During the past three years, I’ve found a number of titles “outside” mainstream law librarianship which have been useful in my work and understandings of academic law librarianship. Since our profession sits on the intersection of people and information, and law and academics, sometimes books in just one of those areas will yield good results in the whole.
If you only read one of these, I strongly suggest Educating Lawyers. My top three are: Educating Lawyers (for its broad analysis of current legal education), The Five Love Languages for Singles (for its personal and professional relationship perspectives), and Sacred Stacks (to reconnect each of us to why we serve people with books and information).
| 1. The Book Thief | 6. Good to Great and the Social Sectors |
| 2. The Changing Academic Library | 7. The Justice Gap |
| 3. Educating Lawyers | 8. Organize Your Corpses |
| 4. The Five Love Languages for Singles | 9. Sacred Stacks |
| 5. Google Hacks, 3d ed | 10. U.S. Government Publication |
Law librarians should read this book because it leads to the court opinion extolling the value of library and archival materials, United States v. Spiegelman, 4 F.Supp.2d 275 (S.D.N.Y. 1998). The book deftly combines an international manhunt, a self-confessed (but unproven) participant in the Oklahoma City bombings, a $1.3 million dollar theft from the Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, trial transcripts, and the U.S. Federal Sentencing Guidelines. And it is written by an academic law librarian.
If you’ve been in academia for a while, you may want to read through this basic textbook of general academic librarianship. This text does not necessarily supply a lot of answers, but will remind the reader of what the questions are within our profession. If you are new to law librarianship, this would be essential reading for the big picture on how libraries in higher education operate. Many academic law librarians assume that since they’ve gone to two graduate schools (JD and MLS), they know how academia works. This book will help fill in any gaps in such thinking.
This is the most important empirical study of legal education since the 1992 MacCrate Report. This isn’t law school ranking and fluff, but a serious examination of sixteen American law schools with an analysis extending to the entire law school enterprise. It may be tempting for law librarians to ignore as physical inputs into and support for the legal education process are not the emphasis as much as how law school training is conducted and the results. But the lack of discussion of law libraries in this study could motivate each of us to examine more closely our own roles. Highly recommended for both its descriptive and proscriptive aspects. The 16-page executive summary is online at www.carnegiefoundation.org/files/elibrary/EducatingLawyers_summary.pdf.
Concise, upbeat ways to improve your interactions with co-workers and others, based on how they prefer to be treated. Five categories of relationship “languages” are presented: words of praise, physical touch, acts of service, gifts, and spending quality time. The core message is that you can speak up for what you want in ways others can hear. This Christian author originally wrote to married couples, and has expanded his works to children, teenagers, and now individuals in roommate, working, and family relationships. His online quiz is at www.fivelovelanguages.com/. Law librarians are not specifically mentioned and shouldn’t be put off by the title “for singles,” as the principles apply to anyone who works with people.
Since so much legal and other information is published to the Internet these days, knowing how to maximize your use of the premier Internet search engine, Google, can go a long way. This book includes simple techniques for beginners and advanced programming level applications, organized in a way useful for reference as well as serendipity. Example searches include “define:librarian” for definitions of librarian on the web, “phonebook:smith john wv” for phone numbers and addresses of john smith’s in West Virginia, and “intitle:law library” for webpage titles containing the words law library. The publisher also prints similar books: Amazon Hacks, eBay Hacks, Firefox Hacks, Flickr Hacks, PDF Hacks, Podcasting Hacks, etc. See: http://hackszine.com/.
This short 36 page work is written as an additional chapter extending this business author’s original Good to Great (2001) to non-profit organizations and those serving the public - the social sectors. Law library managers at all levels will benefit from the advice here to seek disciplined and long-term greatness. Calibrating success without business metrics, and getting things done within a diffuse power structure are just two of five main concepts in the text, sub-titled “why business thinking is not the answer” to non-profit organizations. An excerpt is at the author’s website: www.jimcollins.com/.
Many state bars have surveyed citizens to quantify their local pro bono legal assistance gap. This survey is representative of those like it (in your state or city) which show the large numbers of people with civil legal needs which are not being resolved. State university law school libraries could benefit by becoming more familiar with such studies in their own jurisdictions. If such a study has not been done in your state, this and others are models to follow. Online at: www.uls.state.ut.us/The%20Justice%20Gap%20-%20Needs%20Assessment.pdf.
This fictional mystery book, like the Utah legal needs book above, is included to show the types of titles of interest outside the normal non-fiction arena (and also beyond the legal thrillers and the true crime documentaries). Catalogers and those who like things in order will enjoy this whodunit with its suggestions on dejunking and straightening things up, the librarian-like complexities of organizing and recognizing documents with legal significance, and the protagonist’s never-give-up aplomb. This is the first book in a planned series, with a bit of a stretch ending here prior to the sequels. A good summary is at the author’s website: www.maryjanemaffini.ca/adams.html.
The language of ministry and calling is used by this Jewish writer to describe her library work. This is not a religious but a spiritual and somewhat philosophical book, with a heartfelt passion for service as a librarian. In some ways, it’s a deep look at secular civilization and culture, and the ways librarians, like clergy, seek to discover and share the highest within all of us. Meditative, reflective, insightful, spirited, even funny, it’s an inspirational pep talk for librarians. Read it to rediscover your calling as a bibliophile. A two-page related article is at: Nancy Kalikow Maxwell, “Sacred Stacks,” American Libraries, May 2006, pp. 36-37.
The Government Printing Office functions at times like the canary in the mine of legal information. So when legal and political information starts having troubles at GPO, it’s a symptom of greater issues affecting all of our work. This idiosyncratic history of federal publishing has its weak points, but is also one of the few studies of the long interaction between libraries and government information. Anyone who is not a government documents librarian should become familiar with this work.
Five of the above books are written by current or former librarians (The Book Thief, The Changing Academic Library, Organize Your Corpses, Sacred Stacks, and U.S. Government Publication). These are all good examples of ways librarians can use their day-to-day work to contribute to the greater good in many areas, even beyond libraries and academia. And if you’re one of those librarians with a book inside you waiting to be written, perhaps some of the above examples will inspire you to get your own ideas into print, or at least see things within law librarianship from a different point of view.