Message from the President

A short and sweet President’s message for February, the shortest, and sometimes the sweetest (for those of us that partake in Valentine’s Day celebration) month of the year.

Leadership:

Leadership Manual: The edits continue; very, very slowly. I am determined to complete the manual before the end of my term, so that the incoming executive board and committee chairs can hit the ground running.

Leadership Transition: A leadership transition workshop is tentatively scheduled for the April 13, 2012 Spring Meeting. All incoming and outgoing executive board members and committee chairs will be invited to participate.

Pride:

Electronic Newsletter Collection: All RALLA and VALL newsletters are in the process of being scanned and converted to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) format. Many thanks to Gail Zwirner and our archivist Gail Warren for providing the print copies.

The ultimate goal of this project is to create a searchable and browseable newsletter collection which will be accessed through the VALL Wiki. The digitization of the newsletters is just the first step. I invite and encourage you to join Gail Warren and me in seeing this project through to its completion. Please contact me (mgernhardt@hunton.com) if you are interested in participating in the planning and/or execution of this project.

Growth/Other important updates:

VALL VIP: John Douglass has accepted our invitation to attend the 2012 AALL Annual Meeting in Boston as the VALL VIP. Lyn Warmath has been the driving force behind this process. I deeply appreciate her efforts in keeping us on task in ensuring VALL participates in this important program.

AALL Chapter Visitor: Our request for a AALL executive board visitor was submitted in advance of the deadline. We are currently awaiting a response.

Elections: The election process is underway and on schedule. Please send any further nominations to Fred Dingledy, Nominations Committee Chair, by February 15, 2012. I am so very appreciative of the Committee’s timely efforts, and the responsiveness of the membership in submitting nominees. Thank you all for your part in a successful elections process!

List-serv: The List-serv is being vigilantly administered by our Membership Committee Chair, Chris Vassey. All active 2011-12 members should be receiving list-serv messages. So, you should have received a “save-the-date” announcement for the Spring 2012 meeting at the University of Richmond School of Law. If you did not, please contact Chris at christina.vassey@thomsonreuters.com.

I wish you all the very best in 2012 and hope to see you at the Spring Meeting on April 13.

Michele Gernhardt

Save the Date: April 13!

The Program Committee is in the process of finalizing the Spring meeting -- please save the date for the meeting which is scheduled to be held at the University of Richmond School of Law Library.

The day’s program will include a presentation from the team at the University of Virginia that is digitizing the papers of Frank S. Tavenner relating to the Tokyo War Crimes Trials; a visitor from AALL (still to be determined); and a presentation from David Mao, the new Law Librarian of Congress.

Mark the date on your calendars -- it looks to be an interesting and informative meeting.

Happenings at Ehrhorn Law Library

Congratulations to Anthony Brown Ikwueme who is now the director of Ehrhorn Law Library! Tony assumed the directorship in December after serving as acting director when Barbara Baxter retired in the summer of 2011.

Welcome to Sola G. Babatunde who is the new reference librarian at Ehrhorn Law Library. Sola comes to Ehrhorn from from Texas Southern University – Thurgood Marshall School of Law where he was the Government Documents Librarian.

For nearly eight years, Sola served Fondren Library at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas, Texas, first as Library Specialist III in the Center for Information Processing and then as Library Specialist IV in the Government Documents Department.

Sola is a recipient of the SMU Colophon Library School Scholarship Award, the University of North Texas School of Library and Information Science Scholarship, and has been invited to join the Beta Phi Mu honor society. He is a member of the American Association of Law Libraries, the Houston Area Association of Law Libraries, and the Houston Area Network of Documents Information. Babatunde has been a member of the Tennessee bar since 2005.

Below is Sola's educational background:

M.L.I.S., University of North Texas, School of Library and Informational Sciences;

LL.M., Southern Methodist University School of Law;

LL.M., Unviersity of Lagos, Lagos, Nigeria;

B.L., Nigerian Law School;

LL.B., University of Lagos; Lagos, Nigeria

We look forwarding to meeting Sola at future VALL meetings.