Note: This is the third in a series of columns about the experiences of those new to the academic law librarianship profession--ed.
I hope that everyone reading this has survived the end of the school year and is enjoying a nice, leisurely start to the summer.
The final push to the end of the semester was especially hectic for me this year. However, I am now relishing the chance to slowly start work on a new research project. I am currently finishing up my library degree, and I just completed a class in correctional librarianship, in which we learned about libraries and librarians in a prison environment. This is a really fascinating topic, and I was inspired to learn more about regulations that control which publications are permitted in prisons. Specifically, I am interested in how these types of regulations balance librarianship principles, institutional security requirements, and First Amendment concerns. I look forward to discovering more broadly how this works as I continue researching this topic throughout the summer and into the foreseeable future.
What I am really interested in talking about for this column, however, is my recent experience providing instructional assistance for our law school’s Advanced Legal Research course. This was the first time that I had done this, and I found it to be amazingly rewarding. I was brought in to help instruct on three topics that are of great interest to me: administrative law, international law, and foreign law.
As I was developing some of the content for the international law research class, I found myself going back to the presentation on UN Legal Research that I attended during last year’s AALL conference. I had always meant to go back and really study the lecture handouts created by UN librarians Susan Kurtas and Maria Paniagua, and the preparation for this class finally provided the perfect opportunity to do so.
During this process, I ended up developing a guide for researching United Nations legal materials for our library. This guide specifically discusses how to interpret UN documents symbols and how to use the bibliographic resources that are available through the UN website and elsewhere to find UN documents. It also discusses how to find UN materials in HeinOnline, a topic I felt much more comfortable talking about after having participated in HeinOnline’s United Nations Law Collection webinar earlier this year.
It was through the experience of creating the research guide that I learned enough about the topic to talk about it in front of a classroom full of law students, most of whom knew practically nothing about UN documentation. Not only that, but this experience also gave me the confidence to help develop research exercise questions that required the students to find and evaluate UN materials. Now, I am pretty sure that most of these students will never have to research UN legal documents once they enter into practice. However, the students’ experience with UN research in our class showed them that they should not be daunted by any legal research tasks, even in areas that are unfamiliar to them.
Of course, taking advantage of educational and professional development opportunities as they arise really helped make all of this possible for me. This is my message here to newer librarians – there is so much that we don’t know, and so many opportunities to learn. It can only benefit us, and increase our professional confidence and competence, to take advantage of as many of them as we can.
Wishing you all a productive and restful summer!
PS – I would like to personally thank the AALL-SIS Newsletter Editor, Leah Sandwell-Weiss, for her support and encouragement. As was recently announced, Barbara Traub is assuming the newsletter editorship in the near future. I am looking forward to working with Barbara on future issues.