CRIV BLOG

With summer behind us, CRIV is looking forward to the fall and to working with AALL members and outside vendors to address concerns, advocate for best practices, and facilitate open and useful communication.  We hope to hear from members about how we can best serve you. 

One issue that’s come up repeatedly is that of the availability, quality, and consistency of usage statistics provided by database vendors.  If you’d like to work with us on that – or anything else – we welcome that participation!  We hope to address that issue this fall.  Other concerns we hear about from time to time include bundling of products, integration of AI functionality into databases, the relationship between print and digital pricing, and clarity and transparency about database content and potential content.  Again, if any of these issues are of interest, we’d love to hear from you.  And even if they aren’t, we’d still love to hear from you and learn what issues you do care about.  So, please contact me (jeanne.price@unlv.edu) or any of the CRIV members to share thoughts, concerns, willingness to help, whatever.

As the annual meeting is also behind us, it’s a new year AALL-wise.  All of our collective CRIV thanks go to last year’s chair Cynthia Condit and members Saadia Iqbal and Elizabeth Outler.  Cynthia brings such warmth and steadiness to everything she does and her leadership of CRIV helped us all stay on track; Cynthia’s service led to, among many other things, improvements in the CRIV webpages and CRIV tools, strong and useful communication with our vendor representatives, and a more visible CRIV all around.  And Elizabeth and Saadia will similarly be much missed.  Elizabeth was our Thomson Reuters vendor liaison and both Elizabeth and Saadia were active CRIV members and consistent contributors to CRIV goings-on.  Many, many thanks to all three of you.  We already miss you.

The very good news is that CRIV welcomes three new members this year (yay and thank you!).  Mary Jenkins returns to CRIV (after a bit of a hiatus) from New Hampshire (Mary is the Library and Research Services Manager at Devine, Millimet & Branch); Katie Lynn joins us from North Dakota where she serves as the Technical Services Librarian at the University of North Dakota Thormodsgard Law Library; and Yasmin Morais come to us from D.C. where she is Head of Collection Services at the University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law.  Again, many thanks to the three of you for your willingness to contribute; we are so looking forward to your all being a part of CRIV.

So, please let us hear from you.  CRIV can be a force for good and we hope to make that the case this coming year.