Law librarianship is a profession where the unpredictability of our daily routines is something that most of us enjoy and appreciate. Despite this, I used to worry that I was getting bored by the routine that played itself out at the start of each school year: every fall, we get a new crop of 1L students, we participate in orientation, give library tours, help with their research and writing homework, etc., etc. But fall 2005 would make me appreciate such “boring” routines in a way I never could have imagined and it was more unpredictable that I could have ever wanted.
The fall semester classes for Loyola University New Orleans School of Law started on Monday, August 22nd. By the next weekend, Hurricane Katrina was threatening the Louisiana coast and both the city and the university put their evacuation plans into effect. On Saturday the law library closed early and university and law school classes were canceled for Monday and Tuesday, with the reopening and resumption of classes tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, August 31st.
Like previous hurricane evacuations, most people in New Orleans thought it was a case of “better safe than sorry,” and most of us packed only two or three days’ worth of clothes and supplies. Even when Katrina made landfall Monday, after shifting east of New Orleans and devastating the Mississippi Gulf Coast, we thought we had once again missed the worst of the proverbial “big one.” But then, like the rest of the country, we watched the news broadcasts of the water rising from the breeched levies and knew we wouldn’t be home soon.
The School of Law started the fall with a total of 818 students in two curriculums - common law and civil law - and a day and evening division (the evening division only provides the civil law curriculum). Like most schools of our caliber, we are very tuition-dependent and not able to endure an extreme drop in our revenue stream. Canceling the fall semester with no contingency plan for our students would be disastrous.
Within days of Katrina, the AALS and ABA worked out an agreement with the two New Orleans law schools and schools throughout the country that enabled most of our upper level students to take courses elsewhere for the semester with the understanding that they would return home in the Spring. But only a few schools agreed to take in some of our first year students. Even if most of them deferred and returned in fall 2006, our financial profile would be devastated and there was no realistic way to double our incoming class next year to make up for the financial shortfall that would result. In that scenario, the budget cuts would likely be extreme: even tenure would not save the junior faculty if we had to downsize to a dramatic extent and the law library’s budget would have been similarly eviscerated. But unknown to most of us, events were in motion that would prevent this dire scenario from playing out.
The University of Houston Law Center had experienced its own hurricane in 2001. Serious flooding forced them to relocate much of their summer program that year to other facilities throughout the university and the city. Watching the news of Hurricane Katrina, they quickly decided to do what they could for either of the displaced law schools in New Orleans. Luckily, several of the administrators from Loyola School of Law, including the Dean, had evacuated to Houston and the Law Center staff got in touch with them to discuss several possible plans. It was eventually decided that the best option was for Loyola to set up a “satellite” program at the University of Houston Law Center for the fall semester. Our faculty would teach a full roster of courses for our first year students, including both the common law and civil law curriculums. The classes would be scheduled around the Law Center’s own courses and the semester would be compressed into eleven weeks, from October 3rd to December 17th, with exams back in New Orleans in January (the Spring 2006 semester was pushed back accordingly). As it turned out, in addition to the first year courses, we were able to offer a fair number of required upper level courses and electives. (We would eventually have about 310 students in our Houston program, roughly 180 first year students and 130 upper level students.)
While all this was happening, my wife and I had evacuated to a friend’s house in North Carolina (along with our traveling menagerie of four cats and a dog). Loyola’s e-mail and web servers were down and so I re-subscribed to the law-lib listserv from a personal e-mail account. That is how I learned of the slowly-forming plans in Houston.
Watching the news for countless hours was grating, and so, needing to do something to try and help, I started scouring on-line message boards and news forums for word of co-workers and students. I also posted my own messages to help spread the word about the Houston program. I also started a roster of our displaced students with their non-Loyola e-mail addresses and other contact information. A faculty member set up a temporary web page and we set up Google Groups for our displaced faculty and students to facilitate easy e-mail distribution. This is how we slowly started to aggregate and pass on information to the Loyola School of Law community in the first days and weeks of the New Orleans diaspora.
I didn’t know what I could do to help in Houston, but I knew I could do something. Even if it was just answering phones and making copies, another set of hands would be useful. My wife has relatives in Houston who could help us find a place to live, so I was perhaps the one reference librarian most able to relocate there and help out. (Our library director, P. Michael Whipple, teaches a section of Torts each fall and also eventually made it to Houston to teach.)
Just as Loyola was extremely lucky to have the opportunity to relocate our semester to Houston, I, personally, was very lucky to have the supportive staff at the O’Quinn Law Library ready to accommodate any librarians who showed up. Director Spencer Simons and his staff were preparing to accommodate several librarians before I even knew I could come to Houston and I had an office and a computer waiting for me when I got there. But it turned out that I would be doing very little traditional librarian work.
The immediate task I took up was to coordinate the textbook orders. All the major legal publishers had agreed to donate books that students had lost or had not evacuated with. A few faculty had already made arrangements to get books for the students in the courses they would teach, but the publishers wanted to deal with a single person instead of the twenty-five faculty who eventually taught at Houston. There was only one problem: we didn’t know how many students we were going to have, let alone what classes they would take.
Yes, we had a ballpark estimate of how many first year students were going to be in Houston, but an increasing number of upperclassmen also started to indicate their interest in taking classes from our own professors. We hadn’t thought early enough to try to survey the students coming to Houston about whether they were in our Civil Law or Common Law program, or, for the upperclassmen, what classes they wanted to take and the first we heard from some students would be upon their arrival in Houston literally on the morning that their classes began. We didn’t even have a formal registration process in place. The plan was for students to show up and sign their class rolls, and then we would get the records straight later. So to estimate the quantity of textbooks needed, I adopted the technique that I had heard our mayor use when asked a similarly un-knowable post-Katrina question: the “SWAG” method - Scientific Wild-Ass Guess.
Though the companies were very accommodating, I tried to be conservative in the quantities of books I ordered. It turned out I underestimated how many students - particularly the first year students - had indeed evacuated with their books and I would end up shipping back a fair quantity of some titles. But some books for other classes required multiple re-orders, as we had seriously underestimated how many students would take the upper level courses. In the end, the three big publishers - Thomson/West, LexisNexis, and Aspen - collectively donated over 3800 books with a total list price of over $180,000.
Besides ordering textbooks, I performed a lot of other miscellaneous tasks. For example, none of the faculty secretaries had evacuated to Houston. Some professors were in e-mail contact with their secretaries and got help that way, but I picked up some of the slack and did some purely administrative support functions, such as coordinating with the Law Center’s in-house print shop and uploading syllabi to course web pages. (Luckily the university’s servers for e-mail, the web site, and Blackboard course pages were up and running by the time we started classes in Houston on October 3rd.) And though I’m not an information technology person, I assisted with the IT stuff anyway. The Law Center’s tech staff went beyond the extra mile, but as a somewhat familiar face (though the 1Ls barely knew me or anyone from Loyola), I helped the occasional student get set up on the Law Center’s wireless network, and also coordinated with the Houston staff on enabling our students to print. We were lucky to have some of our Westlaw and Lexis student representatives among the evacuees to Houston, and between them and the O’Quinn law library’s staff, our accounts had been shifted over to Houston and the stand-alone printers were soon up and running for our students and faculty. But having had only a week of classes in New Orleans, the 1L students still hadn’t received their Westlaw and Lexis IDs and that was one task that ended up taking up a good bit of my time.
I called this article “When Job Descriptions Matter Least” because it struck me early on that I would normally never be doing much of the stuff I did in Houston. I think most librarians don’t consider themselves bound by the typically vague paragraphs of text contained in a job advertisement or in a human resources manual. But the biggest lesson that I learned from Loyola’s semester in exile is that perhaps we should all take some time to consider the unanticipated and think about how we can prepare for situations where we might have to work way beyond the scope of our typical work duties. Such planning has applications besides preparing for possible disasters. Not to be morbid, but this is often considered what I call “bus accident” contingencies: what if any random member of your library staff got run over by a bus tomorrow - could someone step in and do their job with a minimum of adjustment and transition?
One principle of military organization is that everyone should be able to perform the job of the person above you in the chain of command, and ideally have at least an idea of what happens at one or even two levels beyond that. Of course, this pre-supposes that those higher up have moved through the lower ranks and most libraries don’t have as strict a rank hierarchy and promotion scheme as the military services. But we should all have an idea of what the folks below us, above us, and in parallel departments, do.
As a relatively minor example, I don’t know what our account numbers are with different publishers, but it would be good to at least have that information handy when the tech services people aren’t around and I need to talk to a customer service representative. Similarly, our tech services people should at least know what Westlaw and Lexis are, and understand how we distribute individual accounts for these services to all our students and faculty.
These aren’t unique managerial insights by any measure, and I’m not saying anything that hasn’t be considered or written about numerous times already. But now we at Loyola have seen first hand how unanticipated circumstances can throw both the library and the law school into unknown territories and hopefully other institutions can benefit from our experience by collectively brainstorming about how they might prepare to adapt to similar, yet unpredictable, contingencies and situations.
Editor’s Note: I asked Brian for an update on the situation as I was finalizing this issue. He said “we’re back in New Orleans, exams from the Houston program are wrapping up this week and our pushed-back Spring semester starts on Monday. The swath of the city closest to the river - where both the university and our house are - are pretty much returned to normal, but the rest of the city is still largely a wasteland and long-term prospects are still a big unknown. So we refer to this part of New Orleans as either “the sliver along the river” or “the isle of denial.” The law school is expecting just over 80% of our students to be back next week, which is a good bit better than early predictions.”