HEARSAY News from KU’s Wheat Law Library | Spring 2018
THIS ISSUE Introducing ProView eBooks
Optican International Trade Law Collection
National Library Week
Green Hall | 1535 W. 15th St. Lawrence, KS 66045-7608 law.ku.edu/library lawref@ku.edu
DIRE
DIRECTOR’S CORNER Welcome to the latest edition of Hearsay, the newsletter of the Wheat Law Library. Each semester we are pleased to share some of the exciting things that are happening here, although it is impossible to capture all of the action in just a few pages. On any given day, you will find our library faculty and staff engaged in a wide variety of projects that contribute to the intellectual and practical life of the law school, university and profession. Choosing a few items to highlight is never an easy task, but we hope that this small sampling of library updates will encourage you to engage with us the next time you confront a challenging legal research problem. At the Wheat Law Library, we have long recognized that expertise and communication are generally far more important than any specific books or databases. In other words, the six dedicated and knowledgeable people that comprise our library faculty and staff are the key to our success as an organization. We have important tangible resources as well. Our patrons are often astounded when shown some of the incredibly powerful research tools we make available. With a KU online ID and password, most of these resources are available virtually anywhere with an Internet connection, while public patrons can visit the library and gain access to almost all of them on any campus computer. A few good examples include: • Trying to interpret an ambiguous statute but afraid of going down the complex legislative history research rabbit hole? Our Legislative Insight database puts thousands of compiled federal legislative histories at your fingertips. • Working on an issue that implicates foreign law but you have no idea where to start looking for the law of a wholly unfamiliar legal system? Our Foreign Law Guide database jump-starts that research process for any country across the globe. It even compiles foreign laws by subject, making comparative research a breeze. • Need a scholarly monograph but it is 11 p.m. and you are cozy on your couch with a laptop? Our ProQuest
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Ebook Central database delivers thousands of titles right into your living room.
On any given day, you will find our library faculty and staff engaged in a wide variety of projects that contribute to the intellectual and practical life of the law school, university and profession.
• Conducting historical research and you need a legal treatise published in 1827? Or primary source documents about the trial of Marie Antoinette? Or the Revised Ordinances of Kansas City as they existed in 1902? We have several Making of Modern Law databases that can deliver that information in seconds. • Trying to track down an elusive law review article not found on Westlaw or Lexis? You can probably find it in our extensive HeinOnline law journal library collection.
All of these resources and many more are just a click away via the Wheat Law Library website (law.ku.edu/ legal-databases). Immersed among these wonders of the digital age on a daily basis, law librarians often do not give them a second thought. I hope this brief list will inspire you to peruse our collection, whether electronic or print, and find the information you are seeking. I might have mentioned this before, but we also have a pretty amazing staff to assist your search.
Christopher L. Steadham, JD, MLIM Wheat Law Library Director
Team Swardfish crowned 2017 Bluebook Relays champions Jeff Montgomery Circulation/Serials Departments Manager Another raucous edition of the Barber Emerson Bluebook Relays enlivened Green Hall over the lunch hour on Oct. 27, 2017. Organized by the law library’s own Jeff Montgomery and sponsored by the Lawrence law firm Barber Emerson LC, the 28th annual Bluebook Relays were a smashing success. The 2017 title was ultimately captured by third-year law student Brad Hook’s Swardfish team, which joins a long line of proud Bluebook Relays champions. The Relays are a special and cherished tradition for KU Law that provides 1Ls with a brief respite from memo writing and puts their newly acquired legal citations skills to the test. Each small section competes with a team of 10 members, including one Bluebook “expert.” Usually held around Halloween, the Relays also feature outrageous costumes and spirited but friendly competition. Jake Turner’s Guns ’n’ Rosenberg team won the 2017 Spirit Award.
Brad Hook’s Swardfish (top) won the 2017 Bluebook Relays, while Jake Turner’s team, Guns ’n’ Rosenberg, captured the coveted Spirit Award.
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Lighten up! Pam Crawford Assistant Director for Public and Technical Services Law school is serious business. The reading, the writing, the long hours of preparation, the days and nights spent in the library. But that doesn’t mean we have to be serious all the time. In fact, the very weight of law school pressures demands some creativity and — dare I say it — fun! Here are just a few of the ways we at Wheat Law Library manage to help lighten up life at the law school. • Any discussion of library fun must begin with the highly competitive, eagerly anticipated and thoroughly enjoyable Barber Emerson Bluebook Relays held each fall. This event features teams composed of lawyering sections and tests their knowledge of legal citation. Jeff Montgomery is the longtime ringmaster of this circus. In fact, he talks about the most recent Relays in this edition of Hearsay. • National Library Week (NLW to those of us in the biz) is another excuse for a little fun in the law library. April 8-14 are the dates this year, and we will be brightly decorated for the occasion. We hand out “Cake in the Commons” on Monday and recognize our awesome library staff on Tuesday. The rest of the week is filled with library user surveys (with a prize drawing from the entries at the end of the week), research-themed puzzles and other fun activities. • In addition to their already-full class and study schedules, some of our law students work for us at the Circulation and Reference desks. The “fun” component of this is the chance to meet and greet, converse and commiserate with their fellow classmates while helping them unjam or refill the paper drawers in the printers/copiers and find relevant research materials online or in the stacks. In assisting fellow students, they are also becoming more aware of the collection of amazing resources our library provides. A final fun perk for these incredibly helpful student workers is
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lots of snacks for the late-night hours during exam periods. • At Halloween, the law library joins the law school and several nearby buildings on campus to welcome costumed trick-or-treaters from the campus preschool as they parade through the building. All those tiny people in adorable costumes bring smiles to even the grumpiest law students. And then there’s all the leftover candy the law students (and faculty and staff) get to eat the rest of the day! So there you have some of the more highly visible instances of fun in the library. Even just a few special moments or celebrations can brighten a student’s day, elicit a smile or create a memory. If you went to school here, I hope you have “fun times” memories of your own — and maybe one or two in the library!
For the girls Jeff Montgomery Circulation/Serials Departments Manager In January, I received a birthday gift from the Law Review staff. It was a three-month subscription to Bark Box for my two Labrador retrievers, known to most at Green Hall simply as “the girls.” This touching gesture caused me to reflect on my long career at the Law Library. I started in old Green Hall as a student employee in April 1976. A lot has changed in 42 years, and much has stayed the same. I was hired to do re-shelving, then moved on to circulation desk duties and handling overdue items and fines. I went full time in 1981, but worked mostly in Technical Services, out of the public eye. In 1992, I started working as a library liaison with the Legal Research and Writing (now Lawyering) small sections. I estimate that in the past 25 years I have had about 1,000 1Ls in my small sections. I have enjoyed almost every minute of it, though not so much when one of my students informed me that his father, an attorney, said he did not need to Shepardize. Oh, well! One of my friends remarked to me that I have touched so many lives. Well, it is mutual. So what am I doing now, 42 years later? I am the Circulation Manager. I handle the re-shelving, as well as overdue items and fines. I have
Circulation Manager Jeff Montgomery’s dogs Lucy, foreground, and Nellie, background.
come full circle but, most importantly, I am trying my best to take care of my law students the way I take care of “the girls.”
UPCOMING EVENTS Return to Green CLE April 20, 2018 Recent Developments in the Law CLE May 17-18, 2018 Reunion/Homecoming Weekend Sept. 28-29, 2018
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Library welcomes new tech services manager Ellen Olker Technical Services Manager Sitting at the front desk for one of my very first circulation and reference shifts, a frazzled law student asked if she was able to put items on hold, as she had no idea what to do with the large stack of “light reading” she was lugging around. While she referred to herself as “so obviously a 1L,” I admitted that I was also new and proud that I was able to answer a question that went beyond the location of the bathroom. Luckily, if you are a newbie in need of guidance in Green Hall, there is no shortage of knowledgeable and patient people to help. Though I have grown quite accustomed to large public universities, having completed my undergraduate degree and later an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, coming to a campus as a new staff member certainly feels like being a first-year student all over again. From getting lost on the hills of campus to not knowing what a Bluebook was, I have made my share of rookie mistakes. Through it all, the support and wisdom of the rest of the library staff have been invaluable since I began working at the Wheat Law Library as the Technical Services Manager this past October. If you are unfamiliar, the main duties of the position involve managing acquisitions, processing new books, and maintaining our online catalog. You can also find me at the circulation desk mid-day every Thursday. Along with my regular tasks, I will be working on projects related to the Legal History Collection or processing donations to the library, such as the manuscript collection recently donated by Judge James K. Logan. Before arriving at KU, I spent two years in Chicago working at the library of a small, Catholic high school, where I cataloged new materials and provided research support to students. While I had never imagined myself as a school librarian, I had also never imagined working in a law library. However, librarianship is a diverse field that allows me to explore what I may otherwise overlook,
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Though I have grown quite accustomed to large public universities, having completed my undergraduate degree and later an MLIS from the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, coming to a campus as a new staff member certainly feels like being a first-year student all over again.
giving me an equally diverse set of experiences. During my time in Chicago, I worked as an intern processing archival collections at The Leather Archives and Museum. Through my studies I focused on special collections and archives while still broadening my skills to include cataloging and metadata theory, data processing, and reference. Here at the Wheat Law Library, I am excited to apply these skills and expand upon them to better serve the KU Law community.
As a born-and-raised Chicagoan, I am appreciating the change of pace that comes with life here in town, and I am enjoying all that KU and Lawrence have to offer. While not in the library, I mostly find myself taking aerial dance classes, reading and talking about my cat to anyone who will listen. I would like to welcome you to ask me any questions about my work and projects here at the law library, or to simply say “hello.” Before long, I won’t be feeling like a newbie anymore.
Optican International Trade Law Collection Melissa Doebele Library Assistant I admit, when I first heard the name Optican I thought someone was referring to a character from one the “Transformers” movies. I’d say the Optican in question refers to a normal human being, but he appears to be anything but that. Scott Optican is an associate professor at the University of Auckland Law School in New Zealand. He holds degrees from the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Cambridge (England) and Harvard Law School. He interned at the Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch of the United Nations in Austria and has served as a prosecutor in the New York County District Attorney’s Office. Professor Optican has also been a guest lecturer at universities in Canada, Turkey, Israel, Australia and the United States. He is the author of several publications about criminal justice issues in New Zealand law.
enabling library patrons to easily find what they are looking for. They will also be able to find the collection in the online catalog since every title now has its own record there. Each item will have a label that has OITC (Optican International Trade Collection) at the top and the year of publication at the end. Between those two vital pieces of information, there will be an abbreviation of the subject/ category of the book. All of the categories were designated by Professor Bhala when he organized the materials prior to making the donation. The subjects include a variety of topics from trade and aviation to the North American Free Trade Agreement to United States customs law. Once the collection and bibliographies are fully processed, we hope you will stop by and peruse the materials in the Optican International Trade Law Collection. Although Professor Optican is not likely to ever become a shapeshifting robot, having a friend donate a collection of materials in your honor isn’t too shabby.
What is Professor Optican’s connection to KU Law? He is the long-time friend of Professor Raj Bhala. The two first met in 1986 at Harvard, where Professor Optican was Professor Bhala’s tutor. Twenty years later, Professor Optican taught Comparative Criminal Procedure at KU Law. Professor Bhala taught at the University of Auckland Law School in 2003 and was the New Zealand Legal Research Foundation Visiting Scholar last year. Professor Bhala began collecting materials on International Trade Law in the mid-1990s. He made the decision this year to donate those items to Wheat Law Library in honor of his friend, Professor Optican, for whom the collection has been named. The collection is currently being processed by Technical Services Manager Ellen Olker with support from the student assistant in Technical Services, Annie Brazil. Four bookshelves have been set up on the fourth floor to house the collection. A bibliography of the items in the collection is being assembled and will list the materials both alphabetically by title and also by subject,
Future home of the Optican International Trade Law Collection, currently in progress on level four of the Wheat Law Library.
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Introducing ProView eBooks Blake Wilson Assistant Director for Instructional & Faculty Services Faculty, students and practitioners are increasingly seeing the benefits of technology and digital media in the legal industry. Work is no longer limited to the confines of libraries and offices. This modern need to work on the go makes convenience, portability and agility key attributes of the media that most legal professionals use. Given these requirements, e-books are an increasingly important component of the modern legal research toolbox. This is why we are happy to announce access for KU Law students, faculty and staff to Thomson Reuters ProView eBooks. No matter how tech-savvy you are, you will find it easy to interact with the content in the ProView eBooks platform.
Reuters’ ProView eBooks, login using your OnePass username and password. For more information or to schedule training, contact Blake Wilson by email at wilsonwb@ku.edu.
ProView eBooks provides the ability to access eBook versions of the West publications we subscribe to in print, wherever and whenever you want. Powered by the Thomson Reuters ProView app, you can access eBooks anywhere, with or without an Internet connection. You can download and access eBooks on up to four devices and across mobile, desktop and the web.
Notes and annotations:
Thomson Reuters ProView eBooks combine book-like reading with filtered searching in an individual book or your whole ProView eBook library. Use keywords and phrases to find all the instances of the information you need. Add personal notes, highlight text and set bookmarks that automatically sync to other devices and transfer to your next edition. Your notes and highlights transfer to new editions automatically. All your notes, bookmarks and highlights are saved in one place, so when you create or update content on one device, it will show up anywhere you use ProView. ProView eBooks also integrate with Westlaw so you can easily verify controlling authority. The app is available on iTunes, Google Play, and for your Mac or PC (proview.thomsonreuters.com). To access Thomson
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Library Interface:
Library staff directory OUR MISSION
Christopher L. Steadham Director csteadham@ku.edu 785-864-9242
Pam Crawford Assistant Director, Public & Technical Services pcraw4d@ku.edu 785-864-9264
Melissa Doebele Library Assistant mdoebele@ku.edu 785-864-3360
Jeff Montgomery Circulation & Serials Department Manager jmontgom@ku.edu 785-864-9252
As the largest and oldest law library in Kansas, the Wheat Law Library is an integral part of the School of Law. It serves the law school and university community in legal and interdisciplinary scholarly pursuits and provides attorneys, judges, and the general public with access to legal information. Key components of this mission include collecting and preserving Kansas, national, and international legal documents, teaching legal information literacy, and serving as a legal information gateway by providing access to sources beyond the scope of the physical collection.
LIBRARY HOURS March 25 - April 17, 2018 Mon - Thur 7:30 am - 11 pm Friday 7:30 am - 5 pm Saturday 9 am - 5 pm Sunday 10 am - 11 pm
Ellen Olker Technical Services Manager eolker@ku.edu 785-864-3168
W. Blake Wilson Assistant Director Instructional & Research Services wilsonwb@ku.edu 785-864-9253
EXAM HOURS April 18 - May 4, 2018 Mon - Thur 7:30 am - 1 am Friday 7:30 am - 10 pm Saturday 9 am - 10 pm Sunday 10 am - 1 am Friday, May 4 7:30 am - 5 pm Wheat Law Library | Hearsay
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