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.

New Members

Welcome to the following new members:

Julie Beamer – Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals

Gabrielle Dennis – Thomson Reuters

Allison Gifford - Alexandria Law Library

Isaac Needell – Norfolk Law Library

Leslie Street – William & Mary Law School

Proposed changes to the Bylaws

VALL Voting Members ,

At the recent Executive Board meeting, two updates to the Bylaws were proposed to address changes to our organizational structure and operational processes. In accordance with the VALL constitution, members are being notified of these proposed changes in advance of the next meeting (October 25, 2019).

Article I, Sec. 5

Current language: Section 5: Suspension of Membership. Members failing to pay dues by August 1st, and after due notice by the treasurer, shall be suspended from the membership by the treasurer. Suspended members may be reinstated at any time upon payment of the full current year’s dues.

Proposed change: notice and suspension of membership for non-payment of dues shall be made by the Membership Chair rather than the Treasurer

Proposed language: Section 5: Suspension of Membership. Members failing to pay dues by August 1st, and after due notice by the Membership Chair, shall be suspended from the membership by the Membership Chair. Suspended members may be reinstated at any time upon payment of the full current year’s dues.

Article V, Sec. 1 

Current language: Section 1: Purpose. The property, business, and affairs of the Association shall be managed by the Executive Board which shall be composed of the officers of the Association, the last retiring president, and two directors of the Association who are not officers. The Chair of the Communications Committee shall serve as an ex officio member of the Board. The Executive Board shall have the power to fill any vacancy in elective offices except that of president. The person so elected by the Executive Board shall serve the unexpired term.

In the case of death or resignation of the president of the Association, the vice-president/president-elect shall become president and shall serve until the end of his or her own elected term.

Proposed change: remove reference to Chair of Communications Committee as ex officio member. The Communications Committee has been rolled into the Public Relations Committee.

Proposed language: Section 1: Purpose. The property, business, and affairs of the Association shall be managed by the Executive Board which shall be composed of the officers of the Association, the last retiring president, and two directors of the Association who are not officers. The Executive Board shall have the power to fill any vacancy in elective offices except that of president. The person so elected by the Executive Board shall serve the unexpired term.

In the case of death or resignation of the president of the Association, the vice-president/president-elect shall become president and shall serve until the end of his or her own elected term.

Thank you,

Megan Scanlon

VALL Secretary

Hungry, Hungry Hypos – A Reflection on a Great Program

by Molly Lentz-Meyer

As a relatively new research instructor I am always on the look-out for ways to improve my teaching and the experience of my students. This year’s programming provided a wealth of opportunity to learn what practitioners wish students knew, and how to teach them those skills.

I have found in prepping my courses that maybe the hardest thing to do is write a really good hypothetical. Frankly, even writing a kind of mediocre one can be hard. How do you balance interesting with relevance while avoiding pandering? Should you be clever or funny? Have silly names? What even makes a hypothetical a good hypothetical?

Happily, Hungry, Hungry Hypos was there to help. The presenters had put out a call on the listserv for hypos a few months ago, so the program had been on my radar for a while. I was hoping that it would be mildly helpful (managed expectations), and I was thoroughly surprised when it turned out to be amazing.

The presentation started with a hypothetical I happen to know well because it is used by UR’s very own Joyce Janto. The hypo was singled out as a great hypo because it meets what the presenters have identified as the “3 F’s” of a good hypothetical; functional, familiar, and fascinating.

These criteria are in order of importance. First and foremost, a good hypothetical must be functional. By this, they mean that a good hypothetical must be designed around the learning objective that it is attempting to teach. So, if you’re teaching how to research statutory law, your hypothetical must be functional for that purpose. As a corollary, and something I found alarmingly eye-opening to hear, there is no such thing as universally good hypo.

Second, a good hypothetical should be familiar. By this they mean that a good hypothetical should be familiar even to the student that they do not need to do any background research to start the research you have assigned. They cautioned however that pop culture references in hypotheticals should probably be avoided. You can never bank on everyone in the room being a Game of Thrones fan.

Finally, a good hypo should be fascinating. This, of course, is the hardest to get right – and thankfully the one that is the least important. It is also where the presenters disagreed the most. Should you try to be funny (not unless you actually are), should you use cute names (are they distracting), are they actually functional if they’re fascinating (this is where mine most often fail)? While we should strive for fascinating, interesting enough might actually be enough.

It was an eye-opening and educational experience and I walked out more confident in my ability to write a good hypothetical – and armed with a bunch of really great examples.

AALL 2019- Capitalizing On Our Strengths

by Ashley Vavra

First, a highlight: AALL 2019’s Thompson Reuters reception at the Library of Congress. I saw Dr. Carla Hayden speak, gawked at the art on the walls and ceiling of that beautiful building, and met dozens of friends-of-a-friend. I took an entirely unsophisticated number of photos.

That opportunity was just one exciting piece of a great few days, though. This was my first AALL conference, and people were right when they said newcomers are very welcome. I had my “First Time Attendee” ribbon on my name tag, and I think people read that as “New Kid: Be Nice To Me and Tell Me To Join Committees.” No complaints here, and I’m very grateful for the VALL grant that made it possible for me to be there.

I am thrilled to say that I was part of this year’s CONELL class. That started with the dine-around option on Friday, which was a fun way to get out and meet the other new people, as well as our two kind hosts, who have been around long enough to give us plenty of good advice. I met our CONELL cohort on Saturday, and decided the value of identifying a few familiar faces early on in such a big conference really can’t be overstated.

I also went to several sessions during the program. One of my favorites- and one that was most relevant for my work- was Creating an Oral History Program: Capturing History and Building Connections. The Supreme Court of Virginia has had an oral history program since 2007, and, as the new librarian-archivist there, the oral history program is an important part of my role. This session was especially useful because it brought together people from different environments with different goals, to talk about how their programs got to where they are and how they prepare for and conduct oral history interviews.

Some of the other sessions I attended:

·          Opening session: The speaker was Shon Hopwood, an appellate lawyer and a professor at Georgetown who spent time in prison some years ago for bank robbery. He told us the story of how he taught himself about the law in prison, wrote a brief for a friend that was accepted by the U.S. Supreme Court, and eventually went to law school and made a new life for himself. His talk was very well received by a packed ballroom full of people, particularly the parts about how resources sent by law librarians helped him get to where he is. (He was on 60 minutes if you want to look him up.) 

·         How to be a leader when you’re not a manager, or “Growing Out, not Climbing Up”. Take-aways: Use professional associations to build connections and skills. Be flexible. Try new things in your own job. Become an expert at something, dive deep into research if that’s what you enjoy. Collaborate. Choose new markers of progress in your professional life. Many of us feel the pressure to “move up” the org chart at work, to become managers at some point, and we may hear or feel that if we haven’t moved up after a certain amount of time, we’ve failed. But managing is just a different kind of job that you may or may not want, and requires different skills and goals. It is possible to be a leader without being a manager.

·         Engaging Public Librarians in Access to Justice. This was sponsored by the Government Law Libraries section, and discussed ways law librarians, who may not always be the first point of contact for a person in need of legal help, can get non-law public librarians on board. Much of the conversation centered on programs to educate public librarians about the self-help resources and organizations they can direct patrons to, and how to make librarians feel confident that they can help in significant ways that don’t cross into unauthorized practice of law.   

I also went to a couple of roundtables, including one where I got to meet other archivists in law libraries. We’re a small percentage of the law librarian world, so it was wonderful to have the chance to meet a roomful of them.

And because the beauty of conferences-- the opportunity to meet people, learn new things, and share ideas at a slightly alarming pace that still manages to be incredibly friendly and engaging-- can be a lot to handle in some moments. I’d like to point out the forethought and kindness of whoever decided AALL needed a Quiet Room. It was a lovely, restful space which, in my opinion, recognized the different needs of attendees and enabled a better appreciation of the general bustle of the conference.

So, long story slightly shorter: D.C. is a neat place to be, I learned a ton of new things on a wide variety of topics and met even more new people. And I am very grateful for the opportunity to attend AALL this year.

And here’s another picture! I finally got to visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture (which opened in 2016 and has been packed every day since then, as far as I can tell), and it was every good thing that’s been said about it. The bottom concourse levels show the history of African Americans from 1400 or so to the present, and the upper floors are busting with music and arts and other things I didn’t have time to fully appreciate before I left D.C. on Tuesday. But anyway, if you get the chance, get there.