Meet New Member Isaac Needell

by Evelyn Campbell

Isaac Needell is the new law librarian at the Norfolk Law Library. He was born in Durham, New Hampshire, but had spent most of his life in Maine.

Isaac graduated from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, with a BA double major in classics and classical civilizations. While he was employed as a ranger at Baxter State Park in Millinocket is when he started working with the Maine statutes – mostly those dealing with game and wildlife, and Isaac discovered that he enjoyed working with the statutes and tracking legislature.

When his wife, Carolyn Swan Needell, was undertaking a fellowship at the University College London – Qatar, Isaac took the opportunity to reevaluate his career choices and enroll in library school at the same university. He was able to concentrate on his studies and be a stay-at-home dad to their first child, who was born in Qatar. Isaac graduated in 2017 with an MA in Library and Information Studies.

The family returned to Maine late in 2017 and Isaac started his job as an associate law librarian at the Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library in Augusta. He rediscovered his love of working with statutes, tracking legislation and engaging with the public.

His time at the Maine State Law and Legislative Reference Library was a short one. Three months after he started his job there, the family moved to Norfolk, where Carolyn had accepted the position of curator of glass for the Chrysler Museum of Art.

“It was a tough decision but I knew there’d be other libraries, while there was only one Chrysler,” Isaac said. The family moved to Norfolk in April 2018. Some months after the move, their second daughter was born and Isaac stayed home with her while he checked out the library world in the Tidewater area.

He had had an opportunity to work in a special library setting when he volunteered at Weill Cornell Medicine in Qatar. He had staffed the reference desk, did collection weeding, did material purchasing, and cataloging. He had also spent some weeks at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, building original cataloging records, and conducted an academic case study. Having had these opportunities, he was open to building up other parts of his library career.

Earlier this spring he was hired by the Hampton Public Library. Isaac enjoyed the public library system and was able to participate in all aspects of managing a branch library. He was able to design the outreach for public schools for the summer reading program, and put his digital skills to good use.

The Norfolk Law Library job became available in the summer and Isaac had the chance to return to law librarianship. “Law libraries are fascinating,” he said. “It really is the best of both worlds – public service and also answering the more challenging research questions from the legal profession.”

In the meantime he is learning as much as he can from retiring law librarian, Donna Bausch, who will officially retire on October 31.

Isaac Needell and Donna Bausch ... the torch has been passed ...

Norfolk Law Library has Moved to a New Home

by Evelyn Campbell

Last summer, after decades of being at Dominion Tower with expansive views of the Elizabeth River, the Norfolk Law Library moved to its new location on the second floor of the City of Norfolk Courthouse.

Law Librarian Isaac Needell at the reference desk.

Now people can come directly from the courts up to the library to research their legal needs without having to walk out of the courthouse and make their way across a very busy intersection to Dominion Tower.

Donna Bausch, the law library director, said that the library has seen a marked increase of public patrons. The library offers free copying and programs such as The Lawyer in the Library where a legal aid lawyer is available for two hours in the library to answer questions from the public. This is popular with patrons.

The library still serves the research needs of members of the Norfolk-Portsmouth Bar Association as well.

The new space is bright and inviting with lots of natural light. There are private study rooms with computers for quiet research and tables if one’s research needs to take up space.

The Norfolk Law Library’s new address is: City of Norfolk Courthouse, 2^nd Floor, 150 St. Paul’s Blvd., Norfolk, VA 23510. The hours are Mon – Fri, 9:30 am – 4:30 pm. Tel: (757) 622-2910.

UVA Law Library Launches New Digital Archive Website

Submitted by Kathryn Boudouris

CC BY Image courtesy of University of Virginia Law Library

The UVA Law Library’s Special Collections team has launched a new website for its Scottish Court of Session Digital Archive Project. The project began as an effort to digitize and richly describe the Law Library’s print collection of Session Papers, which includes documents submitted to Scotland’s supreme civil court from the late 1750s to the late 1830s. The Law Library subsequently established a collaborative initiative with the Library of Congress, the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh, and other institutions. The digital archive will make Session Papers more accessible to scholars and the public.

Session Papers tell us a great deal about life and the law in what historians call the “British Atlantic world.” As civil court records, Session Papers contain rich histories of individuals who lived in North America, the Caribbean, and Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. They provide a window into how people defended their legal interests in an era of profound historical change. Virginia merchants sued their Glaswegian counterparts over trade deals that soured; formerly enslaved people sought to prevent their forced impressment into the Royal Navy during the War for Independence; and women in the post-war era laid claim to inherited property in Scotland. These are but a few of the many early American legal histories we find in the Session Papers. 

The Special Collections team and its partners have constructed a custom-built database and website to hold digitized Session Papers and unpack the stories within them. The Law Library’s project will be among the first to describe Session Papers in rich detail. The website provides many different access points for exploring the collection, including curated themes and a full-text search feature that displays snippets of relevant documents. 

For more information about the website or the Scottish Court of Session Collection, contact Loren Moulds at moulds@law.virginia.edu.

CC BY Image courtesy of University of Virginia Law Library
Clockwise from front: Loren Moulds, Randi Flaherty & Jim Ambuske.