Tag Archives: librarians

2012 PLI Treatise Catalog

The 2012 PLI Treatise Catalog is now available.  View it online here.  If you would like a print copy mailed to you, please email us at libraryrelations@pli.edu.

  New additions to the catalog include:

– Insider Trading Law and Compliance Answer Book 2011-2012
– Corporate Legal Departments: Practicing Law in a Corporation (4th Edition)
– The Securities Law of Public Finance (3rd Edition)
– Asset-Based Lending: A Practical Guide to Secured Financing (7th Edition)
– Corporate Whistleblowing in the Sarbanes-Oxley/Dodd-Frank Era (2nd Edition)

Law Firms & Librarians

Why is the partnership between law firm and librarians so important? Chuck Lowry discusses the symbiotic relationship between law firms and their libraries. He makes some interesting points about law librarians:

  • They will see from their research interaction with attorneys what information products or services can be replaced by something else that responds more closely to the firm’s actual information needs, thereby increasing both the effectiveness and the efficiency of the attorneys.
  •  There is no one in your firm better positioned to create, monitor and adjust the balance of firm-wide and specialty products that will get to fee earners what they need to practice law at the standard your clients and your management committee demand.
  •  They understand what the firm’s lawyers can and cannot do, will and will not put up with, have to have or want because the publisher called them directly.

 

This Book is Overdue

There’s been a lot of press recently about “This Book is OverDue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All,” Marilyn Johnson’s new book about the importance of librarians in an information-overloaded world.

The first reviews of the title have come out, and now you can read an exerpt of the book on both NPR and the Harper Collins website.

You can also check out the New York Times review of the title here.

Treatises As Purses

Kathy Kelly, a law librarian from Erie County, has started making purses and messenger bags out of treatise titles. Not only is it incredibly creative of her, but they look really cool!

I want one. You can read all about it in the Pittsburgh Tribune, here.

The Hollywood Librarian

A fellow MLS student forwarded this website on: “The Hollywood Librarian: A Look at Librarians Through Film.” While the documentary has a heavy slant towards public libraries, they do go into private and special librarians and their importance to the fields they serve.

(You can watch the entire thing as a preview through the Online Store’s website, if you don’t feel like buying it.)

Website here.

Interview with an MLIS Student: Natalie Pantoja

We interviewed Natalie Pantoja, a library student at Queens College, about her experiences in training, her thoughts on the future of the profession, and where technology fits into everything.


What role do you think technology is playing in your education and how will it impact your career?

Technology is the focus of all of my courses. Library education is structured around how we utilize technology to store, access, and use information. For my career, it is important that I learn to be flexible and knowledgeable about technology because certain aspects of it are always changing. The evolution of print to digital is the next frontier in the profession and I have to be prepared to be a middle woman between people and information.

Do you feel your education is adequately preparing you to enter the field?

I think the graduate program at Queens is probably like other programs in that it is what you make of it and so I’m going to try to learn everything I can about the field. Like any wide-eyed graduate student, I want to make my contribution and be innovative. So far, I have been learning how to catalog books and perform reference interviews.

The approaches librarians take to figure out what library users mean when they ask for a book/periodical/thing, is adapting to online reference tools. Google is the 21st century reference librarian, so we have to make technology better assist people in their searches. You have to instruct library users how to use reference sources and show them that there are resources beyond Google and Wikipedia.

How do you think the role of a librarian is changing and what part do you feel technology is playing in that? How is it staying the same.

I think that if you got your degree fifteen years ago you were probably learning different skills then you would be today. One thing that hasn’t changed about the profession is the importance of being able to help people access information. You have to teach people how to use technology to get what they want. This is difficult now because people are overwhelmed with information. Some of it false. Technology has also changed the way we keep bibliographic records and enhanced convenience for library users. Renewing books and ILL are easy to do online. Librarians are adapting to changes that are inevitable in the field. Google’s book digitization project has been in the news a lot lately, as has the Kindle. I think this is making librarianship more complex and it is really interesting to study what this will mean for libraries and archives.

NY Times Article About the Changing Role of Librarians

Sunday’s New York Times has an article about the changing role of librarians in this new digital age. While the article has a focus on school media specialists, it is an interesting read, and a great bit of visibility for the profession.

It also discusses some of the challenges that librarians face today; balancing an ever-shrinking budget with an ever-expanding amount of information, and the need for a trained professional to filter out the relevant content.

(It’s also the second most emailed article of the day!)

Article here.