Oakland County Law Library (MI) Contact: Dianne Zyskowski, Law Librarian Oakland County Law Library 1200 N. Telegraph Road, Dept. 450 Pontiac, MI 48341-0450 E-mail: zyskow@oakland.lib.mi.us Website: www.oakland.lib.mi.us/oakllaw.htm LAW DAY OPEN HOUSE Activity Summary: The Adams-Pratt Oakland County Law Library in Pontiac, Michigan welcomes everyone. People from all walks of life and diverse ethnic groups, citizens and non-citizens, make over 45,000 visits to the law library every year. Our 1999 reference desk statistics show that over 50% of visitors are attorneys and government employees, 36% are from the general public, and 9% are law and paralegal students. Law Day, May 1st 2000 presented a wonderful opportunity to market our presence in a big way and to encourage even more people to use their public law library. The “Celebrate Your Freedom: Democracy and Diversity” theme fit in perfectly with our goal: to make more people aware of, as well as take advantage of, our fine law collection and our legal reference services. Activity Narrative: On Law Day, using the “Celebrate Your Freedom” theme for all of our promotional material, we: Held an Open House. We invited the general public, attorneys, paralegal students and their teachers, Oakland County government employees and public librarians in Wayne and Oakland counties. With a provisions budget of $75 we decorated the Law Library with the red, white and blue “Celebrate Your Freedom” theme, and served refreshments (many homemade!). LEXIS Publishing and Shepard’s provided some fun giveaways and gifts for free drawings. Almost 260 people visited the library throughout the day. Introduced our new Shepard’s Public Access Program, expanding our LAN’s electronic resources that we provide free to everyone, and increasing our ability to deliver prompt, up-to-date service. This Public Access Program provides current citation validation, plus full text documentation retrieval from all jurisdictions. Vendors from LEXIS Publishing and Shepard’s trained 125 attendees to use this new product, as well as the Michigan and Federal LEXIS Publishing CD-ROM products on our LAN. Revamped our Website (www.oakland.lib.mi.us/oakllaw.htm). We reformatted our home page and updated our links to law-related websites. Staff developed an Internet legal research tip sheet and how-to instructions for the general public searching for Michigan statutes and recent court decisions. Staff demonstrated these webpages during the Open House and trained attendees to retrieve Michigan primary law from the Web. Publicized all of these events and the “Celebrate Your Freedom” theme in the weeks preceding Law Day. Some of the local and the legal press published our press releases, radio station WJR added the event to their website and station WNIC announced the event on the radio on May 1st. We broadcast emails on the County employees’ listserv, as well as the public libraries’ listserv. Shepard’s sent personal invitations to all Oakland County attorneys, and we distributed invitations to library directors, encouraging their staffs and patrons to attend. May 1st served as the kick off for services, which extend beyond the Law Day. We signed up for a year’s subscription to Shepard’s Public Access Program. All patrons have free access to this program on two public computers, as well as at the Law Library Reference Desk. People from around the world who can access the Internet may use the law site links on our Webpage. Anyone unfamiliar with legal research in Michigan has easy access to our “Legal research tips” pages from our homepage. In the fall we plan to expand upon these “Legal research tips” pages (which we used as a handout at the Open House) and offer half day training sessions to public library staff interested in helping their patrons access law on the Web. Sample Programs Home | By Audience | By Location | By Sponsoring Organization