A State Department press briefing by Secretary of State Blinken threw a wrench in my week. I am not complaining. He was announcing an effort to get my brother released from Russia’s ongoing wrongful detention. But it meant that, once again, I was in family spokesperson mode for my family. And once again, I
I was fortunate to be able to go to the American Association of Law Libraries annual meeting in Denver. But it was hard, a lot harder than I remember. I consider myself an introvert and I do not like large gatherings in which I need to be social. The reality of being a part of
Like so many law libraries, we are returning to a mixture of in-person and virtual educational programming. But we still want the virtual output, a video we can post to our public YouTube account for the secondary audience activity. We had a speaker coming in and I decided to play around with creating a video
My apartment building got a coffee machine. It’s one of those counter top items and sits in the shared kitchen. It’s one of a number of small improvements that the new property management company has implemented in the last few months. I’m a huge coffee fan so I was thrilled to have an alternative to
It is hard to know what the truth is sometimes. It is less hard to know a fact. But that doesn’t mean that everyone has the same commitment to the facts that you, as a law librarian, might. I’ve run into this a couple of times with sites like the New York Times and Wikipedia,
I’m not sure if I’m mad or sad. Okay, those are words I would rarely use. More likely, I’m just irritated because some automagick technology is telling me to simplify my writing. Increasingly, if I’m in a Microsoft product, a little Editor bubble will appear to let me know that there’s something non-conforming with my
There are days that I feel like the most important thing I can do is revisit the way things have always been done. It is not out of any sense that things are being done incorrectly. But I know that, after a thing is decided, circumstances change. And so, even as you are putting a
I’ve been in the States for over three months now. This was my third emigration. The first was from Canada to the US when I was little. Then back to Canada, and now back to the US. The Canadian move was easy for me but I had to learn a lot about immigration law to
You can look back over years of law library professional development programming and see how often marketing comes up. It’s evergreen. I’ve never been confident that marketing is the issue. Like a technology applied to a bad process, marketing allows us to take action. But it doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, it may miss
We are approaching year-end (June 30) and it’s time to review the budget draft for next year. One thing that I’ve talked over with some staff is revenue. Fundamentally, courthouse law libraries have a single source of revenue. In California, it’s filing fees and, universally, these fees are a limiting factor on service delivery. But
We’ve drafted a hybrid work policy and will roll that out soon. It’s been an interesting experience watching hybrid continuing to roll out. There’s so much variety of control embedded in some hybrid environments. My guiding principle is this: staff can do the work from anywhere the work can be done. Now we need to
One thing that attracted me to my current role was to be able to work with a governance board again. A proper one. Every board has its own personality and I’m already learning the differences between this board and the one that I worked with in Hamilton County, Ohio, which was positive but different. The
I’ve just finished my first solo Board meeting. Our law library is overseen by a Board of Trustees that meets monthly. My first meeting I was just a wallflower. This time, I had to actually do a bit of heavy lifting. This included an attempt to help give some perspective on our financial income.
I
I’m learning Spanish. Now that I’m living in California, it seems a wise skill to pick up. One of the first things I accessed with my library card was their Rosetta Stone language subscription. I don’t aim for fluency, although who knows. One reason I started was because I was thinking about how to better
A recurring question for me is how to build lateral growth in the flat hierarchy of a law library. In many law libraries, you’ll have three tiers of personnel: director, intermediate management, front line subject matter experts. When you do the math, there aren’t enough jobs for early career law librarians to move up into,
I was preparing to switch jobs when I saw the news that Yolo County had chosen the open source Koha library catalog. In tandem, I noticed a posting about egroupware, another open source tool, and an alternative to Microsoft’s 365 environment. We are spoiled for choice when it comes to open source software.