Cindy Chick
Latham & Watkins
Los Angeles, CA
Finding Energy in Change
Law Library Journal Fall, 2001
I was one of those odd kids who liked school. All right, maybe with the exception of the fifth grade with Dr. Anderson, but that's another story. Oh, and library school, which I really wasn't that fond of either. I'm very glad I didn't let that discourage me from librarianship as a career, though. That has worked out very nicely for me.
Still, when I did leave school for the working world, I expected from the start that I would not leave the classroom behind. And I was right. I took classes on such topics as communication and public speaking. (Living within a couple of miles of UCLA came in handy.) I also diligently attended AALL Annual Meetings, local workshops, and institutes of the Southern California Association of Law Libraries. Still do, as a matter of fact.
When personal computers started appearing, it was time for a computer class. It was magic! I sat there during the three hours a week of the introductory class thinking of all the things I could do with this stuff. Like taking a ledger sheet and putting it into Lotus so that everything added up all by itself! Amazing! Creating my own databases—how wonderful! I could control, to some extent, what the computer did and how it did it. Time marched on. Ah, the joys of DOS and the agony of Windows fatal exception errors.
So on I went, taking classes in Dbase programming, systems analysis, Access, and database design. Not that many classes, really. I scattered them throughout my career as I found something that I wanted to be able to do, but needed more information in order to actually do it. When you're a solo librarian, you either do it yourself, or not at all. I didn't live near UCLA anymore, but luckily there was a downtown satellite, which, by the way, happens to be where I was when the L.A. riots started.
There weren't always classes available for what I needed to know. So I bought every book on the Internet, at a time when there were only three. I "taught myself" HTML with the help of a colleague, Joan Loftus, who tried it first.
I know, I'm supposed to be talking about how I keep energized after twenty-some years, and it may seem that I'm digressing. But not really so much. Because I consider myself very lucky to be in a profession that has been in a constant state of flux during my entire career. And there's no end in sight.
The rate of change in the profession and the world in general can all be quite overwhelming. But how dull it would be if we were still doing things the same way we did them twenty years ago! Still typing catalog cards and filing them by hand? Still digging through annual indexes, one at a time, trying to find a specific journal article? Thanks, but no thanks.
I just adore figuring out a new way to do something, usually using technology, to make a task simpler and easier. That's the most fun. And continuing education in one form or another helps me do that.
And that is how I have stayed energized and happy in my work. The profession kept changing and I just kept learning. It's that simple.
Of course, I would think that, wouldn't I? I'm the kid who liked school!
For More Information About Law Librarianship or the AALL Recruitment Committee, contact committee chair Sarah Mauldin.