Reading Time: 7 minutes
My first discussion about equitable access at my current role happened during my interview. I was talking with some students, one of whom had hustled for the interview from work and frequently used the law library after their full-time job. Evenings are a time at which the law library is lightly or unstaffed. We had a
Continue Reading Small Changes for the Same Access
Reading Time: 4 minutes
I was downloading a government form the other day and it told me that I would need the Adobe Acrobat Reader. Umm, I don’t think so. Adobe is a corporation whose tools I avoid like the plague. Also, a PDF should not need a proprietary reader in order to be accessed. Despite the marketing, portable document
Continue Reading The Plague of Document Formats
Reading Time: 4 minutes
One of the interesting things about my current role is that it is two part-time roles. When I was hired, the role required a library director 49% of the time and a faculty member for the remaining 51%. It has resulted in a lot of unusual outcomes. For example, when I take a full day of
Continue Reading Split the Difference
Reading Time: 6 minutes
The semester started last week and I have been building out my course materials in our online learning management system (LMS). Our university uses Blackboard but I expect that users of Thomson Reuter’s TWEN or Blackboard’s competitor, Canvas, have been going through a similar experience. I’ve been surprised how much duplication is involved even when there
Continue Reading First Steps in Learning Management
Reading Time: 13 minutes
I cancelled Bloomberg Law. It was an agonizing decision-making process. The decision itself was not hard. If anything, it was obvious and overdue. That tension, of having an obvious decision that still needs to be teased out to its full extent, was a professional challenge. It has been a long time since I had found myself
Continue Reading Decision Dilemmas
Reading Time: 5 minutes
My immersion in law school life continues. All faculty are asked to proctor a final exam so I had that experience. The room slowly filled with laptops and piles of books and notes and outlines, sometimes supplemented with scratch paper. The laptops are a requirement for the exam. But I was still struck by the place
Continue Reading The Place for Print
Reading Time: 7 minutes
My wife and I are house hunting. We are hoping it will be our last move, as we have moved a few times already, always because my desire for challenging work took us to new places. It has meant identifying and engaging a number of specialists—a realtor, a lawyer, a painter, an electrician—to help us. Our
Continue Reading The Humility of Expertise
Reading Time: 2 minutes
This is the first Christmas in 6 years that all of my family will be in North America. The first Christmas my parents have bothered to get a tree to decorate, since it didn’t feel like much of a celebration with my brother held hostage in Russia. I’ve been reflecting on the many well-wishers I heard
Continue Reading Thwarted Prayers
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have departed X as a social space like so many others. You will still find my handle on there but it’s not somewhere I linger. My brother’s ordeal in Russia meant I used that account for a lot of public advocacy and I’m worried that, if I yield it, it will be taken up by
Continue Reading Re-Publish Your Twitter Archive
Reading Time: 11 minutes
Let us take a walk into the unknown. I have spent most of the last year thinking about how legal scholarship is promoted and connected. Not so much from the perspective of the librarian assisting faculty, but from the perspective of the librarian or lecturer who is promoting their own scholarship. One of our law school
Continue Reading The Found Legal Scholar
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I am leaning increasingly on a philosophy of slow news. It’s a pretty big change for me, because I used to enjoy getting information from multiple media, especially the radio. NPR and PRI podcasts used to be a staple. But over time, I have found audio and video takes a long time to tell a
Continue Reading Slow News Days
Reading Time: 7 minutes
One of the things I enjoy in life is when two things I’m interested in converge. I am finding that with teaching, as I read up on how to do it better. One topic—mindset—grabbed my attention because it’s such a common thing to consider in management too. I had always thought of them as scarcity and
Continue Reading An Unsettled Mind
Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been on Mastodon for nearly two years. It has been interesting learning the new culture. I tend to take people at face value there so, when someone asked why their posts weren’t gaining engagement, I responded with some suggestions. It wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
Here or There
They were very polite about
Continue Reading Anti-Social Broadcast
Reading Time: 10 minutes
I have been unhappily surprised by the apparent lack of usage data available to academic law libraries. After talking to some folks at the MAALL annual meeting, my own experience seems to be a common one. While our colleagues in other law library contexts may have rich usage data, legal publishers do not make this
Continue Reading Measure What Matters
Reading Time: 7 minutes
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. One of the things I’ve been looking forward to in my new role is teaching. The calendar has rolled around and I was asked to teach next fall, which is really exciting. I’ll be teaching a course on law practice technology, which is also
Continue Reading An Illuminated Path