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Law library discussions are dominated by format discussions. They tend to revolve around print, licensed databases, and discrete electronic files (ebooks). I have been wondering what an audio format might look like for a legal text, and whether it has a place in our information delivery. If it sounds painful, I admit that it might be. In fact, this post may need to come with some sort of reader warning! Wait until you hear…
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I do a lot of things from habit, moving from one thing to the next almost by rote. One can forget to stop every so often and look around and say, “what else can I improve while I’m here?” Over the last year, I had a number of opportunities to reflect on this as I was plugging away at an accessibility project. The biggest hurdle about change may be stopping to make a deliberate choice…
Leadership requires patience. Some things will take years to unfold. That’s the job. If you’re good at it, and circumstances allow, you’ll see your strategy work out. For more than a decade, I have kept watch for opportunities to make my staff positions less precarious. Fortunately, it’s been working out. For context, I manage a variety of information professionals. We don’t all work in the library domain and so our operational demands vary. But most…
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We’re engaging in holiday merriment. That’s what it’s called and you will be merry. I was asked to provide a favorite song for the work-related festivities. It’s funny how such a small request can be so difficult. We want to and are encouraged by other professionals to engage in social media and sharing about ourselves but the self that is shared is often only one face. If you’re a law librarian wondering how much to…
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I went live during a work meeting with my first attempt at using non-verbal phrases. One thing I’ve discovered is that you can chroma key – green or blue screen – any input into the Open Broadcaster Software Studio. This creates a lot of flexibility that I hadn’t imagined, since I can now stack inputs in different ways. Here’s what I did with PowerPoint. The first person I saw do this was over on Opensource.com…
I’m confident our law library is not alone this winter when it comes to planning for straitened circumstances next year. 2021 will be a year of reduced budgets. We lost staff positions and funding equivalent to 15% of our 2020 budget, which itself had been reduced from 2019 by 8%. As they say, anyone can manage when things are going well. The hard choices are where you earn your keep. Budget cuts are always hard.…
I was on a virtual call recently about customer service improvement. Customer service is a key aspect of law library service. It’s an area where there tends to be a lot of chatter about how to make improvements. This call was meant to flesh out a methodology that might be helpful in improving service delivery. Instead, I was struck by how the approach used generalizations to segment the audience. In particular, the definition of what…
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It is normal to follow patterns, habits that give us comfort. Or that make our environment familiar. The last 8 months have disrupted those patterns. I’m a morning person, but without a 2 hour commute, my decade-long morning habits have been hard to recreate. I’ve started to think about how, as we approach a year whose patterns may be more familiar, I will need to remember that 2020 was like no other for law libraries.…