The University of Washington and the University of Pittsburgh are pleased to welcome two new partners to the Legal Scholarship Blog: the University of Georgia School of Law and the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law. We’re excited to have the help—and we’re happy that the blog has grown so much that we need the help.
In August 2007, teams at Pitt and the UW independently created blogs to help law professors keep up with conferences and calls for papers. Pitt’s blog also featured in-house colloquia and workshops. Within a few days we discovered that we had embarked on very similar projects and we decided to join forces.
Our transcontinental partnership has worked well. Over the last five years, we have posted thousands of events, calls for papers, and other items of interest to legal scholars.
We’ve made the contents of the blog accessible to our users in different ways. People can browse the listings, subscribe by email, subscribe to an RSS feed, or follow the blog on Twitter. At the request of one professor who wanted to be able to focus on his own subject areas, the Pitt staff even set up individual RSS feeds for all the different categories (e.g., Calls for Papers, Environmental Law, Human Rights).
Use of the site has grown. In the last year, we had over 6,000 visits each month. And as more people use the site, more people send us announcements to post. Meanwhile we have gotten better at searching to find events that no one has sent to us.
The increase in events and calls for papers to list has meant that we’ve had to scramble to keep up. Unfortunately, we’ve sometimes fallen behind. And that’s why we are so pleased to be joined by two energetic and creative librarians, one from UGA and one from OSU.
Our expanded team will continue the work begun in the first five years of the blog. And we hope to make improvements, too. For your part, keep those announcements coming. And tell your colleagues about the blog: the more people use it, the more announcements we’ll get and the more useful it will be to all of you.
