When looking for technology to address a library problem, I was recently reminded of the tendency to look for answers in old, familiar places. However, that doesn’t always lead to a good solution to the problem at hand. Sometimes, the best answer to a library problem can be found in a different area entirely. While reviewing safety practices following a few significant security incidents on campus, access services staff identified a need for a way to call other staff for assistance. In situations where it would be unwise to step away from the service desk to get someone from their office to as ..read more

Samantha Ginsburg, Law Library Fellow at the University of Arizona's Cracchiolo Law Library, has been participating in a large project to gather data about the University's land-grant status and its impacts on Indigenous communities. She has authored this guest post to share her experience using GIS systems to present this data in a clear, visual way. Applying GIS in this innovative way is a first for the library and can serve as a model for others.  In the last year, the Daniel F. Cracchiolo Law Library undertook a significant task: researching and realizing the University of Arizona’s l ..read more

Getting our patrons to use our online catalogs can be a challenge, making much of our collections invisible. This summer, PowerNotes unveiled the new “Library Search” feature (conceived by Richard Leiter). When the patron enables the Library Search feature and performs a search in Google or Google Scholar, a PowerNotes box will show the top ten results from the patron's library on the same page along with the Google search results. The library results and the “see all results” link takes the user straight to their library’s catalog. This feature enables libraries to highlight their holdings wi ..read more

 Since 2002, Marshall Breeding has released an annual Library Systems Report, a "state of the nation" report on the library technologies market. Thanks to his efforts, the history of this industry over the last 20 years is well documented. The recently released 2022 Library Systems Report documents the impact the pandemic continues to have on the library systems marketplace. In short, it's a sudden acceleration of trends that have been growing for years, especially the trend of consolidation.  While much of the Library Systems Report is geared toward libraries of other types, th ..read more

The COVID-19 pandemic has been disrupting library operations and services for close to two years. In a previous entry, I wrote about disruptions to Technical Services workflows at my library. This time, I’m looking back on how the pandemic has disrupted our technological infrastructure and the changes we made to compensate.   First and foremost were the changes to our communications technology. Long reliant on email for most written communications, we had to find ways to replace the kinds of verbal conversations made impossible by the move to working from home. Enter Zoom and Teams ..read more

The Library of Congress recently updated the interface for its Classification Web product. For those of us in libraries that use LC Classification and subject headings, Classification Web has long been a valuable tool for quickly researching and assigning call numbers and subjects. It's more frequently updated and infinitely more convenient for users than the printed schedules of yesterday. In addition to call numbers and subject headings, Classification Web contains several other controlled vocabularies as well as the name authority file. As someone who used to look these things up in the pri ..read more

LawArXiv was launched in 2017 to provide legal scholars with an open-access, non-profit platform for preserving their work. By the end of the first year, over 700 articles had been submitted to the archive and there were plans for additional features to make the repository more robust and useful to the legal scholarly community. However, those plans never made it to fruition. Earlier this year, it was announced that LawArXiv would no longer accept new submissions.  At the recent Legal Information Preservation Alliance (LIPA) annual meeting, more details were shared about why the LawArXiv ..read more

  1. Introduce yourself (name & position).  Mahalo Lauren for keeping "getting to know librarians" going and giving me the opportunity to introduce myself to my dear colleagues. I am Keiko Okuhara and a mediocre librarian (ha ha!).  I am the Bibliographic Services/Systems Librarian (July 2003-May 2020) and the Metadata Services Librarian (June 2020-Present) at the William S. Richardson School of Law Library of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. 2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not? Yes, it does. I have been working in Hawaii for 18 years by now ..read more

One year ago this month, I posted about the experience of transitioning my Technical Services staff to working from home in response to the pandemic .One year later, we’re still here. Passing this milestone has caused me to reflect on how our situation has changed over the year and take stock of the lessons learned from managing a Technical Services staff remotely.  Technology is Key As I mentioned in my post last year, the sudden shift to working from home shone a light on the Digital Divide among my own employees. On one side of the divide, there was an employee with a personal deskto ..read more

1. Introduce yourself.  My name is Larissa Sullivant. I am the Head of Collection Services and Adjunct Lecture in Law at the Ruth Lilly Law Library, Indiana University Robert McKinney School of Law.  I started my professional career as a Slavic cataloger at the University of Michigan Graduate Library, and for the last 20 years I have been a law librarian.  2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?   I think that my job title, Head of Collection Services, reflects my duties accurately, with responsibilities that include bibliographic and s ..read more