School started last week and our youngest showed up for the first in-person session. The schools are mostly online but groups of a dozen or so come in every other day. This day, almost everyone had a Chromebook and the teacher made it clear there would be no handouts. Here’s how I took an old laptop and made a Chromebook over the weekend. There had been talk last year about a shift to all digital…

The word curation has become a bit precious in the last decade. Law libraries have been curating collections – making selections, choosing one thing and omitting another – forever. This recent post by the founder of Medium was very positive to see. He contrasts what he calls the relational and transactional approaches to consuming information. It’s important because the transactional – disintermediated, often algorithmic – approach treats all objects as equal. Faux curation. The post…

The summer is at an end. This means that eyes that may have been averted from organizational finances may have turned once more to the law library’s budget. To some extent, all law library funding is discretionary and volatile. Courthouse law libraries can be particularly volatile. When the funder asks for a mid-year budget cut, it can be hard to square with our actual spending. Law firms, law schools, and membership law libraries probably have…

We are months away from reopening but the planning has begun. One aspect is how to help the researcher return to the library. Unless we want to field a host of phone calls, the law library needs to create some confidence that, when the researcher arrives, they will be able to use the library. We are, like many law libraries, looking at online bookings. I’ve also been thinking about a simple capacity widget for our…

I’m halfway through my 2 week self-isolation. If the US-Canada border remains shut for the rest of the year, I’ll be doing this at least 2 more times. But the kernel of this post goes back to March, when the borders were closing. About 12 hours before they did, I drove down to retrieve one of our kids from the US. And I experienced the very large gap between legal information and legal practice. As…

To watch trends is to see developments as things move from one point to another. Every so often, the trend arrives at its destination. That’s sort of how I felt when I read about the Grayson County (TX) law library. Some local press is better than others in covering their courthouse law library, and so it has been easy to watch Grayson County’s story unfold. Courthouse law libraries in Texas, like in many U.S. states,…

I’m in self-isolation after a brief trip to the US. Isolation is not great for focus, let me tell you. But I’ve been going back through my notes on possible blog topics and this one jumped out again. For a couple of reasons. First, there was a lot of interest in this 5 year old post recently. Also, Google has added or renamed elements of the GMail interface. It seems like a good time…