Tag Archives: work

Presentation Outfit

Posted by jkbeitz in My Style and tagged with ,
Presentation

So, yesterday I took part in a CLE presentation given by the local chapter of the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association, and this is pretty much what I wore. Well, my tank top did not cost $207. Also, I wore totally different rings. And my suit isn’t exactly exactly like this one, but it’s pretty close. So much so that when I saw this one on Etsy, I thought it was the same one, but the Etsy listing says it’s a vintage Japanese deal, which mine is decidedly not. And I think my skirt is a little shorter.

Turns out, one probably doesn’t need to wear a tweed suit with black and white flecks and black pumps to a middle-of-the-afternoon, 1.5 hour presentation for new, solo practitioners. Still, I love the suit and don’t get many chances to wear it.

For your reading enjoyment …

Posted by jkbeitz in Links and tagged with , , ,

photo
Sometimes I star things in Google Reader or Twitter or wherever because I want to be sure to mention them in my Saturday Evening Post, and sometimes I do it to remind myself to read something, and sometimes I do it to save “important” things. Then the starred items are automatically sent to Evernote, where I forget about them until Saturday, when I’m looking for something to post. Point is, I cannot remember which particular bucket these items fall into.

This week, it seems especially heavy on the “save ‘important’ things” bucket, so sorry if legal research isn’t one of your major interests. I don’t actually talk all that much about work on my blog, so this provides you with some insight on a lot of the things I think about all day.

    • Slaw, Reflecting on Legal Research Instruction. This is another librarian’s reaction to a post I drew your attention to a few weeks ago, along with her feelings about being in the middle of teaching a first-year legal research class. This point seemed particularly apt:

      To many students, legal research is sort of the broccoli and spinach of first-year law school courses, and research instruction tutorials come at a time when they’re beginning to feel the weight of their workload. Engagement can be a challenge, as can avoidance of information overload.

       

    • RIPS Law Librarian Blog, Reference Coaching for the Short Attention Span Patron. Aside from blaming “Sesame Street” as the beginning of the slide into short-attention-span territory, there’s a lot of good stuff here.

      I became concerned because of a reference question I recently received. I had a student working on a research problem. I directed the student to the United States Code and helped her with the index. It was a heavily litigated area and I pointed out the annotations. She looked at them. She looked at me. She asked “How would I know the answer? Would I need to read this?”
      …
      Librarians need to craft reference interviews not to be more entertaining, but to coach the researcher to understand that the answer will not be easy, will not appear on the screen or immediately stand out to them in the book. Students need to be explicitly told that research will take hours, not minutes. That they should embrace this.

      Although this part:

      I told her no one would pay her as an attorney if it was easy to find a legal answer. Her face brightened. I also told her that, depending on the payment model, she would get paid for each hour spent researching.

      Reminded me that I thought I read something that said clients were being more circumspect about research fees. I guess I did not bookmark that in a way that would make me easy to find it again, though …

That’s all for now. Am planning on writing tomorrow about a meeting I had earlier today with a group of students I like to call LSOT, who tell me everything I need to know about kids these days.

Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo …

Posted by jkbeitz in Work and tagged with , ,

Assuming you’re still interested in the Technology Petting Zoo that I mentioned briefly yesterday, here’s the story of how it all happened, and what all went down . . .

I saw this tweet in late September:

(or maybe I saw this Facebook status, I can’t remember) and immediately thought we should do something similar at our library. Asked supervisor if it would be feasible, joined forces with our Educational Technologist (hereinafter “ET”*) to organize, and begged people to contribute their talents.

My idea was that most everybody working in the library has some expertise and interest, if not passion, for something technology-based that our students/faculty/staff could benefit from learning more about and experimenting with (yeah, I ended that sentence with a preposition. Deal.).

Generalized interest from my co-workers existed, I think, but was not overly high – although some were really excited about it, and helped out a lot (seriously, could not have pulled it off without several of them really pitching in on many different aspects). I think some were dubious about the whole thing, and/or wanted something more concrete from me and ET in terms of exactly what they would be doing. But I wasn’t really  sure. And I really wanted people to be informal about it, and to be eager and interested in what they were “demo’ing,” so I didn’t have much more of a plan than, “Show up with a device (or a piece of software, etc.). Talk about what you like about the it, and how a student/prof could use it in law school.”

We got enough librarians to buy into it so that we had a room with at least five people available to demonstrate something: iOS apps, Android apps, differences between browsers, Kindles, Word formatting (this may sound odd, but every year we have students writing briefs who are stymied by requirements that they begin every section with new page numbers), the new exam software, and special scanners and how they can assist you to create a paperless office.

I ended up being fairly pleased with the whole thing. I would have liked a greater turn-out, but we never had a day where nobody showed up (we held the zoo for two-hour shifts on three different days). And it’s beginning to dawn on me that I simply can’t anticipate students’ schedules and perceived busy-ness vs. their willingness to come in for things and talk with librarians (even when there’s free food!). As an unexpected benefit, when there were no real attendees, those of us demo’ing talked with each other about our interests, and learned things we might not have otherwise.

Next time (if there is a next time!), I’ve gotta do something about getting staff more fired up. And figure out a way to hook more students. It wasn’t advertising, I don’t think. We advertised everywhere, electronic and otherwise. It could’ve been timing – law review students had their articles due, so maybe other students had long papers due? Or maybe students were just as unsure what would go on at the zoo as my co-workers were. I’m not sure.

In somewhat-related work news, I am currently setting up meeting number 2 of the “Library Student Outreach Team” (a group of librarians meet with a group of students and try to learn how the library could better serve them), so I’ll try to get a better sense of timing/scheduling from the students then.

So that’s that! See you tomorrow!

*I realize that this abbreviation is more commonly used for “Extra Terrestrial.” No disrespect intended! Really!

Day in the life …

Posted by jkbeitz in Work and tagged with , , ,

The Library Day in the Life Project is on Round 8! And here I am.

We’re supposed to start our LibDay blog posts with a reminder of who we are and for whom we work, so: I am a reference and instruction librarian at the Warren E. Burger Library at William Mitchell College of Law.

I actually started my Monday on Sunday night, with a final look at my RSS reader to schedule things of interest for my work alter ego to tweet. That’s also how my Monday morning – and pretty much every morning, actually – started.

I love Hootsuite because it allows me to go through my reader when it has accumulated a lot of posts, and I can schedule a whole slew of interesting things to tweet throughout the day. I feel like my tweets have more of a tendency to get lost in the Twitterverse if I make a bunch of tweets at once (or maybe I think they’re more likely to be ignored?). I consider it a pretty good day when I can have a tweet go out about every half hour during the work day.

This was my favorite tweet of the day:
 

 
It is not law-related. So sue me.

I then had an email exchange with a student whom I had helped last week. He was doing research on government entities and how the First Amendment might affect their presence on social media sites (i.e., to what extent can government entities control what citizens post on government Facebook sites?). Anyway, we found some law review articles last week, and I told him to come back and brief me on what he found, because the topic interested me. He sent me a pretty detailed email about the state of the limited public forum and how he thinks social media fits in within that concept. In turn, I found a few more resources he might want to check out, and I emailed those back to him. It was quite gratifying. I usually tell students to feel free to contact me with the results of their research when the topic personally interests me, but they hardly ever do. Which is fine, but it was still a nice surprise to hear from him.

I’m co-teaching a class this term – Internet Legal Research – so most of my work this term is related to that. Even though it’s only a one-credit, pass/fail class, we revamp it so much each time that we teach it that it ends up being more work than you’d think.

One of the new things we’ve added this time is online discussion forums related to the reading. I attended a teaching seminar a few months ago, and one of the things I distinctly remember from it is the idea that we shouldn’t waste time in class with what the students already understand or can learn outside of class. Therefore, if the students “get” the reading, don’t take up class time discussing it! So, we’ve developed (what we hope are) thought-provoking questions related to the readings, and the students talk about the ideas in the discussion forums. This also helps with students who may feel more comfortable discussing things in writing, where they have more time to reflect than they do in class. We haven’t quite worked out how we interact with the students on the forums. Not everything needs to be addressed, and I don’t want to stifle discussion, but I would like it to be more of an interactive back-and-forth than it really is right now.

Last week was one of “my” weeks to teach, so this week I’m the one who primarily grades the homework and makes sure everybody has responded to the Discussion Board. So a big chunk of my day was spent looking at the homework, which was due today at noon. I may talk more about this tomorrow.

I also did a little work on the newsletter for one of the professional librarian organizations of which I am a member. I’m the technical editor (or something like that), which means the substantive editors gather all the stuff, give it to me, and I fit it all in, using a publishing software. I did the bulk of it last week, but I don’t have all the articles yet, and had to make some changes from the draft that I have. There will be more of this this week, too.

Then I went home, but my day won’t officially be over until I go back to my RSS reader and schedule more tweets for tomorrow. The symmetry of book-ending my days like this is nice, don’t you think?

So! What did you all do today?