This was a busy week. I was fortunate, because when there is media interest in your situation, it can often be a surprise. It made me realize how, over the past year and a half, I’ve learned a thing or two about dealing with media. As a law library director, this may not be a skill set you’ve developed. It wasn’t one I had. So I thought I’d share some ideas. Law libraries talk a lot about marketing and I’ve got mixed feelings about that. We obviously have stories to tell. We frequently highlight the wrong thing, focusing on…

Work from home has meant that I have 4 hours a day – my 2-hour-each-way commute – that I didn’t have before. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t use some of those early hours for sleep. But the idle brain is the devil’s playground. When our company starting using desktop video conferencing, I started playing around with the virtual backgrounds. Part of my interest is just curiosity. But also my home workspace is shared with 2 other people and I’m intensely private about my family members. If I was going to have to do video conferences, I…

Leaders need time. For the observational leader, the pandemic has allowed us to see bad habits get amplified. One reason seems to be a penchant for busyness. Things we did that were a distraction have now become a drain. We value people being busy rather than thinking about the value of what that busyness produces. A Harvard Business Review article came by that put some of that in perspective. Here’s the article (the HBR edition is paywalled). TL,DR: you need time for strategy. If you value busyness, you are creating impediments to having that time. Busyness is a term of…

It’s Friday. Well, not when I’m writing this but … anyway. I’ve had a couple of things rattling around in my head that didn’t really fit anywhere else. One is an idea I’m starting to rough out a little bit for our law library. Another is something that other libraries have done that I want to emulate in spirit. One is just a “how would that work” idea. Thinking Outside the Physical Box This is an easy one. Amplify your in-building wireless when your physical access is closed. Google “wireless parking lots ‘public library’” for plenty of results. I like…

I license information for a living. That is what law libraries do. We are intermediaries between someone who is selling content and someone who wants to access content. Unlike law libraries, apps tend to fail at delivering licensed content. One reason is that most apps are either one-to-one (publisher provided) or one-to-none (free access). If I were to build an information app, these are my druthers. Let me start with two scope comments. First, I’m mostly going to talk about non-legal resources. It’s easier and the app market is bigger. But the challenges are the same since I’m going…

Law libraries aren’t restaurants but we face similar challenges in a pandemic due to our reliance on physical space for delivery. A restaurant may have multiple channels – dine-in, take out, catering – to generate revenue. When the pandemic closes your restaurant, a commercial success is maintaining those channels without in-person contact and potentially creating new channels. When our law library closed, our reference interactions dropped like a restaurant that relied on seating diners. I’ve been thinking about what this means. One last analogy and then I’ll let restaurants go. If your primary channel (in-person) disappears, that’s obviously a huge…