Reading Time: 7 minutes
I’m still in my first year at my new role and it’s budget season. This is one of those perennial experiences that you would think would become routine. If you move libraries, though, you find that each organization does it differently, even if they use the same words. At the same time, I’ve been able to…
Continue Reading Building the Budget

Reading Time: 5 minutes
One of the things I’ve learned both from self-hosting a server inside my home and from using commercial hosting is that I want bad actors as far from my server as possible. When I migrated my hosting company recently, it was primarily for cost reasons. I was delighted, though, to find that they had substantially better…
Continue Reading Push Spam Further Away

Reading Time: 6 minutes
Librarians are knowledge workers. We work on things that require attention to detail and investigation, whether we’re cataloging books or answering obscure reference questions. I am always interested in new research on interruptions and thinking around how to improve the work environment so that librarians can be as effective as possible.

Microsoft recently surveyed 31,000 people…
Continue Reading Stop Bothering Me

Reading Time: 6 minutes
My recent travel to Canada couldn’t have been more normal. I drove up to the Ambassador Bridge border control with very few other cars from Canada. The person in front of me was in hijab and showed an ID as they entered the gate. They were waved through quickly and I took that as a good…
Continue Reading Prepare for Uncertainty

Reading Time: 6 minutes
My website has been on a North American host for the past half dozen years. It has been fine but the cost has been inching up and I’ve had some support issues. I have a budget in mind for this blog and it was starting to exceed the costs I want to invest. I had…
Continue Reading Spring Migration to New Web Host

Reading Time: 5 minutes
A colleague was in town and attending ABA Techshow so I swung by McCormick Place to see them. It’s been awhile and the Expo pass is free (something I will keep in mind next year). I walked over to the Metra and hopped on the train to the conference site. As I was waiting for them…
Continue Reading A Hole in the Bucket

Reading Time: 5 minutes
I crossed the border into the U.S. from Canada with my American wife in mid March. It seemed pretty normal, even given the extra paperwork we were doing: car import, dog import. I’m a green card holder and have gotten comfortable with the ease with which I’ve been able to cross the border. In the following…
Continue Reading Stay Clean at the Border

Reading Time: 6 minutes
I’ve signed a contract to write a book. I’m excited but also a bit daunted. It will be my third book and it is one I have wanted to write for most of my career. As I wrote recently, I started working in law firms when I was 15 and was quickly engulfed with law practice…
Continue Reading How to Prepare a Book

Reading Time: 6 minutes
About 6 years ago, I interviewed for a job in the U.S. I had come to the conclusion that, as our kids were aging out of the house, it was time for us to start planning our return to the States ourselves. The interview went okay—I was a finalist but not selected—but the process made me…
Continue Reading The End of the Remittance Man

Reading Time: 6 minutes
Is working with lawyers more likely than other fields to result with colleagues being impacted by scandals? I wouldn’t have thought so but now I’m not sure. The CEO of a former workplace—who hired me to go to Canada and who I had huge respect for—has just been let go (“is no longer employed by”) amid …
Continue Reading A Problem in the Legal Profession

Reading Time: 7 minutes
One long-term challenge for law library decision-makers is the position legal publishers take on their pricing. They incorporate confidentiality clauses in their contracts to prohibit sharing of pricing information. So, when I wrote about my decision about cancelling Bloomberg Law, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when their representative called to tell me to…
Continue Reading Fear of Information Access

Reading Time: 5 minutes
I was delighted to see the ABA Journal name Joan Howarth and Deborah Jones Merritt two of their 2025 Legal Rebels. I’ve already mentioned Prof. Howarth’s book—Shaping the Bar—and will recommend that you read it if you haven’t already. The bar exam, and the obstacle it creates while simultaneously demanding far more of…
Continue Reading The Bar as an Obstacle

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