The Ginger (Law) Librarian

Law Deans posted a piece of Dean van Cleave's essay on the courage of law students today: "Current students and recent graduates are exceptionally brave and optimistic. They are coming to law school because they really want a legal education. In the face of a difficult job market, a profession that is in a period of dramatic transformation, and even with the prospect of incurring significant debt, they want to study law, become lawyers, and have fulfilling careers. They are going against the grain, against the advice of commentators, some pre-law advisors, and probably friends and family. That takes a lot of courage, real courage. Amelia Earhart said, 'The most difficult thing is to act, the rest is merely tenacity ... You can act to change and control your life, and the procedure, the process is its own reward.' The decision to act also takes optimism." This is a good point. Law students today must be braver than law students at any other time in history. T...

I read an article from a long-time librarian about the state of librarianship today. The librarian's advice was to (1) avoid librarianship, but if you must enter the profession (2) learn useful skills that they don't teach in library school like how to code websites. Some library schools probably offer this as a course of study. Mine did not. My library school required a self-created webpage portfolio at the end of the program. In order to create this portfolio, we had to code the webpage from scratch. There was not a lot of instruction in coding, and we were mostly left to our own devices. While I did learn some valuable information at the time, I couldn't code a webpage today if I tried. And I do think that coding is a skill that is more and more useful for librarians. Librarians needs to be agile in their positions to remain relevant. We need to possess more skills than ever before and take on more responsibilities in a time of return-on-investment thinking in higher...