One project has swept the inaugural American Association of Law Libraries’ Innovation Showcase, winning in all three categories of government, law firm and law school.
More surprisingly, the project was able to achieve its sweep despite some minor involvement by yours truly. More on that later.
The showcase, introduced by AALL last June, is presented as an opportunity to highlight members’ innovative projects in their own libraries. Each entrant created a short video, which AALL members could then view and log their votes.
Each category carried a first-place prize of $1,000.
The winning project in all three categories was Review-it, developed by Lindsey Carpino, legal content services supervisor at Baker & Hostetler, and Annie Mentkowski, agency librarian at the U.S. Railroad Retirement Board Library.
And, yes, that means they won $3,000.
Review-it is a crowdsourced tool that provides anonymous resource reviews to the law librarian community, allowing users to share feedback on legal resources.
“We wanted to create a platform that combines all the benefits of listserv discussion posts, word-of-mouth product reviews, and online product reviews, in one dynamic site,” Carpino and Mentkowski said in their video submission.
“Review-It does all of that but it also acts as a knowledge management repository because all the archived information is available at any time.”
So where do I fit into all this?
Wanting to come up with a clever device for their video, Carpino and Mentkowski asked me if I would record them as if I were interviewing them for an episode of my LawNext podcast. I was happy to oblige, and after just a couple of takes on Zoom, the video was done.
Unfortunately, unless you are an AALL member, you can’t see their winning video. But, trust me, it was great — well, except my part.