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  Building the Future of Law Libraries: Artificial Intelligence, Opportunities, and Advancement

  Laskowski, Casandra; Buckingham, Richard; Marks, Taryn; Miguel-Stearns, Teresa; Niedringhaus, Kristina; Parsons, Patrick; Pike, George; University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law (2025-10)

  The Future of Law Libraries initiative convened six regional roundtables on Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Law Libraries with experts from academic, court, firm, and government law libraries, as well as allied professions, using scenario-building methodology to examine how AI is reshaping legal education, work, and systems and what law libraries must do to lead that change. The common message: legal information professionals must take an active, coordinated role in AI policy, training, and infrastructure or risk being sidelined as legal information vendors and non-library actors set the agenda. This white paper distills convergent themes and proposes collaborative directions. It explores three recommendations that sprang from the roundtables: 1) create a centralized AI organization, 2) develop tiered training for legal information professionals, and 3) establish a shared knowledge hub. If we are successful in this next stage, we will have coordinated advocacy and standards, a workforce with more advanced skills, and an open, authoritative, dynamic, centralized repository. We will be convening teams to push these recommendations forward and we provide a link in the Call to Action section for our colleagues to join this effort.
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  The Evolution of Bagrada Bug Management in Desert Cole Crops: The Legacy of John C. Palumbo (2010–2025)

  Keith, Macey; Calvin, Wilfrid; University of Arizona (College of Agriculture, Life & Environmental Sciences, University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), 2025-10-15)

  This article, published in the Veg IPM Newsletter (Vol. 16, No. 21), summarizes John Palumbo’s research following the 2009 introduction of Bagrada bug in desert cole crops. His work identified pest behavior, feeding injury, and management thresholds that shaped current IPM practices still guiding growers today.
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  Germination and Seedling Development

  Silvertooth, Jeffrey C.; University of Arizona (College of Agriculture, Life & Environmental Sciences, University of Arizona (Tucson, AZ), 2025-10-14)

  This article, published in the Vegetable IPM Newsletter (Vol. 16, No. 21), explains how temperature, moisture, and soil conditions affect seed germination and seedling development, with focus on lettuce thermodormancy and managing heat with sprinkler irrigation.
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  In-Dewar Optical Design Analysis for Cooled Hyperspectral Imaging

  Driggers, Ronald; Kellermeyer, Brian (The University of Arizona., 2025)

  Long-wave infrared (LWIR) hyperspectral imaging (HSI) systems enable the ability to probe the LWIR spectral band to identify specific materials; offering additional situational awareness compared to a passive LWIR imager. The HSI camera breaks the spectral band into hundreds of narrow sub-bands to accurately distinguish unique spectral signatures of differing materials within the field of view (FOV) of the camera. This separation of the waveband results in small amounts of signal focusing on individual pixels of the focal plane array (FPA). Due to the emissive nature of LWIR radiation, both the spectrometer and focal plane need to be cryogenically cooled, minimizing the impact of noise and self-emission from the optics. This introduces a large amount of thermal mass in the cold space which results in a long cool down time, or a larger cooler, compared to an equivalent cooled broadband LWIR system. The resulting increase in size, weight, and power (SWaP), as well as cooldown time, can have adverse impacts to the operational capability of the platform the system is mounted on. To minimize this impact, the design form of the in-dewar optics is typically an all-refractive solution, using multiple lens elements to minimize the space claim. Visible hyperspectral imagers typically use reflective solutions to maximize the SNR of the system. However, this leads to a larger amount of space claim than a refractive configuration which is why it is typically not pursued for the LWIR. The purpose of this analysis was to perform an apples-to-apples comparison between a LWIR refractive and reflective solution, which ultimately demonstrated that the reflective solution does not provide any significant benefit in the LWIR.
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  Variations, Causes, And Consequences of Bureaucrat-Led Public Engagement In A Hybrid Regime: A Case of Thailand

  Baldwin, Elizabeth; Tosuratana, Wasimon; Jo, Suyeon; Schuler, Paul; Osorio, Javier (The University of Arizona., 2025)

  Research on direct public participation has largely focused on stable democracies with only recent extensions to some stable authoritarian contexts, while hybrid or oscillating regimes remain understudied. This dissertation addresses this gap using Thailand as the empirical setting. It asks: (1) what do direct participation or public engagement practices look like in a developing democracy with volatile politics, and (2) what drives variation in those practices? I conceptualize public engagement variation along three dimensions (recruitment inclusiveness, information flow or communication mode, and perceived impact) and operationalize them as indices at the policy-task level rather than at the level of individual public engagement activity, to better reflect how public managers make decisions. The study uses administrative data, original interview data, and original survey data conducted on K3-level Thai public managers and their equivalents covering 230 policy tasks, nested in 125 managers, across 8 organizations. At the policy-task level, multilevel linear models with random intercepts for individuals and organizations show that higher Public Service Motivation (PSM) and greater political autonomy are associated with higher scores across all three indices. Other variables, such as technocratic orientation and legal requirements, have different relationships with different dimensions. For example, having no legal requirement but having norms to engage the public has a significant relationship only with the perceived impact of the engagement activities of a policy task, not with inclusiveness or communication. These findings suggest that it might be useful to model public engagement as multidimensional dependent variables, since disaggregating the dimensions can reveal more specific ways that independent variables influence variations of public engagement. The study also compares the policy-task level results with results from analyses at the engagement-activity level. These results diverge in theoretically informative ways. No predictor is consistently significant across all dimensions within one activity. Attitude toward democracy shows a significant negative relationship with committee meeting’s information flow while it does not appear as a significant driver at the policy-task level. Technocratic orientation has positive relationship with committee’s inclusiveness but not task-level inclusiveness. These patterns are consistent with managers making policy-task-level design choices rather than thinking about each engagement venue or activity in isolation. Overall, modeling participation with policy-task-level indices aligns more closely with theoretical expectations, but these indices still have limitations and should be further refined.

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