Margaret Schilt is the Faculty Services Librarian at the D’Angelo Law Library of the University of Chicago Law School. Educated primarily at the University of Michigan (undergraduate and law), she also has an M.A. in history from Northwestern University and an M.L.I.S. from Dominican University.
Margaret administers the faculty reference, research and document delivery programs at the D’Angelo Law Library and acts as liaison to the faculty for current awareness programs, serving a talented and exceptionally productive faculty. She participates with the other reference librarians in teaching the legal research component of the first year legal research and writing program, providing training and assistance for student research assistants and research programming for the Law School’s L.L.M. students, as well as serving on University Library committees for Library outreach and instruction, electronic resource implementation and assessment initiatives.
Margaret has been a member of the American Association of Law Libraries and the Chicago Association of Law Libraries since 2000. She co-chaired the CALL Public Affairs Committee for two years and has been active as a member of the ALL-SIS Faculty Services Committee, working as co-chair with Marianne Alcorn in 2006 - 2007. She currently serves on the AALL Research and Publications Committee. An enthusiastic attendee of AALL Annual Meetings, she has been a speaker and coordinator of educational and roundtable programs at AALL Annual Meetings. She has contributed several articles to the ALL-SIS Newsletter and the CALL Bulletin and has authored articles on faculty services in the law library and the impact of blogging on legal scholarship.
AALL in general and ALL-SIS in particular have been crucial to my personal development as a law librarian. The annual meetings and conferences introduced me to other law librarians and widened my perspective on issues and problems I encountered in my own library. AALL and ALL-SIS encouraged me to think about larger issues, not just in the context of what was happening in my own library but in their impact on the profession and on access to legal information for the legal profession and the public generally. The law library is essential to legal scholarship and lawyer education, serving the needs and interests of our students and faculty with new tools and new methods. A quick glance at the ALL-SIS webpage reveals many of the ways that ALL-SIS assists us all in doing a competent and occasionally inspired job. The Statistics Committee’s work with the ABA in revising the library-related sections of the ABA questionnaire, the collection and posting of Collection Development policies, ALL-SIS’ work on the status of law librarians, and ALL-SIS’ activities on vendor relations are all examples of the value ALL-SIS provides to librarians in the field making decisions for our individual institutions. I hope to have the opportunity to contribute to these and other ALL-SIS activities as a member of the ALL-SIS Executive Board.
