MIE and NLADA Present a live Webinar scheduled for January 25 -
Perles of Wisdom/Chuck in the Field: What Legal Services Programs Need to Know about LSC for 2012. Here's your
chance to find out what's happening from two of those who know the most, all without traveling to D.C.
Our library of recorded Webinars gets longer with the addition of
the free MIE Board of Directors Training
Toolkit preview.
On-line registration is now available for MIE's New Executive
Director Training to be held in May in Jacksonville Florida, and the
2012 National Fundraising Conference to be held in July in Boston.
Sure, your problems are new and unique, and pretty daunting, but the legal aid community has been through
a lot over the years. Many of its struggles and responses to adverse times are chronicled in the
MIE Journal and many of the
tools that have been used to respond are available in the MIE library.
Take advantage of the twenty-five years of history and three thousand eight hundred four documents in the library.
The Winter issue of the MIE Journal is now available in the
Library for those of you who are subscribers. The Special Feature for this issue
is "When the Going Gets Tough ... Again" with
articles from some of the most knowledgeable and forward looking leaders in the Legal Aid Community and beyond.
There are also wide ranging articles and features extending all the way from "The Paperless Office"
to "Deer and Loathing in Legal Aid." There's much more, and, of course, this issue's crossword puzzle.
As usual we have made the
table of contents and some sample articles from the current issue
available to anyone. But, you're not just anyone.
If you or your organization aren't subscribers, you should join now.
Puzzlemaster, and Legal Philosopher Pat McIntyre has again agreed to make the puzzle solution
available. It would be cheating, however, to look before giving the puzzle your best
efforts. If you can't figure it out the solution is
here.
We are developing quite a library of recorded Webinars - on-line training sessions
you can attend at your convenience in the relative comfort of your own office (or home, or Starbucks, or
wherever and whenever you like. There are three so far, on
Donor Communications,
Financial Oversight and Internal Controls,
and 403(b) Retirement Plans.
We think these are a great addition to MIE's training offerings, but, of course, we'd like to
hear from you.
Since last we counted we've added 368 documents to the MIE library. That brings the total
to 3,686. Count them yourself in the Library or use our
sophisticated search engine to find exactly what you are looking for.
Sure some of them are duplicates because we try to post many documents in
both pdf and word processing formats. Still, that represents a lot of accumulated knowledge
and expertise. Almost all of those documents were created and / or submitted by our
subscribers. The MIE Library is an awesome resource.
No doubt you know that MIE now provides for on-line registration and
payment for most of our training events, and conferences, as well as
on-line
membership subscription. You can use your credit card or PayPal account to either register or join.
We think it's a useful service, but we'd like to hear from you if you have ideas how to make it better
or easier.
It isn't really new, but many readers don't realize that our on-line version of the MIE Journal is
fully interactive. The table of contents is hyper-linked and you can jump directly to any article.
If an article is continued later in the Journal, you can jump directly there by clicking on the continued
link. If an article references an internet resource, you can go there directly just by clicking on the
reference.
Maybe you don't know, what an incredible resource the
archives of the MIE listservs are. You should look them over (if you are a
subscriber, of course).
Link. Here's an example. A few years ago - I can't remember exactly when -
Nan Heald had a discussion on the Managers list about Work From Home policies.
I go to the archive and search for "Heald." I scroll down a little and there it
is. I click on the topic and there is her message with the string of all the
responses to it. OR I search for "Work From Home" and there is Nan's conversation
and a couple of other conversations all sorted by relevance.
Maybe you can't see it, but the MIE website is sitting on
a newer, faster, shinier, more secure server. Depending
on the speed of your connection, it should make downloading documents
faster, and it should solve some of the email problems we have been having
lately.
Some people report having trouble downloading Word documents
from the MIE Library in the newest version of Internet Explorer. They get a
message something like, "To help protect your security, internet
explorer will not let you download files from the MIE Library. Click
here for options." When you chose the "download file"
option, nothing happens. There are two ways to fix the problem, the easiest being to
abandon Internet Explorer, the other being to fix Internet Explorer.
Both are outlined in a new help page in the library. Look for the "Having
trouble downloading Word docs from the Library?
Here's how to do it." link.
There is a lot that's new on the MIE website, but much of it is
barely visible. For example, we have upgraded the software platform
this website sits on and installed a new search engine in the Library. You'll hear more
about the search engine (TextIndexNG) as we go along. It is much more sophisticated than
our old library search engine. Among other things it utilizes the
Levenshtein Distance. Here's
how it works in practice: Suppose you are looking for articles in the Journal by someone named
Geminani. You do a search on his name and it comes back empty. You could try a "similarity
search" using the Levenshtein Distance by putting a percent sign in front of your search word -
"%geminani." The multitude of writings of Victor Geminiani from the March 1992 issue to the
most recent issue are returned. (In case you didn't notice, you had misspelled his name
the first time. The new search engine allows you to search for similar names.)
Here is a tip: If Internet Explorer tries to protect you
from the MIE Journal and won't let you download it by clicking on the link
in the MIE Library, right click instead (use the right button on your mouse
instead of the left) and choose (in IE 8.0, anyhow) "Open," "Open in
New Tab," or "Open in New Window." It should work.
MIE has built quite a sophisticated database of job descriptions
for the legal aid community. When the library started, job descriptions consisted of
"attorney, secretary and paralegal." The newest additions to the Human Resources wing of
the Library include job descriptions for "Senior Manager," "Database Administrator,"
"Grants and Compliance Administrator," "Assistant Comptroller," "Accounting Assistant,"
and many more. There are still plenty of new and improved job descriptions for our
more traditional jobs.
If you haven't tried the advanced search feature of the MIE library for a
while, check it out again. By searching from a particular section of the library, it
allows you to focus your search on just that section. For a while the feature wasn't
working, but no one told us. If you see anything in the MIE website that doesn't
work like you think it should, or if you have any ideas for improvement please let us
know. Use that feedback button at the top of the page (the top of every page, actually).
You can submit your own documents into the library, and we encourage you to do so.
The library tells the type of file by its extension, so be sure your documents carry the
default extension for its document type, e.g. ".doc," ".wpd," ".txt," ".xls," etc. The
document submissions will go to MIE staff for approval. As good as it might be, we really
don't want your recipe for blueberry pie. MIE staff will try to add a .pdf version of each
document that is submitted.
Your feedback is very important to us. There is a feedback button at the top
of this page and every page in the site. Please use it to tell us of problems you find,
bugs you run into, or ideas you have for improvement. There are bound to be problems and
bugs in a new and complex site like this one. MIE is a collaborative effort, and we encourage
your collaboration on the website. If you just want to give us a pat on the back, we'll
accept it.
The MIE website was developed by Kaivo Software,
to whom we are very grateful. It is built on an open source Zope software platform and is
part of the growing open source movement in the legal services community.
