by Mila Rush
University of Minnesota Law Library
This initiates a column in this newsletter that will cover FCIL SIS members' comings and goings both in terms of employment and in terms of foreign travel for professional reasons. Attempts at something similar (though of lesser scope) have been made in the past (see the March 1988 and October 1989 issues). This time around, the scope is widened to include foreign travel, and we are more optimistic that you will feed us plenty of materials to keep the column going.
With all the options and the ease available to transmit information, I hope to be flooded with news about our members' comings and goings. I will prefer e-mail, but will accept anything besides. You can also just give me tips about members other than yourself, and I'll do the follow-up. I want to get permission from the subjects of the news items anyway.
In this inaugural column, we welcome two members to the foreign, comparative, and international law librarianship field: Michael Estle and Jonathan Franklin.
Michael L. Estle joined the William M. Rains Library at Loyola Law School in August as special collections librarian. His primary responsibility in this multi-faceted position is to carry on reference and collection development in foreign, comparative, and international law. He is also in charge of rare books and archives, and supervises a special collections assistant (who catalogs the archives and also helps out in reference and interlibrary loan). Michael also performs general reference work and teaches two sections of the first-year legal research class.
Michael comes to the field of foreign, comparative and international law librarianship with a very strong background. He has an A.B. in comparative government from Harvard (1988), a J.D. (Dec. 1991) and an M.L.S. (1994) from Indiana University, Bloomington. He spent the 1990-91 academic year at the University of Paris XI (Paris-Sud) where he obtained a Certificat d'études juridiques françaises. He took courses in West European history at the graduate school of Indiana University.
Did you say the only available text on a certain topic is not in English? "Not to worry." Michael studied French at the Sorbonne, Spanish at the Universidad Catolica del Ecuador in Quito, and German in Graz, Austria. He has also taken Russian and Uzbek in the Indiana University Russian and East European Institute's summer intensive workshops.
While awaiting membership information for the FCIL SIS, he has joined AALL. He promises to become active in the SIS eventually. (By the way, he has been an INT-LAW subscriber even while he was at Indiana.) He is a member of the American Bar Association and its Section on International Law and Practice. Throw in there: membership in the Indiana Bar.
On Jonathan Franklin's first day at work at the University of Michigan, I asked him to supply me some information about him so I could include him in this column in this issue. He obligingly did, at the same time proclaiming that he didn't have much to say on this his first week. Fortunately, I had met him in Seattle and, fortuitously, found out a few things about him.
Those of you who attended the President's Luncheon in Seattle may remember a Jonathan Franklin, who was called up on stage to receive the Call for Papers award in the Student Division. That was him alright. His paper is entitled "One Piece of the Collection Development Puzzle: Issues in Drafting Format Selection Guidelines."
Could the research and the thinking he did for this paper have anything to do with the job that he had lined up months ago? I did not ask, but he started work at the University of Michigan on October 10 as the foreign and comparative law selector and reference librarian.
Jonathan received his J.D. from Stanford and his M.Libr. from the University of Washington. But law is only one facet of Jonathan's interests. He also graduated from Stanford with a B.A. in modern architecture and computer music and with an M.A. in anthropology. His previous work and travel experiences include working in the Tribal Art Department at Christie's (yes, the auction house) in London and for an African art dealer in Brussels. He says his French was passable before law school, but wilted from disuse.
This summer, Jonathan was juggling his hours between attending library school classes and attending sessions (and selling drink tickets) at the International Law Institute. The following week he was attending business meetings and program sessions during the Annual Meeting. He proceeded to Minnesota where he spent his internship at West Publishing designing a key number tutorial for the Westlaw documentation division, as well as spending time in the editorial department. While in Minnesota, he also made visits to the University of Minnesota Law Library.
Maria Smolka-Day (University of Pennsylvania) spent a four-week vacation early this summer visiting Poland, her homeland. While in Lublin, she paid a visit to the law school where she had been a student and a teacher for several years. There, she addressed the university librarians on recent developments in American libraries. She also visited the Parliamentary Library, the Omsbudsman's Office, and several book distributors in Warsaw.
Kenneth Rudolf (Yale University) spent the month of May traveling to Santiago, Chile, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, to serve as a library consultant to three institutions in these cities which are participating in a USAID-funded linkage program with Yale Law School.
The three institutions that Ken visited were: 1) the Facultad de Derecho at the Universidad de Chile (Santiago), which has just inaugurated a graduate program in law; 2) the Escuela de Derecho at the Universidad Diego Portales (Santiago); and 3) the Centro de Estudios Internacionales (Buenos Aires) which was in the process of affiliating with the Universidad Diego Portales. The libraries of these institutions ranged from very large (with closed stacks and poor organization) to small but technically up-to-date collections.
Ken also had a chance to tour the law libraries at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago.
The FCIL SIS is a close-knit community that is widely scattered geographically. Often the only time we can be in touch with our friends is during the Annual Meeting, but all of us can't always attend.
Keep in touch through the FCIL Newsletter. Mila Rush is writing a column about FCIL members and their professional activities, but she needs your help. Tell her what you (or your colleagues) have been doing lately, so she can share it with the rest of us. Call 612-625-0793; fax 612-625-3478; or e-mail her at m-rush@vm1.spcs.umn.edu.
We want to hear from you!
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