The Ginger (Law) Librarian

Happy Fair Use Week 2017! Fair Use Week is an annual celebration of the important doctrines of fair use and fair dealing. The week is designed to highlight and promote opportunities presented by fair use and fair dealing, to celebrate successful stories, and to explain these doctrines. For law libraries, AALL has created a wonderful resource called Guidelines on the Use of Copyrighted Works by Law Libraries . This guide discusses, among other things: The Copyright Act Fair Use The Library Exemption The TEACH Act And the various rules that govern reproduction of copyrighted material The area of copyright law is constantly in flux as we learn more about what fair use means through case precedent, particularly for libraries and archives.  We've seen the ongoing Google Books litigation, with post on the progression of the case  here  (District Court), here  (Court of Appeals), and here (SCOTUS).  The Georgia State case that involves libr...

Barbara Fister over at InsideHigherEd recently discussed practices for designing learning spaces in libraries . Her post was informed by a new report published by  Project Information Literacy  called Planning and Designing Academic Library Learning Spaces. The report involved interviewing 49 librarians, architects, and consultants involved in 22 library construction projects that were completed between 2011 and 2016. The research probes how these three parties negotiate their values and incorporate them into designs, what kinds of learning are these new and renovated spaces meant to support, and what best practices (and worst practices) might inform libraries embarking on a renovation.  Fister noted a surprising finding that [s]tudents weren’t part of the discussion, or at least not in any depth, in a majority of these projects. Apart from gate counts and a focus group or survey here and there, studying student needs or asking their opinion wasn’t part of the plann...

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article this week on colleges being " obsessed with smartness ."  The "pecking order" of higher education — and the ratings that we use to establish the quality of our colleges and universities — has come to depend almost entirely on acquiring smart students.... Colleges receive their place in the latest magazine rankings, in large part, based on their selectivity in admissions, and upon factors like retention and degree-completion rates. Guarding those rates leads us to select the best possible students — because, of course, they are the ones most easily retained and most likely to graduate. The real purpose of a college education, by contrast, should be to develop smart students. Their development depends not on the quality of the entering class but on the quality of our teaching and the ability of our institutions to cultivate intellectual and affective skills. If our campuses were driven primarily by a desire to dev...

A wonderful colleague who pumps out an admirable amount of scholarship recently turned me onto Scrivener . Scrivener is great for its ability to organize research and act as a word-processing tool. It was originally created for writing novels or screenplays, but more and more law professors are adopting it. The beauty of a tenure-track law librarian position is that it attempts to give law librarians full citizenship in a law school, which as any law librarian knows, is an uphill battle. My law school wasn't ready for it either, so they created a new tenure-track line for "law library faculty." This designation comes with the great responsibility to teach, research, and provide service akin to a "normal" tenure-track law faculty member. It also comes with the responsibility to provide all of the support that a law librarian gives. All of this to say that anything that helps me write more and write faster is a friend of mine. Scrivener has been invaluable f...

To go along with a recent blog post on practical considerations for a career is law librarianship , I thought I would highlight a type of librarian that is needed now more than ever. Newsworks profiled a young librarian working as a digital archivist to highlight the librarian of the future. As mentioned in the article, several years ago, Forbes Magazine listed the advanced degrees with the worst job prospects—and a master's in library sciences was No. 1 on the list. Despite that gloomy prediction and some staid image problems, young librarians say their work is relevant in the 21st Century and is as needed now as it has ever been. Jarrett Drake learned librarianship at the University of Michigan School of Information. He's Princeton University's first-ever digital archivist, which is a librarian who preserves things created on computing devices. His job is to figure out how to safeguard ones and zeros, and to do that, he gets help from a $10,000 machine called ...

Is a career in law librarianship right for you? The Findlaw blog asked this question to highlight law librarianship as an alternative to a traditional legal career. The post asks Like books? Like the law? Worried about the crushing debt of a J.D. or the soul-sucking hours of a young associate? Maybe it's time to consider being a law librarian.  For law firm librarians, these are precise questions to consider. For academic law librarians, however, salvation from the crushing debt of a J.D. is generally out of the question (save for independent wealth or  an increasingly rare full scholarship). The majority of academic law librarian positions require both a J.D. and a Master's of Library Science (or similar variation). Law firm librarian positions, on the other hand, generally require just the M.L.S. And with the cost-savings associated with avoiding the J.D. degree, the starting salary of $62,000 noted in the Findlaw post offers a decent cost-benefit analysis. As noted...