The Law Library Association of Greater New York

February 23, 2009

Dear LLAGNY Members,

I am writing to you in the capacity of LLAGNY Placement Chair, and want you to know that LLAGNY is undertaking steps to meet the needs of its membership during this current economic crisis.

LLAGNY’s greatest strengths are its professional network and sense of community, and we want to capitalize on that for the benefit of our members.

I have been approached by both out of work librarians and potential employers to see what LLAGNY can do to facilitate the networking that brings people and jobs together.

To that effect we thought it might be helpful to our colleagues to maintain of list of librarians who are available for temporary and permanent assignments. This list would be completely voluntary, and would be maintained by the Placement Chair. To be included, the librarian would need to be a LLAGNY member in good standing. If potential employers were interested in our list, they would be given all names; no one would be favored over another. Only name, email and phone number would be provided. We feel this service would not diminish the need for job postings or placement recruiters, but would only facilitate professional networking.

Many of you know that we currently do not permit job postings on our listserv. We have decided to allow internships and temporary assignments to be posted on the listserv until the end of 2009.

Speaking of our listserv, please remember that many librarians subscribed to the listserv through their work email. If you know of someone who has been recently displaced, please forward LLAGNY emails to them, and make sure they re-subscribe under their personal e-mail address. Instructions for subscribing are located on LLAGNY’s website.

We also want to create a list of library recruiters on our website. We understand that some members may feel that this is free advertising, but we want to make sure all our members are aware of every possible job resource.

Finally, we want to suggest that you join LinkedIn. There is a LLAGNY group that was started by one of our members, Nathan Rosen, which will help facilitate networking. There are other groups as well, including SLA and a Law Librarian Group.

I hope you find these suggestions helpful, and if you have any other suggestions or comments, please feel free to forward them to Jeff Cohan, Jill Gray or to me.

Sincerely,