One thing that attracted me to my current role was to be able to work with a governance board again. A proper one. Every board has its own personality and I’m already learning the differences between this board and the one that I worked with in Hamilton County, Ohio, which was positive but different. The relationship between the law library…
Continue Reading Misgoverned

I’ve just finished my first solo Board meeting. Our law library is overseen by a Board of Trustees that meets monthly. My first meeting I was just a wallflower. This time, I had to actually do a bit of heavy lifting. This included an attempt to help give some perspective on our financial income.

I use the word “solo” loosely.
Continue Reading Perception Visualized

I’m learning Spanish. Now that I’m living in California, it seems a wise skill to pick up. One of the first things I accessed with my library card was their Rosetta Stone language subscription. I don’t aim for fluency, although who knows. One reason I started was because I was thinking about how to better support bilingual legal information needs…
Continue Reading Word of Mouth

A recurring question for me is how to build lateral growth in the flat hierarchy of a law library. In many law libraries, you’ll have three tiers of personnel: director, intermediate management, front line subject matter experts. When you do the math, there aren’t enough jobs for early career law librarians to move up into, and there never will be.
Continue Reading Law Librarian Lateral Growth

I was preparing to switch jobs when I saw the news that Yolo County had chosen the open source Koha library catalog. In tandem, I noticed a posting about egroupware, another open source tool, and an alternative to Microsoft’s 365 environment. We are spoiled for choice when it comes to open source software. Increasingly, we can make smarter…
Continue Reading Open Source Helping Hand

I almost snorted my coffee. My newsfeed popped up an article by a lawyer that described the appropriateness of the legal profession’s caste system entitled “Separate, not equal.” His position seems to be that not all legal professionals should have an equal expectation of access to legal information, whether due to “lawyers … [being] slow to accept paralegals…”…
Continue Reading Caste Away

As we were preparing to reopen for the first time last year, it became clear that our reference schedule needed a rethink. I talked about it last October as I was starting to work through permutations and get staff input. We implemented a revised schedule in January and almost immediately needed to tweak it. I think there will be an…
Continue Reading Reference Schedule Redux

I’ve been doing one-on-one meetings with all of my staff at my new job. It’s something I’ve done each time I have moved. And I’m reminded, once again, how valuable it is to sit down with everyone, out of the chain of command and hierarchy, and just talk. One thing that came up, and which I’ve been asked in other…
Continue Reading A Small Knowledge Share

I have not always thought about public access to legal information. I haven’t ever been opposed to it. I started in an environment where my audience was prescribed: faculty and students in a law school. But my perspective has morphed over time from the technology delivery aspect to thinking more about who the people who access it are. After more…
Continue Reading The Closed Garden of Law Libraries

Allow me a self-congratulatory moment: this is my 1,000th blog post. It came as a bit of a surprise, as it’s not something I was tracking. When I enter the blog dashboard, I usually click on “Add new post” and leave once I’ve written it. WordPress shows you how many posts you have and one day, doing the math of…
Continue Reading Old 1,000th

This blog has always had a bit of this and a bit of that. I noticed recently renewed interest in a some blog posts on Canadian legal research apps, one a decade old, one about 4 years out. Out of my unending curiosity, I decided to take a look at legal research apps again. This time, in light…
Continue Reading Last Call on Legal Research Apps

Today is my last day at the Great Library. It’s been nearly 15 years and I’m long overdue for a change. I am not part of the “Great Resignation,” though, as this departure has been years in the making. I have been unhappy in my role for much of the last decade, so my leaving is not at…
Continue Reading Goodbye, Old Paint

I was talking to a legal publisher about some training recently, as we’ve had some staff changes in the last year. At some point, I became backup for one of our staff managing our electronic access accounts, as you do when you work in a small team. When that staff person moved on, I’d just kept doing the task. When…
Continue Reading What Lies Beneath