Competency 9- Internet

I used Google's search engine to search for websites relevant to my topic. I found many helpful sites from diverse sources such as law schools, public law libraries, various associations, and individuals. I have chosen the Law Library of Congress for the purposes of this competency. This website has a host of information useful to anyone interested in legal matters. The website has guides to legal research, portals to legal and legislative sites, legal history resources, an online catalog for the law library's holdings, and much more.

One of the most helpful resources on the website is the "Research Help" page. This page has an enormous number of links to online law resources at the federal, state, and international level, links to commentary and resources on current legal issues, guides to research tools and techniques that have been created by legal research specialists at the law library. Other pages give information about upcoming events or news pertaining to the Law Library of Congress, news from the publication of the Law Library of Congress, the Global Legal Monitor, and information about the history and services of the library. One may also use the online reference feature to ask a question of a law librarian.

The website provides a wealth of information for navigating through the complex tangle of legal resources available today. The URL for the website is:

http://www.loc.gov/law/

This would be a most helpful website for law librarians seeking to assist patrons with legal information needs across the spectrum of the discipline of law.

(I also found much useful information at the Georgetown Law Library website: http://www.ll.georgetown.edu/, in the form of tutorials, guides, etc. to legal research, but ultimately chose the Law Library of Congress because of its unique scope. Other favorite sites are http://www.llrx.com/, http://www.sla.org/division/dleg, and http://www.aall.org/. These sites each provide beneficial information for law librarians.)

Competency 8- Research Visual/Multimedia

I selected the two tables above from an article in the Law Library Journal that I found by searching through the American Association of Law Libraries' website. The article reports the findings of a study to determine the location of jobs for law librarians, types of employers, kinds of jobs, and numbers of jobs for law librarians as compared to population and numbers of attorneys per state. This statistical analysis seemed pertinent to my topic of law librarianship in the 21st century.

The first table is particularly helpful in showing the range of employment opportunities for law librarians and the percentages in each type of work. The highest percentages for job openings over the five year statistical period are in academic law librarianship and in law firms. However, the percentage for academic law librarian openings is more than double that for openings in law firms! Local, state, and federal law librarian positions accounted for just over 10% of openings. The second table shows the comparison of job listings and population of the state and number of attorneys. Washington, D.C. (counted as a state) has the highest number of job listings under this comparison, and ranks number 3 for job listings overall. It is interesting that though very low in population compared to the populations of individual states, D.C. still ranks very high for job openings. Its high number of attorney is a more natural correlation with the high number of job listings. The author speculates that Louisiana's high number of openings as compared to its relatively low population and attorney numbers may be due to openings created following Hurricane Katrina.

This was an interesting statistical anaylsis that is pertinent to my topic of law librarianship. The full copyright information for the images and the information posted in this blog can be found below:

Gleason, D. (2008, Summer). Where will you work? A five-year statistical analysis of AALL job placement listings. Law Library Journal, 100(3), 529-39. Retrieved March 20, 2009, from American Association of Law Libraries Website: http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v100n03.asp

Competency 7- Image

I chose this image of a map displaying the states included within each of West's regional case law reporters. A law librarian must know where to find relevant case law and this map is a very useful tool for remembering which states' cases will be reported in which set of regional reporters. West is a major publisher in the legal field and law librarians are required to work with its vast array of publications. This Regional Reporters map is a convenient reference item that can save a law librarian time by avoiding the necessity of looking up, for example, whether New York's cases fall under the Atlantic Reporter or the North Eastern Reporter.

I searched Google Images for relevant images to my topic and found many photos, some flowcharts, etc. I also searched Google with phrases such as "law school tutorial" and "law library resources legal research" and browsed through several law school websites for relevant images. I saw this map at the website for the law library at Northeastern University and then followed a link from there to the West Group's website to copy this image.

The image may be found at the website cited below.

Copyright information:

West's National Reporter System. Retrieved March 20, 2009, from West, The West Education Network: http://lawschool.westlaw.com/federalcourt/NationalReporterPage.asp

Competency 6- Browsing Strategy

I chose the WorldCat database for my final searching competency. I decided to try a browsing strategy in this database. My topic remains, “What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians?” However, this time, I did not try to form any specific search string. I chose only to enter the term law librarian+ (plus sign includes the plural in the term) and chose the descriptors field. I applied limiters of English language and the publication years of 2000-2009. My initial browsing search retrieved 212 results as shown below.



I then clicked on the tab labeled “Serials” to view the five results there. The third result pertaining to legal information management and law librarianship looked interesting.



I continued to browse by clicking on the tab labeled “Books” with 69 results. This list of results immediately showed results that would be of interest to my topic.



The fourth result was highly pertinent to my blog topic and discussed the skills and abilities needed by the modern academic law librarian to fulfill his or her role in a world of changing trends and technologies. It is shown in the screen below and is titled, "The Changing Role of Academic Law Librarianship: Leading Librarians on Teaching Legal Research Skills, Responding to Emerging Technologies, and Adapting to Changing Trends."



I found other pertinent results in browsing through the 69 results. I then decided to try a different browsing technique in this database. On the home page of the database, just below the tabs for Basic Search, Advanced Search, etc., there is a small icon with the word “Subjects.” I clicked on this and then entered “law librarians” in the "Word or Concept" find box. This brought up a hyperlink to the term "Law Librarians." Clicking on this brought me to a list of 711 results as shown below!



I clicked on Books (249 results) and then clicked on the limiters icon. I limited results to the years 2000-2008 and this brought my set of results to 65.

I found the browsing strategy to be quite easy in this database. I was able to scan through the results and identify relevant results. The database itself is fairly user-friendly and I was surprised and pleased by the number of results I obtained. It was easy to apply limiters or search by specific formats in order to narrow down results and not feel overwhelmed by the size of the set retrieved. Overall, I can see occasions for use of the browsing strategy for information retrieval. It is effective when one knows the general subject one wishes to search and browses to see what the database may contain on that subject. It was important that I was able to recognize relevant information and remain engaged with the system to help improve performance as discussed in Chu's (2003) text (p. 92)!

References:

Chu, H. (2003). Information representation and retrieval in the digital age.

Medford, NJ:  Information Today, Inc.

Competency 6- Citation Pearl Strategy

For my third database search competency, I chose to use the citation pearl strategy in the Academic Search Complete database. My topic is the same as before: "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians?" I looked through some of the articles that I had retrieved in my two previous database search competencies. I decided to use the author's name "Barbara Bintliff" to begin my citation pearl search. I entered this name as Bintliff, Barbara in the Find box and chose "Author's name" in the Field box. (This can also be entered as "Bintliff and Barbara" but the comma after the last name adds the Boolean operator "and.")

I retrieved 3 results:


I clicked on the third hit because an additional author was listed. This article gave me several additional search terms also, such as "law school administration" that might prove helpful in future searches. Clicking on the name of the additional author, Richard A. Danner, gave me 2 results, (or one additional hit to the one I had been viewing). This new article by Danner had several new Subject Terms, but most were quite broad. I tried the "Find Similar Results" feature with this article, but retrieved an untenable and staggering 6,025,228 hits!!

I returned to my first article by my original known author, and clicked on the Subject Term listed there of "Law Libraries-Reference Services." This gave me 10 hits. I chose one of these, "War Stories: Tales from the Law Library Trenches," by the author Mike Chiorazzi, to look for additional Subject Terms. One of the new Subject Terms given in this article was "Law Librarians" as you can see below:


Clicking on the Subject Term "Law librarians" gave me 68 hits, many of which were very relevant and new results that I had not found in my previous database searches on my topic. This would be a very manageable number of hits to search for appropriate articles for my topic.


Out of this set of 68 hits, I was able to glean even more new Subject Terms, such as "Vocational Guidance," that could prove useful in future searching. Also, I noticed that many results give "Author supplied keywords" in addition to the Subject Terms. I decided to see if entering one of these terms in the Find box and choosing the Field "KW - Author Supplied Keywords" would produce any unique results from what I had already found. I retrieved 8 hits, several of which were new and pertinent to my research topic. The article I have chosen to display here, "Wisdom from Mount Nebo (Hiei): Advice to a Young Person Aspiring to Become a Foreign and International Law Librarian," by the author Dan Wade, is quite useful as it discusses the skills and education required to work in this area of law librarianship. It is from my last set of 8 retrieved results, using the "Author Supplied Keywords" field.


This search strategy proved to be quite useful. It was an easy method and worked well with this database. The database provides "Cited References," "Find Similar Results," and links from author names, Subject Terms, etc. that make this approach quite easy to use. I came away from this search with new, useful articles and new Subject Terms to try in future searching. Overall, I was impressed with both the citation pearl search strategy and the Academic Search Complete database.

Competency 6-Building Block Strategy

I decided to search the database LexisNexis Academic for my second database competency requirement. The search strategy I chose was the Building Block construction. My topic is "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians?" As in my previous search, I first constructed my facets.
s1= law librarian*
s2= education* or degree* or training*
s3= skill* or abilit* or competenc*

In the Lexis database, I chose to search the "Legal Library," under the "Legal" tab. Within this library, I chose to search the database titled "Law Reviews," and under sources I chose "US Law Reviews and Journals Combined."

I combined my 3 identified component facets with the Boolean operator "and" to have a search query of :
(law librarian*) and (education* or degree* or training*) and (skill* or abilit* or competenc*)

I retrieved 1,141 results:


I narrowed this set by limiting results to articles published after January 2005. This gave me 315 results. I decided this was still a bit unwieldy so I tried adding another facet to my search.
s4= (job* or profession* or employment)

This brought my results to 263 hits. I now decided to revise one of my facets. I changed s2 (education* or degree* or training) to s2= (MLS or JD or training). My new search gave me 178 results. This was still a bit large and could probably be narrowed further by employing new synonyms or another facet, or perhaps by searching only within certain publications. However, at this point, I began to scan through some of the retrieved articles. Some were false hits, but many were very relevant to my topic. Here is one:


This article by G. Edward White titled, "Law Librarians," discusses how the role of the law librarian has changed over the years and the need today for a person to have sophisticated skills and knowledge to work as a law librarian. It is extremely relevant to my topic. I found a great number of other relevant articles discussing such things as the administrative and other skills needed to become law library directors, skills and education sought by those hiring academic law librarians, the role of technology in future law librarianship, and potential new opportunities for law librarians like those in evidence-based librarianship. Here is one more from my set of 178 that I found to be pertinent to my topic:

This is the article about skills and education sought by those hiring academic law librarians. It is titled, "Choosing the Top Candidate: Best Practices in Academic Law Library Hiring," by Wheeler, Johnson and Manion.

I found this database to be a little more difficult to search initially. It did not seem to be as intuitive as some of the others that I have been exploring. I also found the Building Block strategy to be easy to understand and use, but I think I will have more productive searches when I improve my ability to craft the components of my facets. I can see that it is important to think of many possible terms, and then choose the best. I did find that by looking at the retrieved articles, some new terms were suggested to me. For example, the term "knowledge" could be used in the facet with skill* or abilit* or *competenc*. I understood the LexisNexis database better as I explored further. My results had initially been grouped by publication date, but I re-sorted the list by relevance and this helped in identifying the best retrieved documents. Overall, I think this database is an excellent resource. I was very happy with my results and believe that I will have even better success in the future with both this database and the Building Block strategy when I have had more practice. I am pleased to have found a number of good, new sources relevant to my topic area of interest, "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians today?"

Competency 6-Specific Facet First Search

For my first database competency, I chose to search the database LibLit (Library Literature and Information Full Text) using a "specific facet first" search strategy. I decided to search for information on the topic of "the skill and educational requirements for law librarians today." I developed several facets: s1) Law librarian* or special librarian*; s2) education* or degree* or training; s3) skill* or abilit* or competenc*. The most specific facet was the first: "law librarian* or special librarian*." I checked myself on this by conducting searches on all three facets individually. The first facet gave me 3,435 records, the second returned 20,149 records, and the third produced 4,878 hits. This demonstrated that the first facet was indeed the most specific. I also decided that I would begin my search using only "law librarian*" initially, as this is the type of librarian that is really the target of my search. The operator "or" and term "special librarian*" could always be added back to this facet if results were too small. Conducting a search with "law librarian*" gave me 1,817 results.



Although this was quite a large result set, there were relevant articles on the very first page of my results. The first hit on the list would be quite useful for my purposes of learning about the debate over educational requirements for law librarians. It is an article titled, "Law Librarians: J.D. or Not J.D.?" by the author M. Whisner. I have copied the screen here:



I then decided that at this stage of my search, I would add in my second facet of "education* or degree* or training" with the Boolean operator "and." Doing so gave me 162 results as compared to the previous 1,817 records. On this screen, you can see that the first result is actually the same as the first result of my larger set of 1,817 records and the hit I chose to display above.


I applied a limiter to this set of results by limiting results to articles published between the years 2003 and 2009. This produced 49 hits. Titles included, "Credentials and Credibility.." and "Training Tomorrow's Leaders Today." These were all very relevant to my search topic of "What are the skills and educational requirements for law librarians?"

I thought this database was very easy to search and gave me good, relevant results in a very short amount of time. It was quite obvious when looking at my facets, which would be the most specific and therefore the first one to search with in employing this strategy. It was a large initial set to begin with, but easy to narrow down by adding in additional facets and limiters. The set was not too large that it could not be effectively narrowed, nor too small so that one would need to start over completely. This search strategy worked well for this topic in this database and I will definitely use it again.

Tagging/Indexing/Cataloging (Competency 5)

The first part of this week's competency assignment was to go to LibraryThing and add a tag for our textbook. After signing in to my account, I added Heting Chu's book to my library. I then looked at all the tags in the tag cloud and under "all tags" for the book. I added the new tag "Summarization" to the textbook. It was interesting to see the great variety of terms used to tag this book.

For the second part of the assignment, I searched for a resource associated with my area of interest, law librarianship, at the LibraryThing website. I found a book titled Law Librarianship in the 21st Century by Roy Balleste. The tags for this book are:


"future librarianship"(1) Law(1) law library(1) Librarianship(1) libraries(2) management(1) non-fiction(1) not at public library(1) profession(1) to read(1) trends(1)

I thought the most interesting of these tags was "not at public library." That is not a tag which I would have thought to use, but obviously it is an association for this item which is meaningful for someone. I had used the terms "law library" and "law librarianship" to search for a resource relevant to my topic.

The LibraryThing link is: http://www.librarything.com/work/3527211

I chose this book because it is directly related to my area of interest, law librarianship! In fact, it has the same title as my blog!! There is no doubt that this resource would be very helpful to me as I consider a career in this type of librarianship. According to the description of the book on the LibraryThing web page where I found this item, (the description is a product description from Amazon, http://www.amazon.com/, which has been posted on the LibraryThing page), the book is designed for those taking a library science course in law librarianship. Topics covered in the book include "the history of law librarianship, international law, and government documents." In addition, the book discusses collection development, technology, public services, technical services, etc. as these topics specifically apply to a law library setting. This book is such a perfect match for my area of interest that I think I am going to order it from Amazon!

RSS Feed (Competency 4)

I added an RSS feed from the American Association of Law Libraries. I chose this RSS feed because it relates directly to my library type. The RSS feed is titled "AALL Latest News" and contains news about new issues of the AALL magazine (AALL Spectrum), the AALL e-newsletter, of Law Library Journal, and the latest events or offerings from AALL, as well as other items of interest to the law library community. The URL for the RSS feed is: http://www.aallnet.org/rss/aall-latestnews.asp

It should be a lot of fun to keep track of the latest news in the law library community this way!

Podcast

I discovered a number of useful podcasts this week which are related to developments in various areas of law, law libraries, or legal research. I used several different search engines and different search terms to find the podcasts, and this helped me locate those which were most relevant to my blog's topic of law librarianship. I looked on YouTube and a few podcast search engines such as Podscope and Podcast Alley. I found several podcasts on YouTube and one that was quite good at iTunes. Podcast Alley was my favorite podcast search engine, returning a great number of results using such search terms as "law library," "law librarians," and "legal research." The URL for Podcast Alley is: www.podcastalley.com. I also used Google and discovered many of the same podcasts I had found using Podcast Alley, in addition to a few new ones. West, the company which provides publications, products, and services to those in the legal profession, has a wonderful podcast called Westcast. It was very relevant to my blog and is a legal podcast that would be very useful to any law librarian. The podcast episodes cover a wide range of legal topics and I particularly enjoyed listening to one about legal research in our "google generation." An archive of podcasts from the Westcast podcast can be viewed at: http://west.thomson.com/about/podcasts/. A number of the podcasts I found were from law libraries at law schools around the country. Some of the topics for these were very localized, but others would be of general interest to law librarians. Also, The Law Librarian, with Richard Leiter, is a podcast which discusses "all issues of concern to law libraries, law librarians, legal bibliography and the profession." (http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thelawlibrarian)

Using the search term "law librarian podcast" on Google led me to a wonderful article by Diane Murley titled, “Technology for Everyone... Podcasts and Podcasting for Law Librarians." (The link is: http://www.aallnet.org/products/pub_llj_v99n03/2007-40.pdf ) A number of specific podcasts were mentioned in the article and the author discussed the ways these podcasts are being used in the profession. However, the article also gave me the idea of using "aall podcast" as a search query in Google. This helped me find a link to a podcast from Government Info Pro: LexisNexis. I conducted a search with this search term, adding "podcast" and then was able to link directly to the site. The URL is: http://www.governmentinfopro.com/federal_info_pro/lexisnexis-federal-info-p.html. After looking through the site, I found a number of good podcast episodes. LexisNexis, like West, provides a great number of legal products and services to those working in the legal world. The company is now providing podcasts on topics of interest to law librarians and other legal professionals. Government Info Pro is one of them and is hosted by Marie Kaddell. There were many very useful episodes from this podcast and I plan on returning to the site to listen to many of them. The episode I chose to include in my blog, was a podcast of a talk given at an American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) convention by Donna Scheeder, Director, Law Library Services, at the Law Library of the Library of Congress entitled: "Leadership Through Influence: The Path for 21st Century Government Librarians." It was definitely one of my favorites which I listened to in its entirety and is found at:

LexisNexis® Federal Info Pro Podcast: Special Episode 1. http://www.governmentinfopro.com/federal_info_pro/2007/07/lexisnexis-fe-1.html

The podcast was very relevant to the topic of my blog. The various challenges faced by law and government librarians today were discussed, such as: how to accomplish the electronic preservation of born digital documents; open access to court records versus the privacy issues this raises; globalization trends and the need for librarians to be able to provide access to international sources of legal information, etc. The speaker in the podcast explained that law librarians will need to exercise leadership to meet these challenges. They must find ways to add value to their services and go far beyond the traditional role of a reference librarian or bibliographer. She talked about the use of a law library's website, blogs, and web crawlers which would get scholarly blogs onto the library's own webpage. It was very interesting and I believe the other episodes from this podcast will be as well.

In conclusion, I did learn that varying one's search terms really does help lead to additional sources. For example, using "legal research" at Google led me to Berring’s Legal Research podcast. There were very useful episodes such as, “Legal Periodicals and How to Find Them.” (This episode discusses how to use indexes and Boolean search techniques in full text databases. The link is: http://www.berringlegalresearch.com/podcast.asp) There is much useful information to be found, but it may take a little extra effort in terms of trying different search engines, search terms, and scrolling through a podcast's archives.

Blogs Related to Mine

Now that my blog has been created, the next assignment for my ISAR class is to find a blog related to mine and share it here. My blog is about law librarianship so I wanted to find a blog related directly to law librarianship if I could, or to law libraries generally. I used Google’s service, GoogleBlog (http://blogsearch.google.com), for my search. I tried several different search terms, including "law libraries" and "law librarians," in order to see whether my search results would differ in number of hits or relevance. In terms of relevance, I saw many of the same blogs at the top of the results using each query. I also tried a few other search engines, but in the end, I was happiest with the results provided by GoogleBlog. Many of the blogs were those of law libraries, especially academic law libraries at law schools. These had information which concerned legal developments, legal literature, and issues specific to law libraries in general in a few instances. However, most of these blogs had postings that were concerned with matters related only to the particular host law library (i.e., events to be held at that specific library, new titles acquired there, etc.)

I was happy to find several blogs related specifically to law librarianship or issues impacting law libraries generally. My favorite among these was Law Librarian Blog, (A Member of the Law Professors Blog Network). This is a wonderful blog whose contributing editors are law librarians from libraries and institutions across the country. It is just over four years old and has logged over 1,000,000 page views. There are useful links to legal articles and primary source information of interest to legal professionals, information about new technologies and information resources, upcoming conferences or events for law librarians, law librarian job openings and more. There's even a link to Bonnie Shucha's Directory of more than 100 other law library blogs. (http://library.law.wisc.edu/wisblawg/blogslistpublic.htm) The blog search feature and topical archives were also very helpful. I have posted an excerpt from the blog below which demonstrates the topical relevance of the blog to my own.

Excerpt from Law Librarian Blog webpage located at: http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/law_librarian_blog/

New Report on Emerging Information Technologies In their 2009 “Horizon Report,” EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium report on six emerging technologies likely to impact education (and implicitly, libraries) in the near future. The report discusses all-in-one mobile devices, cloud computing, geographic data, personalized Web media, new Semantic Web tools, and physical objects made “smart” by sensors and identifiers. Hat tip to Roy Tennant.

Robert Richards
January 27, 2009 in Information Technology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Carnegie Report Co-Author Identifies Opportunities for Academic Law Librarians Judith Welch Wegner (North Carolina), co-author of Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law ("Carnegie Report"), writes that "law librarians have an opportunity to enhance their teaching and institutional contributions as part of a broad effort to improve the preparation of lawyers." in Teaching Legal Research: Educating Lawyers, AALL Spectrum (February 2009). She outlines seven challenges and associated possibilities for law librarians.

[JH]
January 27, 2009 in Legal Research Instruction | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

150 Law Library/Librarian Blogs and Counting Bonnie Shucha (UW Law Library) has updated her directory of law library/librarian blogs. As of Jan. 9th there was 150 active blogs. Great job Bonnie!

[JH]
January 21, 2009 in Web Communications | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

A few additional blogs that I found had very good information for law librarians were Law Lib Tech, http://www.lawlibtech.com/ (concerning library technology and knowledge management), and AALL Spectrum Blog, http://aallspectrum.wordpress.com/ (a blog from the monthly magazine of the American Association of Law Libraries). Of the many academic law library blogs, one of my favorites was the "Goodson Blogson" from the Goodson Law Library of Duke University at http://dukelawref.blogspot.com. I am very happy to have found these useful law librarian blogs and to have them stored here for my future reference. I look forward to reading them regularly.

About My Blog

This blog was created for a dual purpose.  Firstly, I have created it to meet the requirements of my Information Storage and Retrieval class (LS 5013) at Texas Woman's University where I am pursuing my Master's in Library Science.  Secondly, I hope to use this blog to document my discoveries and explore my interest in the field of library science, with a particular focus on law librarianship.

I obtained a secondary teaching certificate during the course of my undergraduate studies, but went directly to law school after graduation from college.  I was admitted to the State Bar of Texas as an attorney and enjoyed serving in the profession of law, before taking time off to focus on family.  However, I always was curious about a career in law librarianship and have finally made the decision to obtain a Master's in Library Science to meet this career goal.  In researching this career field, I discovered that law librarians work in law school libraries, government agency libraries, court and bar libraries, and private law firms and corporations. Almost every position for a law librarian requires the MLS degree, very few will hire someone who only has the J.D., and many require both the J.D. and MLS.  The latter is particularly true in law school libraries where law librarians frequently have law professor status on a tenure-track, and in some government libraries where a higher degree in addition to the MLS is required.  Although my teaching certificate and family obligations suggest exploring opportunities in school librarianship, at least for a time, my goal is to ultimately utilize my law background to serve in a law library.

Law librarianship is somewhat unique in that there has been much debate about preparation for law librarians.  There are necessary subject competencies for law librarians, namely knowledge of the law and the US legal system, the legal profession and its terminology, legal literature, and ethics.  This is why many law librarians enter the field already having their J.D.s, or subsequently obtain a law degree, take law school courses or special courses and programs of the American Association of Law Libraries, or in some cases, may obtain a Master's of Legal Studies.  Having the Juris Doctor has provided me with a foundation in the necessary subject competencies.  However, the general competencies of librarianship will be provided by the MLS through the core courses and electives I will take.  I am interested particularly in learning how technical services operate in the law library setting.  I want to explore the issues specific to law libraries that may arise in acquistions, cataloging, serials, and preservation.  My topic focus should narrow as I learn more in my studies. Obviously, most research and reference law librarians are hired for their skills and expertise in the subject competencies, therefore most of these tend to have both the J.D. and MLS.  I hope to end up in a law school as a Reference/Research Librarian one day, aiding faculty and teaching students, and possibly even as a director of a law school library. However, I think a strong grounding in technical services, combined with the J.D., would increase career opportunities and development.

I look forward to using this blog to record what I learn and store helpful information I retrieve along the way.