by Kerry Fitz-Gerald
The Spring Professional Development Workshop seems a long way away, but planning is already starting. Your committee is hard at work brainstorming ideas for presentations and programs and would love to know what you’d like to hear.
Have you recently heard a good program and think it would be worth sharing with LLOPS? Have you encountered an issue that you thought would be worth exploring further? Have you wished that someone could explain a new process, technology, area of law to you?
If you’d like to contribute to this brainstorming process, please leave a comment here or email me to share your thoughts with the committee.
Title: November Special Meeting
Description: Special meeting
Start Time: 12:00
Date: 2010-11-17
End Time: 13:00
by Kristine Lloyd
If you’re a dork like me and just hanging out listening to NPR on the weekends, then you heard about Kee Malesky’s new book, All Facts Considered. First let me say this, I love her name, and I have always been curious about, no let’s say jealous of, her job. I remember meeting an NPR reporter when I worked at the US District Court in Atlanta, and the first thing I asked her was whether she knew Kee Malesky. She was based in Atlanta and looked at my like I was crazy.
Some of the bizarre questions she’s been asked include: is a watermelon a fruit or a vegetable? How long is a New York minute? What is plastic soup? I’m not sure what plastic soup is, but it sounds disgusting, and frankly, not very nutritious. I want some questions like that. Couldn’t I just once get a question like that, instead of, can you find me a case that says “X”?
by Karen Helde
The programs at this year’s WestPac Annual Meeting raised a number of 
provocative questions. Can you use superheroes and comic books to teach law school students concepts of law and justice? Do popular films provide a forum to work out knotty social and legal issues like the definition of marriage? Does WestlawNext mean the end of the world as we know it? Continue reading 'Wine Law: A Tasting'»
by Kerry Fitz-Gerald
I buttonholed Cheryl Nyberg recently to ask her what she was reading. After some polite demurring, she allowed as how she had recently read and appreciated an article entitled “Thinking Like A Librarian” by Richard Buckingham, 12 T.M. Cooley J. Prac. & Clinical L. 1 (2010). She was motivated to pick up the article both because of her professional interest in teaching students how to do research and because she’s used the title phrase herself when talking to students. Noting this, she speculated that since the current generation probably doesn’t know Paper Chase, the phrase may have lost some its resonance. Continue reading 'What are you Reading Cheryl Nyberg?'»
by Karen Helde
I like Seattle Public Library’s Shelf Talk blog for its coverage of SPL news, local happenings and literary events, as well as its reading suggestions and general interest in all things bookish. I especially enjoyed a recent post about a purse snatcher thwarted by a well-read gentleman and a stack of library books. Next time you walk past a hefty USCCAN volume, give it some respect. What appears to be a mild-mannered tool for researching legislative intent may in fact be the sidekick of a crime-fighting superhero.
by Kristine Lloyd
There are many things I covet, and typically these things are sartorial in nature. Like that scarf I bought off the mannequin last week as I just happened to be strolling through Nordstrom. But I should really start saving my pennies, because I am starting to get seriously jealous of all of the cool gadgets floating around out there. I’m starting to feel like a troglodyte reading my print book on the bus every evening while other riders whip out their fancy e-books or type up their grocery lists on their PDAs. I might as well be reading a stone tablet.
Of all of cool tools out there, the gadget I covet the most is the iPad. I’ve seen a few on the bus, those cool early adopters, but I am sure I’ll be seeing more and more of them. I recently read about a new app that lets you annotate documents on your iPad. Can you see where this is going? Not that I want to annotate cases, but this would have great utility for our lawyers and law students. It makes me wonder if the all-digital, all-the-time library really is in our future. Will we just be a desk checking out iPads to our patrons one day?
by Kristine Lloyd
What would it mean to have a library that anyone could access from anywhere? Would it be like the Library of Congress on steroids, with full-text books and serials? These are some of the questions that bear asking when discussing the prospect of a national digital library. And no, this does not mean Google.
In his article “A Library without Walls,” Robert Darnton discusses some of the advantages of having a national digital library, along with some of the potential roadblocks to establishing one, such as cost and copyright, the latter of which has certainly hampered the Google Books project. The author points out that many countries have digitization projects underway. The Netherlands, France and Japan are a few of the countries that are working to create national digital libraries. The Japanese have ambitiously decided to digitize their entire national library in two years. That sounds like an around-the-clock project to me. These are all smaller countries, and one wonders whether our country is just too large to actually coordinate such a project. Of course, Google has already made significant headway, hitting the 12 million mark of books digitized. And so it seems that Google Books is the closest thing we have to a National Digital Library. That will end the day they start charging consumers for access.
by Kristine Lloyd
It’s pretty neat when someone you know gets nominated by the President of the United States to work in his administration. Ok, so I don’t personally know Susan Hildreth, chief librarian of Seattle Public Library, but since she is a librarian and from Seattle, I feel like I do. She is being considered for the position of director for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and she may be confirmed as early as mid-November. If only we could vote on this one!
by Kristine Lloyd
One of the greatest challenges to web-based training, besides the technological issues, is facing an audience as hushed as a group of theatre-goers. Sure, the geographical reach is endless, although you don’t get to whisk off to Paris anymore for a day on Avenue Montaigne and a one-on-one orientation, but teaching to a group of zombies does not always instill confidence in your professorial prowess.
How can you overcome the challenges of teaching to an invisible audience? I can only speak from my own experience, both from trainings I have conducted and trainings I have attended, but here are a few tips on keeping your audience engaged: Continue reading 'Are You There, Patron? It's Me, the Librarian'»
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