David Whelan

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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

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

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

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

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

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