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,
Playing the Field
Readers Choice
July 2019
Latest from Explorations with Information and Technology
Annual Meeting Hangover
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
Open Source Path to a CLE Recording
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
Commit to the Bit
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
Fact or Friction
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
Machined Language
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
Look for Desire Paths
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,
The Immigrant and the Legal Information
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
Law Library Awareness
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
The Cost of Charging for Law Library Services
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,