We have been open for a month. For those of you whose law libraries have reopened – sometimes multiple times – our experience is probably not much different from yours. As I had expected, it has highlighted some new challenges. But it has also enabled a re-connection to our patrons which has been gratifying.
Safety
And so the wheel turns. Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 to devices that can handle its specs. One of our kids was fired up for it so I did a circuit of the PCs in our house to see which could take it, which couldn’t, and which ones just needed a simple BIOS/UEFI
I am not what anyone would call adventurous when it comes to wardrobe. It makes my choices simple when planning what to wear to work. Pre-pandemic, the uniformity of the khakis and an Oxford button down made life easy. During the pandemic, I adopted a new uniform: every day was a casual Friday. Now that
One of the aspects of our pandemic work experience coming to an end that is most interesting to me is one’s ability to transition. You might say “transition back” but I’m not sure that’s a safe assumption. Law library leaders have had 18 months to rethink our work and how it’s done. It has been
I started Steven Pinker’s new book Rationality recently and was immersed in cognitive biases and fallacies for a couple of days. I didn’t finish it but one might say I was primed to appreciate an HBR article on employee feedback that appeared in my information flow. It struck a number of chords and I think
I am trying to disassemble our reference schedule and rebuild it for our new context. This involves trying to enable hybrid work as much as possible. And it also requires adapting to a smaller team, as a 2020 budget cut eliminated 3 staff positions. I’m nowhere near a solution but I’m starting to think
I posted a link to Twitter about personal VPN adoption and whether it was necessary any longer for lawyers. Separately, I’d also seen a discussion about what it means for lawyers to be competent with technology, as so many jurisdictions require now in their professional rules. There seem to be lots of people who
The headline says it all: File Not Found. “Kids these days” have been cocooned so long in search that hierarchical tools like folders are not intuitive. Color me unsurprised. But it’s something I’m interested in, because law libraries are in an information access role. If browsing isn’t logical or within a researcher’s scope, should
A law library director is a bit like a train engineer. The future is ahead of us, on the rails on which our train runs. It is a flight of fancy to think a library can go in any direction. Funding, guild pressure, legislation. We all have constraints that make it difficult to change course
It has been 18 months of working from my home. I don’t really think of work-life balance because work is part of life, something I enjoy, and necessary to pay the bills. But I noticed that a computer screen can only hold so much of my work AND the other parts of my life at
We are experiencing new challenges as we try to re-open law libraries and have staff access physical spaces. One thing I had not anticipated was how much we would rely on technology to enable it, and how little concern for equity there seems to be in doing so. Our need for normalcy should not create
Librarianship is the art of intermediation. Sometimes more, sometimes less. A key law library service is document delivery, which involves a negotiation between the recipient and the library staff. Those negotiations became more common and more complicated during the pandemic. It highlighted some opportunities to improve our document delivery decision-making by looking at where it
One of the most useful sessions I attended at the virtual AALL conference this year was on rural legal service delivery and “legal deserts.” One of the speakers, Dr. Lisa Pruitt, described a fundamental challenge for legal service delivery. In my mind, it overlaps not only a service challenge for law libraries but perhaps
I’m going to tell a story on myself. Our kids fall about laughing when it comes up, which, inevitably, it does. I enjoy crafting things. I’m not great at it but I’ve gotten better and, as you do, over time, you add new tools and techniques. When I was building foam knight’s armor for a
I submitted a video to the AALL Innovation Showcase this year. It was a good chance to stretch and, who knew, perhaps win something. I didn’t – the well-deserving winner was ReviewIt – but still had a lot of fun creating an entry. I’ve fiddled around with video editing a bit over the years but
Are you there? There’s a good chance that you and I are not reading these words at the same time. We engage in a lot of asynchronous activity once we leave grade school activities like reading together. At work, we may tend towards synchronous activity and communications again because we’re all in the same place.