Why did you become a law librarian? The following responses are available on AALLNET only. For the responses published in the February 2011 issue of AALL Spectrum, please see the issue in its entirety. “I became a law librarian because of natural inclination, great role models, and a nudge at just the right time. Fresh out of college with no idea what to do, I brushed off skills from high school public library work and became a library assistant at the University of Oklahoma Law School. Encouraged there by Lolly Gasaway, Marilyn Nicely, and others, I started library school but wasn’t yet committed to law libraries. Then Lolly provided an opportunity for me to go to a Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries/Southwestern Assocation of Law Libraries conference. I knew I’d found where I belonged! “Out of necessity. I wanted to be a teacher and was working on my subject Masters degree. While I was in school, I needed a job and got one as a part-time library clerk in a large New York law firm. After graduation, there were no jobs due to the New York City fiscal crisis. I had amassed enough knowledge to be offered a full-time job in the firm’s law library. --Ann Fessenden, circuit librarian at the U.S. Court of Appeals 8th Circuit Library in St. Louis “I had worked in libraries from the time I was 10 years old but never considered becoming a librarian. It started when I was in elementary school and a librarian approached me and asked me if I would like to work in the library. Mostly I shelved books, but sometimes other kids would ask me to recommend books. “I became a librarian by accident. A friend of the family called and proposed I submit a resume to work part time at a law firm library while I attended law school. I was able to learn many vital skills in the profession while I was mentored by a wonderful law school librarian and eventually hired by her. I gained a career that had been unforeseen. I love my surprise career and look forward to many years of learning.” --Tara M. Crabtree, law librarian at the California Court of Appeal - 5th District in Fresno “Dumb luck. While in library school, I worked parttime for two state of Minnesota agency libraries. I was going from one job to the other and ran into Nina Platt in the skyway. She had resigned from her job at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office and asked, “You’re going to apply, aren’t you?” I did, and here I am, 13 years later. --Karla Gedell, research librarian at the Minnesota Office of Attorney General in St. Paul “Thirty years and five firms later, I am still in the profession and don’t regret it for a minute.” --Michael B. Hoffman, librarian at Torys LLP in New York “I wanted to be an attorney because I was close to my grandfather who was an attorney. I went to law school and got admitted to the bar. I spoke with a law librarian at the University of Akron Law Library who suggested I could get an MLS degree and become a law librarian. I applied to a couple of schools and got a full scholarship to get my MLS from Kent State University.” --Janet Reinke, head of research services at the Florida International University College of Law Library Modesto Maidique Campus in Miami “When I was a law student eons ago, the law librarians were the smartest and nicest people. And as I continue to be in the profession, many of them are still the smartest and nicest people.” --Julie Lim, director of the law library and professor of law at the CUNY School of Law in Flushing, New York 1 member to member “Service to others. In law school I took a job in the law library and found that I really enjoyed helping patrons with research and reference questions. After graduation I earned an MLS and started my first position as a law librarian. More than three decades later I still view patron services as one of the most critical functions we perform. Positive feedback from users shows that we are still on the right track by focusing on providing excellent service.” “I admired friends who were attorneys. They made me want to work in law, but I didn’t see myself as a JD. After working in public and special libraries, I switched careers and became a paralegal. The time I spent in law libraries on class assignments while studying for a certificate made me realize how much I missed the library environment. It dawned on me that I didn’t have to choose between my two interests if I became a law librarian.” --John Edwards, associate dean for information resources and technology and professor of law at Drake University Law School in Des Moines, Iowa --Paula Lichtenberg, librarian at Keker & Van Nest LLP in San Francisco “Actually, the question should be ‘what (and/or who) inspired me to become a law librarian?’ “Back in the day as a newbie law student at the University of Houston who often studied in the law library, I had the chance to observe, converse, discuss, and listen to the many legal reference librarians on their tours of duty. I was fascinated or impressed by each person’s various specialty areas such as the Texas session laws; topical areas like labor law; skill with the Lexis console; overall knowledge of the collection; as well as with their civility and enthusiasm. I made a silent vow to investigate law librarianship as a career (but being careful not to voice it out loud until after graduation day). Imagine my spouse’s surprise when I announced I wanted to continue my studies! “(Incidentally, one of the reference librarians was Roberta Schaffer who is now the law librarian of Congress.)” --MaryAnn Keeling, law librarian at the Department of Homeland Security Customs & Border Protection in Washington, D.C. “I was in a joint degree program—intended to become a lawyer, but knew the employment prospects were dicey and wanted a fallback. Got mediocre grades in law school and hated it. Made Beta Phi Mu in library school and liked it.” --Anonymous 2 “A very wise woman encouraged me to become a law librarian: my mother. “She found a profession in which I combine my dreams, skills, loves, and support myself. After graduating from law school I was dismayed with the legal profession. I love reading, learning, and finding things—information, lost items. She suggested I return to school for a library science degree to combine my skills and interests. To this day I am forever grateful that I listened to her.” --Lynn Hartke, reference/educational services librarian and assistant professor of legal research at Saint Louis University Law Library in Missouri “I am a law librarian because of Roberta Shaffer. I started library school to become an archivist and then went to work in an archive and discovered it wasn’t for me. Roberta was dean of the University of Texas library school at the time and she gave a talk during an orientation session about why she was a librarian. I was so fascinated by what she had to say about her work in law libraries that I knew I had to change course immediately. Once I did I knew I had found my calling and have been happy in my career choice ever since.” --Sarah Mauldin, head librarian at Smith, Gambrell & Russell, LLP om Atlanta member to member “I decided to be a librarian when I was 12—never changed my mind, just veered slightly. “By the time I got to library school I had a degree in English, religion, and philosophy. I was interested in special librarianship but most of the emphasis was on scientific and technical libraries. “Law librarianship was the answer to my prayers! It has been my dream job for 31 years. I’ve been able to apply everything I learned in library school and then some. I’ve been a solo and managed a large staff and everything in between. “I selected it because I expected it to be intellectually challenging (it is), professionally satisfying (it has been), and to give me lots of ways to grow (boy, howdy!). It has never disappointed me.” --Lynn Connor Merring, library manager at Stradling Yocca Carlson & Rauth in Newport Beach, California “My first position as a cataloger and bibliographer was not in law libraries. Although I had not planned on specializing in cataloging when I entered library school, I enjoyed it very much on the job as it was like doing puzzles all day long. I especially liked cataloging serials—figuring out how to catalog title changes and how to describe the relations between them. The weirder, the better. “When it was time to move on I saw the job posting for my present position and asked a friend about it. She said if I wanted to really learn serials cataloging I should work in a law library because legal serials and continuations were unlike anything I’d ever seen. This intrigued me and I decided to apply for the position. The rest is history—I have been happily cataloging legal materials for more than 23 years and just when I think I’ve seen every possible type of supplementation, the publishers come up with something else. It’s constantly new and requires a lot of analysis.” “Practicing law was not for me. As a friend said, “You’re miserable—try something different!” I love research, I’m good at it, and had taken library school classes while in law school. Becoming a librarian just felt right. So, library school, and now this, my favorite job evar. Library users don’t get legal advice from me, just my help and mad skills. They have information needs. They need—and usually get—solutions. And... all my users say thank you!” --Patricia Sayre McCoy, head of law cataloging and serials at the University of Chicago D’Angelo Law Library --Mitchell L. Silverman, emerging technologies, reference, and instructional services librarian at the Nova Southeastern University Shepard Broad Law Center Law Library and Technology Center in Fort Lauderdale “The second major influence was the 1988 AALL Annual Meeting in Atlanta. I fell in love with the Association, the people I met, and was awed by Westlaw’s ‘LA Law’ party and the Lexis event at the Fox Theatre, where Gone with the Wind had premiered almost 50 years before. “I realized after 12 years of legal practice that I was writing off most of the time I spent doing the things I still enjoyed most about my practice—teaching people how to learn about the laws that affect them, helping colleagues with their research, and collaborative problem solving in general—and realized that those activities are at the core of life as a law librarian. I’m still pinching myself that I get paid now to do this.” “Two major factors steered me towards law librarianship. The first was Lolly Gasaway, who was my instructor at the University of North Carolina. She gave a lecture on copyright in the first semester orientation course at Chapel Hill, and I was hooked. “I had a 20-minute interview at that conference and two weeks later was offered a job at Santa Clara, where I have stayed these 22 years.” --Prano Amjadi, director of public services at the Santa Clara University Heafey Law Library in California --Nolan L. Wright, reference librarian and assistant professor at Southern Illinois University School of Law in Carbondale 3 member to member “I was a newly licensed attorney but couldn’t find a job practicing law. “There was much talk at the time of a ‘lawyer glut.’ I had worked six years as a part-time law library assistant while I was in college and law school, so when a reference librarian position opened at my alma mater, I applied. I was hired and became ‘an accidental law librarian.’ I soon became an adjunct professor in the legal writing program and then an assistant director.” --Michael B. Reddy, director of research services at Lewis and Roca LLP inPhoenix “Reading from age three; haunted the local library as a child. “Became a lawyer by accident, and really enjoyed legal research and analysis. “Always enjoyed explaining stuff to people and teaching. “Returned to the law after active military service (not directly related to law), realized that the aspect of law I loved was research and explaining stuff to people— what law librarians do. “Could afford to attend library school and had a supportive employer.” --Ted McClure, faculty services law librarian at the Phoenix School of Law “It was the ‘circle of life’ for my profession. While I was studying in law school, I was a library associate at a health science library. Then I practiced law for 10 years and decided my life was missing something. “I enjoy providing service to others and the ability to research and learn about all facets of the law. Thus I had a ‘calling’ and decided it was time to become a professional librarian and realized a law library would be a great fit for me. I have not looked back or had a single regret yet!” --Brian Huffman, county law librarian at the Washington County Law Library in Stillwater, Minnesota 4 “While pursuing my MSLIS, I was fairly certain I would end up an academic librarian. However, this quickly changed thanks to several internships in legal libraries. The challenges of working with the law are stimulating and rewarding, but more than that is the law librarian community. Before landing my first position, I met AALL members from around the country and found tremendous support and camaraderie. In short, a network of amazing law librarians lead me to this field.” --Philippe Cloutier, librarian atLane Powell PC in Seattle “I wasn’t looking for a job when I had seven job offers and this happened to be one of them. It was the only one that was part-time and since I had been a stay-athome mom and professional volunteer for the last 15 years, I thought I might try it. One of my volunteer gigs was at the school library and I was a regular at the local public library. As it happened, I always played librarian when I was younger, sorting and shelving our books at home. My mom’s love of reading rubbed off onto me. “Within six months I had made the job mine and they wanted me full-time. Now 11 years later, I love my job and have found my niche as a solo librarian in a small county library.” --Monica Overly, law librarian at the Union County Library in Marysville, Ohio “I was happily starving in New York City doing odd jobs when my 44th birthday suddenly arrived and I began to want something with more indoor and sit-down responsibilities. I was offered a lucrative classroom gig and I took it. The children were wonderful, but I was not. I felt like I was under a hot spotlight. I wanted just the opposite. I dreamed of being in a library, so off I went to Columbia University’s School of Library Service. They gave me a broom, a mop, tuition exemption, and the keys to many doors. “Centrifugal force threw me out of the city and into southern New England. There, on an offhand tip from a friend of a friend of a friend, I wandered member to member into a storefront law school. The friend of a friend lent me Morris Cohen’s How to Find the Law. I was interviewed by the librarian and then, at a table for five in a restaurant around the corner, I met the entire faculty. It was an evening law school. All classes started at 6:30 p.m. As that time approached, my interview was abruptly terminated. The following evening, I was shocked by a job offer over the telephone. “The Southern New England School of Law Library was located in the cellar of a department store that had been vacant for several decades. The surplus autoparts shelving that had recently collapsed had been put back together. The books were shelved nearest to where they had fallen. They were the castoffs of several lawyers’ basements. In a pile of obsolete statutes that were being dumped, I found a 19th century edition of Cooley’s Blackstone. We also had a nearly complete run of the Harvard Law Review. One of my first reference interviews was with a local judge. He wrinkled his nose at me and said, ‘Howard, I have the Harvard Law Review in my home, what else have you got?’ On the other hand, the faculty was really smart and the restaurant around the corner was excellent. “At the end of my first year, we put the books in Library of Congress order and started a card catalog, perhaps the last card catalog begun in America. When there were glitches, we called local law libraries to see if they still had someone on staff who could remember how it used to be done. We had two Cardex cabinets that tracked updates with moving colored tabs. We filed looseleafs. Some of our reporters had ‘annotation pasters’ published by Frank Shepard glued on to the end papers. We taught Shepard’s by showing its history. We also had two futuristic Walt II Westlaw terminals. They were amazing. Even law review articles could be easily located and then, if you typed ‘pr’ (the print command) in the left hand corner, the next morning when you came to work, the dot-matrix tractor-feed printer, having chugged all night long, would have the article finished—unless it was really long. “Gradually, The Southern New England School of Law entered the 20th century. In a few short years I was able to work through all the technological changes of the legal literature. I came to appreciate it as perhaps the most elaborate, most expensive, and most powerful structure ever created for scholarship. No literature had ever been so obsessively annotated, updated, cross-referenced, digested, cited, and citated. At which point the internet arrived, making all the magical things available to lawyers seem quite ordinary. And then my gnarled and anachronistic employer had, against all odds, got on its feet and rose to be kissed by the commonwealth of saints. How did I become a law librarian?” --Howard Senzel, public services coordinator at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth School of Law in North Dartmouth “Back in 1978, I graduated with an MLS from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Back then it was simply called library science. A young, inexperienced bookend at 26 years old, I was preparing for a new life in the world of libraries—libraries because I wanted to be a librarian. Before my masters work, I was working in a brickyard. That kind of job taught me that I’d be much better off if I could muster a bit more education past my bachelor’s degree. Only a year and half, I said to myself, and libraries were places where people studied and read books. A librarian was an honorable and relatively safe occupation. At least I wouldn’t be selling encyclopedias door-to-door to people who couldn’t afford them. “The grandeur of libraries was what I wanted to embrace. Students and scholars did research there in the massive building made of grey sandstone blocks and tiny windows. Card catalogs five feet high occupying three first-floor rooms! Such knowledge! Such robust, lofty pursuits of new invention and new thought. History preserved for the ages! It was your classic ARL land grant university academic library. Huge it was. Yes, I was smitten by the academic library career track. My story unfolds. “Actually, the whole thing is more a question of ‘how I became a law librarian’ rather than ‘why I became a law librarian.’ 5 member to member “A couple of months before graduating from Missouri, I started looking at the job postings that were on slips of paper pinned to the large corkboard panel that was outside the dean’s offices in the hallway in Tate Hall. One day I noticed a job opening for an entry-level cataloger at the Creighton University Klutznick Law Library. “Knowing nothing about law and having only coursework on cataloging, I initially dismissed the idea of applying—they’d never consider me; I was so green a greenhorn that people wanted to recycle me. But my strong desire to be back in Nebraska or somewhere in a 200-mile radius of Omaha and Lincoln kept haunting me. I talked to my wife, Linda, who also was going to graduate with her MLS with me, about the Creighton opening. Before I knew it I was at the Corona ‘electric’ typewriter tapping out wording in the cover letter that would accompany my resume and transcripts. “I typed the cover letter and, in the end, decided it was okay that it be fairly short, having a mild, personable, innocent, naive tentativeness in its tone. The strongest language in the letter was how much I wanted to move to eastern Nebraska or western Iowa, to be closer to family and get some career roots established. The rest was just fluff to make it sound like I was a diamond in the rough. “Typed the address on a nice clean white envelope, creased the tri-folded letter, resume, and transcript very tightly, licked on a stamp, and dropped it in the mailbox in the student union. “Meanwhile, I kept looking at the job board in the hallway. Nothing piqued my interest. Linda and I figured that with her having a teaching certificate and lots of teaching experience in elementary schools, that she should follow me wherever I was able to land a job as she could easily be a media specialist or elementary school librarian in the area where we would move. “Two weeks later, I received a letter from Creighton University, and yes, they actually did want to have me drive up for an interview. I remember only one part of their letter now: “We were favorably impressed with your application,” or something very similar to that language. “We made the appointment time for the interview. I got there and got the tour of the building and where my desk would be, and got to see the backlog of work to catalog, and aaaand could see the new OCLC beehive terminal model 100 sitting on a long table behind what would be my desk, with its little rectangle green cursor blinking on the very small screen—just waiting for a newbie to learn to use. Oh joy! “We ate lunch together with the rest of the Klutzick staff at Mr. C’s restaurant in south Omaha and returned back for a couple of quickie interviews. One with the dean of the law school and interviews with a couple of faculty. I was done around 4 p.m. and got in our little yellow Toyota Corolla and drove back to Columbia to tell Linda all my adventures. I liked the place and the people I met, but was pretty sure that there would be someone else who would land the job and be flush with money—the starting salary of $11,000 a year with all kinds of benefits! “It wasn’t but a few days later and I got the offer to hire letter. I sent back my commitment letter, and started a month after I graduated. “As the years went by, I fell in love with cataloging legal literature with all its rules and rule interpretations; with all its MARC fields and little delimiter things; plus all those ISBD rules with their little semi-colons, slashes, and dashes. And now— today—I am now in the dragon’s liar of dealing with the transitions from tangible format to digital...what we all know of as electronic resources. I need an RDA air-conditioned suit, a larger shield, and a longer FRBR lance please!” --Brian Striman, professor of law library/head of tech services at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Schmid Law Library 6 member to member “While I was in library school, the accounting firm Peat, Marwick, Mitchell contacted the school looking for someone to straighten out their collection. My brother worked for them in another office, and I was the only one who knew what the firm did. I learned tax law well. When I moved to a new city to get married, I contacted law firms who didn’t have librarians and talked my way into a job with my tax skills. I was aiming for a public library job but found my niche in law and have never looked back. You can plan your life but it always takes some turns.” --Carol Bannen, director of information resources at Reinhart Boerner Van Deuren s.c. in Milwaukee 7