This Friday, October 17, at 2PM, Central Time, the podcast “Law Librarian Conversations,” will host a conversation about law librarianship education and as a career. Brought to you by the Schmid Law Library at the University of Nebraska College of Law, you can listen in to the podcast live on BlogTalkRadio.
Our special guests this month will be Penny Hazelton, Library Director and Professor at the University of Washington School of Law and Mike Chiorazzi, Associate Dean for Information Resources and Professor at the University of Arizona College of Law.
The show will be co-hosted by Roger Skalbeck, Associate Librarian for Electronic Resources, Georgetown University Law Library, Marcia Dority Baker, Access Services Librarian at the Schmid Law Library, University of Nebraska College of Law and me. We’ll be joined on the panel by Elizabeth Farrell, Associate Director at Florida State University College of Law.
Please join the conversation by listening in live, or subscribing to the podcast from iTunes or your favorite podcast service. Don’t forget to join the chat room during the show, if you listen live. Follow this link to listen in, join the chat room or call in at (347) 945-7183.
by Robyn Hagle
At the beginning of June, I attended a special program on Competitive Intelligence at SLA in Vancouver. The speaker was CI pro, Zena Applebaum. Zena’s goal was to empower the librarians and information professionals in the audience to “draw your own conclusions.” Librarians who don’t regularly do CI as part of their jobs typically stop at step 2 in the CI cycle (below). It’s time we started closing the loop. Our end goal when we do CI should be to mobilize the end user so that they are decision-ready.
Continue reading 'Special Report: Competitive Intelligence Program at 2014 Special Libraries Association Annual Conference'»
by Grace Feldman
You are probably well aware of the West Key Number System and headnotes but are you familiar with Westlaw’s Headnote of the Day provided on Thomson Reuters’ Legal Solutions Blog? If not, today’s headnote might make you want to subscribe:
A dog cannot recover for emotional distress.
Obserschlake v. Veterinary Assoc. Animal Hospital, 785 N.E.2d 811 (Ohio App. 2003)
While it is unlikely that the Headnote of the Day will significantly help you with your work (the blog does state that they “offer the Headnote of the Day as a diversion; the point of law it contains may no longer be good law”), it might brighten up an otherwise gloomy Friday! TGIF LLOPSters!
by Philippe Cloutier
Catching the bus downtown from the quiet realms of Capitol Hill I often pop into the AP News app and apprise myself of the day’s latest. Imagine my shock upon seeing this headline. How dare these librarians sully our respected title in a cheating scandal, garnering national attention and vilifying us throughout the world! I always thought putting librarians in charge of nukes a safe prospect but alas: At Core of Nuke Cheating Ring: 4 ‘Librarians’. As I read further the single quote marks around our honored label was thusly processed:
Investigators dubbed them “the librarians,” four Air Force nuclear missile launch officers at the center of a still-unfolding scandal over cheating on proficiency tests. “They tended to be at the hub” of illicit exchanges of test information… it was the four “librarians” who allegedly facilitated the cheating, in part by transmitting test answers via text message.
Damn those four “librarians”! Yet, what exactly makes them “librarians” according to these so called “investigators”? All I gathered is that they were the hub for text messages, applying this logic: high school kids and one’s children who never call are “librarians” as well.
My jest aside, our membership continually faces label issues and debates. Every year a new gauntlet is thrown down hoping to remove “librarian” or “library” assignments, aiming for more modern “information”, “knowledge”, etc. types. If the article says anything positive about “librarian”, in between the lines, it is that we are known for relaying, managing, and assessing quality information, even if by text. For better or worse, sensationalist headlines like this make it clear that the term “librarian” is generally and immediately recognizable; and, scandals excluded, esteemed.
by Tal Noznisky
Last March, Canadian libraries got caught in a quick swell of fear and worry over the freedom of expression. The Library and Archives Canada (“LAC”), employer of public service librarians, served their staff with a new set of professional guidelines. Many who commented on the new rules, entitled “Code of Conduct: Values and Ethics” reviled it. Boing Boing’s (and former Canadian library-worker) Cory Doctorow tagged it “censorship” and “surveillance.” Library Journal’s Annoyed Librarian called it totalitarian. What happened?
National Archives of Canada
Continue reading 'Library and Archives Canada vs. Librarians and Archivists in Canada'»
by Grace Feldman
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
-Steve Jobs
I recently read this quote on Pinterest. I had just moved from another state leaving some of my closest friends behind to take a job here in Seattle and though I missed my old home, I found myself nodding my head in agreement with the quote. I nodded because life had hit me in the head with a bag of bricks and in spite of this, I kept looking and did not settle. I nodded because I am finally truly satisfied doing what I believe is great work. I nodded until I came to the end of the quote and saw that Steve Jobs was the alleged source. What? Really? Steve Jobs said that? Continue reading 'Find What You Love'»
by Anna L. Endter
I’m back with a second report about my trip the ALA Midwinter Exhibit Hall. As promised in Part One, this post will 
focus on what I learned from talking with vendors.
Thomson Reuters
One of the products that Thomson was showcasing at ALA was EndNote, it’s citation management tool. Endnote is much like Zotero and RefWorks in that it was designed to help people organize and collect resources during the course of scholarly research. (As an aside, while it might seem like citation management is primarily an academic concern, attorneys in private practice also write articles and might benefit from learning to use one of these tools. And Zotero is free!). Continue reading 'ALA Midwinter Exhibit Hall: Part Two'»
by Anna L. Endter
A wrinkled t-shirt, as it turns out. This is a side effect of my shirt’s afternoon spent crumpled in a free ALA bag with other library swag and material. Today, I made a field trip to the ALA Midwinter 2013 Exhibit Hall.
Now, having just recently been to my first AALL Conference and experiencing that exhibit hall, I was curious to see how ALA does things. I was also looking for some perspective about the library profession generally since my focus has been on law librarianship. It was time to learn more about the larger world of linking people and information.
This post includes my observations about visiting the Exhibit Hall. Stay tuned for Part Two where I’ll report on my discussions with Thomson Reuters about its citation management tool Endnote and ProQuest about the Statistical Abstract of the United States.
Continue reading 'Today I Bought a T-Shirt: The ALA Midwinter Exhibit Hall, Part One'»
by Amy Eaton
I recently received a link to this article from March 2012. In it, the author, Jeff Rundles, laments the lack of customer service in both businesses and government entities. The one bright spot he found: libraries and librarians! Of course, this comes as no surprise to those of us in the field. Our number one priority is to take care of our customers, whether they are attorneys, students or members of the general public. Why do librarians excel when other entities, such as the Department of Motor Vehicles, fail? I think librarians are given a great amount of authority and freedom to assist our customers. My daughter had an internship at a large hotel chain one summer. She was working the front desk one day when a customer came to the desk with a complaint about their room. No one at the desk had the authority to offer the customer additional services or remove charges from their bill. The staff had to wait for manager approval. The customer left angry and frustrated and my daughter learned the importance of empowering your staff to handle problems as they arise. I know librarians who have had their children, attending universities in other states, pull and copy articles for rush requests. Many of us spend untold hours on the phone with customer reps for online services seeking to understand the vagaries of their databases in order to explain why we received the results we did. I have used Google translate to try and submit requests through foreign websites written in languages I don’t understand. What is the greatest length you have gone to in order to provide top notch reference service?
by Mary Whisner
myLOC, from the Library of Congress, lets you save folders of favorite images or documents from online exhibits. For example, I have saved to My collection an editorial cartoon by Herblock and a link to an entire exhibit on Brown v. Board of Education.
LC’s email postcards are fun (and educational!). I’ll use this blog post as an opportunity to send out holiday cards to all of LLOPS (and whoever else sees the blog). And I encourage you to poke around in myLOC yourselves: there are lots of cool exhibits, and you can send your friends great cards!
“Postcard” with a 1903 book jacket from The Call of the Wild.
“Postcard” with a poster from a Victor Herbert musical.
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