Reading Time: 8 minutes
I was talking with some folks recently and someone asked why our law library hired part-time staff. Was it for financial reasons? It isn’t and the financial rationale—a part-timer saves costs because you cut out benefits and other perqs full-timers get—is one reason I have avoided creating or keeping part-time roles at other organizations I’ve worked
Continue Reading Mind the Gap
David Whelan
The Referenced Librarian
Reading Time: 8 minutes
It’s always a great joy to give someone a job reference. It doesn’t happen often but it’s always a pleasure to see someone moving forward in their career, whatever that looks like to them. I recently was in a position to give two references and they were the opposite ends of the spectrum on how to…
Continue Reading The Referenced Librarian
And Back to Email
Reading Time: 9 minutes
Email is like the Go space on a Monopoly board. We start there with communications and we travel around the board, sometimes landing in unexpected neighborhoods, sometimes getting detained, but always coming back around to email. We have devised so many other communications tools and yet email remains a foundation when other tools falter. People may…
Continue Reading And Back to Email
Data, Decisions, and Maps
Reading Time: 10 minutes
I work at a county public law library that has transitioned from having physical branches to working with partner libraries. Soon after I arrived here, we closed our last physical branch law library and moved our resources to a different city within the county. This decision re-emerged recently as our governance Board was discussing our annual…
Continue Reading Data, Decisions, and Maps
Responsibility of Law Authors for Public Access
Reading Time: 13 minutes
I downloaded the District of Columbia Court of Appeals opinion in Trump v. U.S.A. as soon as I heard it had been issued. It was pretty amazing to be reading the words without having to have them interpreted for me, or chopped up into little bits by the media. And yet. Within a few pages, the…
Continue Reading Responsibility of Law Authors for Public Access
Adversarial Browsing
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I have pretty simple technical needs when it comes to my work computer. I like to think I’m relatively low maintenance for our IT team. I make a couple of minor interface tweaks—I tend to like my taskbar at the top of the screen, for example, something I picked up from Ubuntu—but I don’t really fuss…
Continue Reading Adversarial Browsing
Leadership Regrets
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I am coming up on 2 years in my current law library director role. It was coincidental, then, to read this piece about how difficult that period can be for new leaders. Scratch that. For any people who take on a new leadership role, even if they have been leaders before. I think it’s fair to…
Continue Reading Leadership Regrets
Accentuate the Positive
Reading Time: 7 minutes
Let’s start this post with a bit of a positive spin. I was reading a story about doing a negativity fast, based on this book that I haven’t read called The Negativity Fast. While I’m not a fan of the title (fast for me suggests something temporary, to be broken) the concept struck home…
Continue Reading Accentuate the Positive
Riding the Tide of a PC Upgrade
Reading Time: 8 minutes
I have a lot of curiosity about technology. That curiosity rarely collides with practice, though. I recently upgraded our parents’ computer and it gave me a good opportunity to think about my approaches to technology, how to tailor it to the intended use, and how to ignore the technology hype cycle. This means lagging behind the…
Continue Reading Riding the Tide of a PC Upgrade
It Boils Down to Professionalism
Reading Time: 7 minutes
I had the opportunity a couple of months ago to talk to a group about the impact of artificial intelligence on legal research. If you’ve followed this blog, you’ll know that I think the AI media hype is mostly that. I’m not sure how that overlays on the Gartner hype cycle, but I think it’s…
Continue Reading It Boils Down to Professionalism
A Bubble Off Plumb
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I’ve been sick. Not sick-sick but sick enough. It’s been nearly 30 days and I am finally kicking whatever this not-COVID-might-be-flu-sinus-chest-cold lingering crud. I don’t get sick a lot but this has really set me back on my heels. It’s the first time in years that I really just didn’t have a scintilla of energy to…
Continue Reading A Bubble Off Plumb
Audience Confusion
Reading Time: 6 minutes
Our law libraries are what we choose to make them. Resources are finite and so we make choices to use those resources. It was interesting to see that discussion of choices play out in some recent news involving law libraries and legal information access. When we make a choice about how we deliver information or what…
Continue Reading Audience Confusion
Small Groups, Loosely Connected
Reading Time: 5 minutes
The fragmentation of social media has been something to behold. I am still trying to wrap my head around what it means for law library marketing and outreach. We want to be where people are but that only scales so far. The other thing is that maybe they don’t always want us there. Ironically, it was…
Continue Reading Small Groups, Loosely Connected
Tighten the Screws
Reading Time: 9 minutes
I have been reivisiting how I secure my website. Over the years, I’ve dabbled with geo-blocking but it’s a lost cause. They are easy to bypass. I have done too much research on Russian websites that are geoblocked to know that you can’t keep determined people out. The ActivityPub connectivity I set up has highlighted that…
Continue Reading Tighten the Screws
Steps Between Cache and Site
Reading Time: 6 minutes
I may have been feeling too clever by half when I finally felt like I had my ActivityPub connection within WordPress sorted out. The first day of a new post rolled around (a new post will trigger awareness of the ActivityPub connector) and I saw the post appear as a Mastodon post. Then one of the…
Continue Reading Steps Between Cache and Site