Marin Dell from FSU Research Center

This issue's New Member profilee is Marin Dell, Reference Librarian at Florida State University Research Center. Born in Brooklyn, Marin grew up in Brooklyn and a couple of the other NY boroughs, escaping without a NY accent. After college in Tampa, Marin got her law degree at California Western School of Law, where she took Foreign and International Legal Research from Bobbi Weaver. Marin describes Bobbi as "a wonderful librarian who really taught me a great deal, and one of the law librarians who inspired me to become a law librarian." While in law school, Marin also worked as a research assistant for a human rights scholar. In that job, she became especially interested in the ATCA/TVPA human rights cases.

Bouncing back east again after some time in San Diego, Marin picked up an MLIS at Florida State University in Tallahassee, then headed to Montgomery, Alabama for her first library job. She served as Electronic Resources/Research Librarian at Faulkner University's Jones School of Law--"a wonderful library and law school, which just received its provisional accreditation from the ABA during my time there and which has been licensed to educate Alabama lawyers since the 1930s."

Given the chance to return to Tallahassee, Marin took on a full slate of duties: "I am very much a public services Research Librarian, concentrating on faculty research, teaching Foreign and International Legal Research, teaching short afternoon workshops on a variety of topics, especially Florida legislative history (keeping them awake is a challenge!), and going into law classes for specialized research presentations for classes with an upper level paper requirement. I am also the Circulation Manager and oversee the Circulation department and all the interesting things that entails."

At FSU, Marin joins Mary McCormick and Margaret Clark, "the FCIL research goddesses here." This spring, Marin is co-teaching Foreign and International Legal Research with Margaret. Marin reads Spanish, but is trying to branch out--"Maybe Italian next, since my dad was from Naples."

Asked what she likes most about her job, Marin says, "Working with other librarians, of course! Librarians rule! I love technology, books and the law. I am so happy to have found the job where I can actually use all of them at once!"

And, asked what she likes least, "That I am not independently wealthy, so I can't have a big screen plasma TV in my office, or any other random cool thing that the FSU research center REALLY needs to have. Like an R2D2 home theater system with the Millennium Falcon remote for the students to watch their make-up law classes on? We need that, right? Come on, it's for the law students! They deserve the best!"

Marin's hobbies include "computers, books, law...oh, yeah...I guess I mentioned that before. Um, reading? Surfing the internet? Learning about legal topics? Hmmmm. I think I may be repeating myself. I guess that is why I love my job so much. It's my hobbies..."