• Thursday’s Musing: The Value of Perception, the Librarian and the Library Space

    (photo (c) 2009 Dorli Photography, available here)   As collections are becoming more electronic, the value of the library space is becoming increasingly questioned. A trend among articles written by non-librarians is to link the edifice with the profession: the librarian works in a library, technology is making libraries obsolete, therefore librarians will also become…

  • The Empirical Value of Special Librarians: An Australia ROI Study

    The Empirical Value of Special Librarians: An Australia ROI Study

    One of the biggest difficulties with the law librarian profession—and really, this is true of any profession with a strong customer service and/or pedagogical component—is gauging the empirical value of what law librarians do. There is not a one-step, direct, easily definable correlation between a law librarian task, and how much revenue that task generates…

  • Academic, County, and Law Firm Librarians: Three Sides of the Same Coin

    Early on in Graduate School, I remember my Professional Adviser taking the time to sit me down and talk about the various career paths law librarians could embark on. Honestly, I was really only familiar with the law school’s library, using its vast, comfortable reading room as my command station to hammer out papers about…

  • Heartbleed bug makes internet users heartsick!

    Two whole years!  That is how long it took experts to uncover what may be the biggest security flaw to ever affect the internet.  It’s big.  It’s bad.  It’s out there.  Worst of all is that you have probably already been a victim.

  • Gmail Turns 10

    As a fan and admitted abuser of Gmail accounts (I have one for each personality I guess), I have to pass along this CNN Money article about Gmail turning 10 yesterday. To summarize, CNN Money points to these particular Gmail features as the reasons why Gmail became the industry dominant e-mail provider: Size of space offered:…

  • Et tu, ALM? Another Provider Up for Sale.

    Et tu, ALM? Another Provider Up for Sale.

    When the news broke a few days ago that ALM, formerly American Lawyer Media, was going to put up for sale, reaction from legal information professionals seemed subdued at best.  Yet we cannot help but wonder what this means for an industry that is still struggling to find its footing in the wake of one of the…

  • The Perils of PACER

    Anyone involved in legal research is more than familiar with PACER (the name, an acronym, stands for: Public Access to Court Electronic Records). Before we delve into the glaring weaknesses and errors of PACER, let’s just step back and give thanks that there is a way for users to access docket and documents filed in…

  • Majority of AmLaw 200 Firms Do Not Have Mobile Sites

    Jeff Richardson at iPhone J.D. comments on Law Firm Mobile’s recent study showing only 42.5% of AmLaw 200 firms have mobile sites–this, after the ABA’s 2013 Legal Tech survey stated 90% of attorneys use smartphones. Global 100 firms fare even worse: only 39 Global 100 firms have mobile sites. This is perplexing data–the legal industry is…

  • FOIA Futility

    As law librarians, I’m sure most of us have a FOIA request horror story or two (hundred): requests that took months to fill, required numerous follow-ups, or were never fulfilled at all. Unfortunately, our FOIA experiences are not out-of-the-ordinary. According to a recent study most government agencies are doing a poor job of handling FOIA…

  • How Are Public Libraries Changing?

    How Are Public Libraries Changing?

    Appearing March 7th in The New York Times, Katharine Q. Seelye’s article “Breaking Out of the Library Mold, in Boston and Beyond” (available here) examines how renovations of large, public libraries exemplify how the roles of public libraries and public librarians have drastically changed. Public libraries are moving far away from being dusty book repositories, and…

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