Law librarians have a lot to say and a lot to teach about legal research…
By writing articles for… law-related publications, librarians can reach out beyond our own organizations and offer research guidance to a much wider audience…
Just as importantly, writing articles for legal journals and publications helps law librarians build a higher profile among the legal community, both as individual authors and as a profession.
That is a selection from an article I co-wrote with LLAW member, Carol Bannen. (Write and Reach Out: AALL Chapters Tout the Value of Law Librarians through Journal Submissions, AALL Spectrum, March 2004)
Carol and I are both active in the AALL Publishing Initiatives Caucus, whose charge is to inspire and motivate law librarians to write articles for legal publications. To that end, Carol has just created a very useful guide to Publication Resources for Law Librarians.
The guide compiles information about legal publications, such as target audience, editorial contact information, and sample articles written by law librarians (when applicable). I suspect that there are a number of law librarians who could write some really killer articles, but, unfortunately, they don’t know where to submit them. This guide should help.
A word of advice for those new to writing: start locally. There are probably a handful of small, local associations or publications who are looking for content. Once you have successfully published an article there, writing for a national publication may not seem so daunting.