor representatives, with Westlaw reps teaching Westlaw and Lexis reps teaching Lexis. The reliability of rep training varies, and a common complaint among librarians is that these reps emphasize full-text searching of primary law at the expense of secondary sources and other analytical materials. This leads to a somewhat disjointed program of instruction, even without the ground shifting beneath us.
When using the current versions of Westlaw and Lexis, a researcher needs to know exactly where relevant information is located before running a search. Therefore, when searching for primary law, she has to already know if she's looking for cases or statutes or regulations or some other type of document. In a familiar area of law, that's not a big hurdle, but when researching a new topic, the first task in research is often figuring out what type of law governs. Only then can the researcher move on to primary materials.
Using WestlawNext, however, a researcher no longer needs to select a source database before running a search. Instead, searches are most often limited only by jurisdiction, using a pop-up page overlay (NOT a pop-up browser window/tab) that allows precise selection of both state and federal jurisdictions. Then, upon running a search, the system provides results from all types of sources -- primary and secondary -- in that jurisdiction: cases, statutes, regulations, secondary sources, briefs, etc. The overview page shows just the first one or two results in each category, but the left sidebar of the page lists all the types of documents available with a count of the number of results in each of these facets. To see complete results for a particular type of resource, a researcher need only click the link for that category. When viewing these faceted results, more limiting options appear in the sidebar, such as jurisdiction, date, topic, and publication name depending on the type of materials being viewed.
Generally speaking, WestlawNext eliminates the need for researchers to know where to look for legal documents before running their searches. Don't know whether your clients' issue involves statutory or regulatory law? Just run the search and find out from the results.
To be fair, the current version of Westlaw already allows researchers to search multiple databases simultaneously, but the implementation is poor. Selecting the databases you want is a tedious process, the results display in one lump-sum list of results with no limiting facets, and basic functionality like tables of contents are nowhere to be found when viewing documents from your results. These problems are all dealbreakers, and they are corrected in WestlawNext.
While the relevant sources of law can be gleaned more easily from search results, it presents a challenge to legal research instructors. As legal professionals who have used the old systems (and print resources) for years, we already understand what the various sources of law are and how they work together. To even use Westlaw and Lexis, law students needed to learn this foundation. With WestlawNext (and most likely "New Lexis") providing Google-esque search with faceted results, students can and will run searches without an understanding of legal sources and yet not feel confused by the results. Well, not at first.
Given this likelihood, research instructors will have to provide a solid overview of the sources of law to their students. Hopefully, we already do this. But until now we could rely on Westlaw's database selection requirement to force students into learning at least a little bit about these sources before running a search that provided meaningful results. Not anymore. A student need not understand anything about sources in order to retrieve a wide swath of relevant material, and many will have the illusory feeling that the research process has been simplified enough to eliminate any need for foundational training. After all, if the fact pattern mentions "unlawful sexual intercourse" and "California" (yes, I used a Roman Polanski hypothetical in my class), a student can search those terms and retrieve a California case that seems to be on point and perhaps believe they've performed due diligence. Of course, the governing law might actually be statutory. Or there might be an split among appellate courts in California on the specific issue. Or a higher court may have decided an issue a little closer to the one in the fact pattern, making the case in hand irrelevant.
This isn't a criticism of WestlawNext. Assuming one understands sources of law, the search experience in WLN is more efficient and more likely to provide relevant materials in results. From a single search a researcher can pull in a wide array of materials and browse them easily using the provided facets. A lawyer unfamiliar with California real estate law need not know of the existence of "Miller & Starr California Real Estate" ahead of time in order to easily find that source's information in WestlawNext.
Foundational source issues are already covered in legal research instruction. The problem isn't that we don't teach them. The problem is that students might be less likely to listen once research begins to seem deceptively easy. This makes it all the more important for us to spend substantial time on instruction and assignments that cover the sources of law, independent of the specific research tools and mechanics. The good news is that if the WestlawNext interface is the future of legal research, we'll be able to spend less time in the classroom teaching Westlaw and Lexis navigation, providing extra time for foundational information.
Just because one can search an entire jurisdiction's worth of material doesn't mean that Thomson-Reuters Legal has eliminated the ability to browse and search more specific information. The currently buried Westlaw Directory once again moves front and center in WestlawNext (albeit in a redesigned form). Rather than running a search from the front page, a researcher can browse via simplified tabs on the front page (which thankfully contain no search boxes or checkboxes). From the "State Materials" tab, if a researcher selects California, a clean list of California materials displays, and the search box at the top of the page now limits itself to just a search of California materials. Clicking "All California Secondary Sources" displays a list of state-specific secondary sources and a search box that now searches only these resources. Selecting a specific source, say "California Jurisprudence," displays the table of contents for that source and allows searching of only that title.
It's been said elsewhere, but it bears repeating: Boolean search still functions. Given that many doubters have yet to acknowledge any of my colleagues' statements on this topic, let me repeat that: Boolean search still functions. There may still be some glitches here and there in that functionality, but Thomson-Reuters Legal has made it clear they intend for those operators to work as expected in WestlawNext.
WestlawNext is not without its problems, however, and the biggest concern I have is a big one for legal research instruction: secondary sources. No matter how many times instructors tell students to begin research with a secondary source, many students will still insist on running full-text searches of cases and statutory codes. (I was one of them.) Part of the blame lies at the feet of database reps who consistently overemphasize full-text searching of primary law in their training sessions, but anytime you ask students to find a case, the logical inclination is to, well, search cases.
I won't quibble with the order of the search facets in WestlawNext. Cases, statutes and other primary materials do belong at the top of the food chain because that's what lawyers and law students should be citing as precedent. The problem is how the results within the secondary sources facet display. In these results, very little specific information about each source displays. Most of the time what a researcher sees is the title of the specific section, the title of the source, and a couple of text snippets in which the search terms are highlighted. Little to no information about where within that source the section appears shows in these results. For example, when a section of Witkin and Epstein's California Criminal Law title simply "Generally" appears, that's the extent of the citation information displayed. The precise article within Witkin & Epstein in which this section appears is nowhere to be found, so researchers won't know until viewing the document itself whether it's from an article about sex crimes, robbery or murder. The threaded information available in search results for statutory sections (Title, Chapter, Subpart, etc.) needs to be included in secondary sources as well, or else the results are confusing at best and unusable at worst.
The search algorithms for secondary sources are also problematic. When I select California as my jurisdiction, if there are California-specific resources available on my topic, those need to show up first in my results. Period. When I ran a search for the term "rape," the first 12 results were from "National" sources such as Am.Jur. Trials, Am.Jur. Proof of Facts, and several law reviews. More alarming, none of these were general overviews of rape law, but instead provided information on specific aspects of rape law in various jurisdictions. I discussed this problem with Mike Dahn, vice president of new product development at Thomson Reuters Legal, he assured me that this was not by design and that they were working to make sure jurisdiction-specific resources for a user's selected jurisdiction float to the top of search results, but as of now this isn't working correctly.
Apart from these concerns, I'm still excited by the overall direction of WestlawNext. This really is a significant step forward in electronic research. I hesitate to call WestlawNext a "game-changer" because I think the game changed for all online search providers awhile back. Westlaw and Lexis are simply catching up, finally pushing legal search into the 21st century.
One final thing to note about the progress made here by Thomson Reuters (and presumably by LexisNexis later this year) is that it furthers the gap between the haves and have-nots in legal information. Once these new products are pushed out to law students, the more comfortable they become searching jurisdictions instead of sources, the harder it will be for them to use source-oriented tools (especially print materials). Again, this presents a challenge for those of us who teach legal research to make sure we provide them the foundation necessary to perform research on any platform.
I'm hardly the only person writing about WestlawNext this week. Here's a list of the reviews already in circulation:
Robert Ambrogi, A First Look at WestlawNext
David Bilinski, Dave’s Top 10 List about WestlawNext
Laura Bergus, WestlawNext: It’s About Time
Simon Chester, The Future of WestLaw – A First Glimpse
Jason Eiseman, 5 random thoughts about WestlawNext
Carolyn Elefant, My Trip Out [to] West: A Preview of WestlawNext
Greg Lambert, WestlawNext - A Study in Applying Knowledge Management & Crowdsourcing
Betsy McKenzie, Westlaw Next
Lisa Solomon, WestlawNext Preview: Product and Pricing
Jason Wilson, WestlawNext Review: Ending the tyranny of the keyword?
And of course, be sure to check out Jason Eiseman's video roundtable with Greg Lambert, Jason Wilson and me:
Video: discussion of WestlawNext
By - Tuesday, November 3, 2009 - 6:41pm
I make no secret of my love of web technology and services. I'm a full convert to electronic books for leisure reading, having read 17 consecutive books this year on my iPhone's Kindle app. Legal issues aside, I think the Google Books project is a big step forward. I haven't rented (or borrowed) a DVD in well over a year, preferring instead to rent from Amazon's Video on Demand service or stream movies from Netflix. I don't read print newspapers or watch television news, opting instead to get my news online via a selection of RSS feeds from various sources. I am not on a routing list for even one journal, yet I read several regularly online. I use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, IM and SMS rather than email and phone calls to stay in contact with my friends and colleagues. I love "new media."
Professionally speaking, that means slightly more than diddly squat.
There is no shortage of librarians stating their preferences about online services. God knows I do it plenty. Some proselytize tools like Twitter as gospel. Others are evangelical about the enduring utility of print. But even if, for example, "I believe that print books are an outdated technology" (which I don't), that doesn't mean my library should cease collecting print materials. I am but one person. Furthermore, I'm not even really a patron of my library. I am an employee. As a professional, my job is to give the patrons of my library what they want and need for their purposes. I work at an academic law library, so by and large those patron wants and needs are scholarly or instructional in nature. Yes, many of those patrons would prefer that everything we have be available in electronic format. These patrons are merely one constituency. If we are able to meet that constituency's expectations, there are still other constituencies to consider. Service to one group of patrons should not be provided to the exclusion of all others.
Now, given my preference for digital library service, I may believe that the reasons behind my preference are universal strengths that all patrons would embrace if only they knew about them. Well, then it's my job to inform patrons about those strengths. And to do so in a neutral manner that doesn't attempt to bully anyone into "seeing the light." Some will see things my way. Some will not. But my job as a librarian isn't simply to please those patrons who agree with me and my preferences. If a significant portion (and that doesn't mean it has to be even close to a majority) of my library's patrons prefer something other than what I like, it's my job to give it to them as well as my budget allows.
This is not an anti-progress post. I believe that librarians should explore social media tools and ebooks aggressively to meet the needs of those patrons who prefer them. If a new web technology really is progress for patrons, and we do a good job illustrating that to them, it will stick. But these new services should be added in addition to the ones already in place. The existence of IM or SMS reference service does not necessarily mean there shouldn't be a librarian at a reference desk, too. These are individual considerations for individual libraries based upon the needs of each institution's patrons. The adoption of new technology should make things easier for patrons, not more difficult. If we, as librarians, simply rely on our own personal preferences in making decisions about services and materials that impact our patrons, we cease to be useful to the very people we're here to serve.
Even in the examples I provided at the beginning of this post, my preferences only go so far. My parents do not use Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, IM or SMS. So while I prefer all those things, when it comes to staying in touch with them, I use email and phone calls. And that's just fine. There is no reason the new and the old can't co-exist.
By - Tuesday, August 25, 2009 - 10:17pm
Yesterday saw a lot of outrage from the law librarian community, thanks to a new (albeit short-lived) promotion from Thomson West that read in part:
Are you on a first name basis with the librarian? If so, chances are, you're spending too much time at the library.
(Click here to view the full ad)
Let me say up-front that I don't think this was a smart marketing strategy for West. Law librarians certainly play a role in throwing a sizeable chunk of change West's way, even if we aren't their biggest audience. Yet, while the ad isn't as disparaging on its face as some have complained (e.g., it doesn't really say anything negative about librarians), singling out a customer constituency in this way would be ill-advised for any company.
With that out of the way, let's look at this from a legal researcher's perspective. I tend to agree with the premise in West's ad that self-service research from one's own office is preferable to any situation that requires help from a librarian. Why do patrons talk to librarians? Because they can't find what they're looking for. As Terry Martin -- a law librarian -- said at a 1996 AALL "Town Meeting:"
Inevitably, there will be instances when people have got to ask a librarian for assistance. Now, I always think that this is a systems failure to some degree. We trained them improperly; we haven't designed a good catalog; and we haven't arranged materials well so that they can't help themselves.
Reprinted in Towards a Renaissance in Law Librarianship (Richard A. Danner, ed. 1997).
In a perfect (though certainly non-existent) world, if everyone involved in creating the system (law librarians, legal publishers, research database vendors) does his or her job right, a legal researcher would never need to ask a librarian for help.
That hardly means law librarians become irrelevant, but to remain a vital part of the system, we need to put as much effort in continuously re-designing and re-implementing that system as we do in helping lost researchers, because reducing those systems failures will save researchers time and frustration. Expressing outrage towards West for suggesting that self-service research is a good thing seems to indicate more concern on our part for the collective law librarian ego than for our patrons' needs.
You want to be angry at West for that ad? Be indignant at the suggestion that their online systems are comprehensive enough or designed intuitively enough to eliminate the need for librarian (or West's own customer support) assistance. Be outraged that they charge so much for their services that, no matter how well designed, our library budgets are the only thing that makes it possible for researchers to use them.
But never forget that if West, Lexis or some other legal database vendor ever fixed these problems, the need for our expertise, at least in its current form, would be reduced dramatically.
If West rethought its pricing structures and realized it could make a lot more money selling, to name one example, a Black's Law Dictionary iPhone app for $10 than it does for $50, a lot more patrons would buy their own research tools instead of relying on our deep pockets.
And if West put the energy and UI expertise responsible for its Black's Law Dictionary Digital software to work redesigning the Westlaw interface from the ground up (rather than simply dumping voluminous full text resources into its system with little regard for how they're used), there'd be a lot fewer questions at the reference desk about how to find something on Westlaw.
Are either of these things likely to happen anytime soon? History suggests they won't. But as I said yesterday on Twitter, I don't like relying on someone else's incompetence in order to stay relevant.
Truth is, West's questionable promotional piece advertised a world that, I believe, most researchers find appealing. Not because librarians are bad or unhelpful, but because research becomes far more efficient when someone finds what they're looking for without needing to ask for help at all. As Martin said, some system failure is inevitable. But that doesn't mean it can't be reduced. If an ad suggesting that such a reduction is positive scares librarians so much, my only question is, "Why?"
By - Tuesday, April 21, 2009 - 4:54pm
Working in an academic library, I routinely fill document requests for faculty. Sometimes a request is for a single article. Other times it's a list spanning several pages. The request list I'm working on now, for example, contains 25 articles. Fifteen years ago, this would've meant photocopying all 25 and hand delivering them to the faculty member. These days, with most articles available in PDF via electronic databases, the usual delivery method is email. With 25 articles to send, however, that can get tedious. Odds are good that my school's email system has a low enough file attachment size restriction that I'd have to split the documents into multiple emails. Even Gmail's higher size restrictions probably wouldn't suffice.
In recent months I've all but stopped sending email attachments to faculty. Instead I'm using a tool called Dropbox to store the documents. Then I just send an email containing each file's URL to the faculty member who requested the articles. When she clicks each link, she downloads the article directly from Dropbox.
So what is Dropbox? From Techcrunch:
The idea behind Dropbox... is that little to no effort should be put into keeping your desktop files synced with “the cloud”. So the three founders have built a... desktop client (available for both PCs and Macs) that acts like a regular folder on your machine. You can manage files within this folder just like elsewhere on your machine (add, edit, copy, and delete them) and changes will be automatically synced to Dropbox’s Amazon S3-backed storage, and very quickly at that.
So, in other words, when I save a file to the Dropbox folder on my office computer, it's automatically synced to the Dropbox folder on all my other computers, like my laptop or my home desktop. This isn't just a virtual folder, like with Apple's Mobile Me service. The file is actually transferred to my other computers, so I can access it even when I'm not online. That same file also becomes available on any other computer simply by logging into the Dropbox site with a web browser.
Each Dropbox account includes a "Public" folder, and that's where I place documents I need to deliver to faculty. Each file in this folder is assigned a unique public URL, and if I share the URL for a particular file with a faculty member, she can then download the file, even without her own Dropbox account.
Overcoming file attachment restrictions isn't the only benefit to this method of document delivery. In the past when I sent files by email, I still saved a copy to my computer for future reference (in case the faculty member accidentally deleted the email attachment and needed the article again). Since Dropbox's Public folder resides on my computer, I now simply use that folder as my faculty document archive and, thanks to auto-syncing, it's automatically available to me everywhere. Plus, anytime a faculty member needs to access an article again, she need only click on the link to it in the original email. Essentially, this folder becomes a shared folder of research between faculty and their librarian liaisons.
Dropbox offers a 2GB account free of charge, or you can upgrade to a 50GB account for $9.99/month or $99.99/year.
