Bid early and often!

When you're in the exhibit hall, don't forget to check out the Stitchers SIS silent auction hosted at the State, Court & County Law Library SIS table in the activities area. The picture at left is just a sample of the creativity on display.

The auction closes at 2pm on Tuesday. All proceeds will benefit the New Orleans Public Library Restoration Fund.

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Bloggers' Get Together

Thanks to Barbara Fullerton, who got us organized and found a spot (Gordon Biersch Brew Pub), around thirty of us got together for the second annual Bloggers' Get Together. With various beers, sodas, and other beverages before us, we had a chance to meet each other, share some experiences, and talk about this new medium we have either tried or would like to try.

A special guest was Ernie Svenson, the thoughtful and witty New Orleans lawyer who founded and writes Ernie the Attorney.

Blogs represented included:

• Blogs @ Widener Law Library (sorry, I missed the names of the authors who were there, one from Harrisburg and one from Delaware -- let me know and I can fill in)
• Law Professor Blogs (Joe Hodnicki and others)
• Biblioblawg and Novalawcity (Meg Kribble,
• Bloggy Notion (Julie Horst, UC Hastings)
• Lex Scripta (the Dallas Ass'n of Law Libraries' blog, by Barbara Fullerton and others)
• Library Boy (personal blog)(Michel-Adrien Sheppard, Supreme Court of Canada)
• Trial Ad Notes and AALL Second Line Blog (Mary Whisner, University of Washington)
• WisBlawg (Bonnie Shucha, University of Wisconsin)
• ZiefBrief (Lee Ryan and Amy Wright, University of San Francisco Law Library)

This group was just a fraction of law librarians who blog. Bonnie Shucha maintains a list of Law Library Blogs and Blogs by Law Librarians or Law Library Associations, now up to 117.

A few notes:

Karen Schneiderman (Drexel University School of Law) analogized legal blogs to something she witnessed as a child. She sometimes tagged along when he and other lawyers and judges in Akron got together, as they did every week, to have lunch at a round table and talk about their cases. Blogging can be a way to share information and ideas -- a new round table.

A few people from different remarked that they began their libraries' blogs because they were tired of formatting their print newsletters.

Lee Ryan added that she thought nobody was reading the newsletter. One test was that they started inserting the word "panda" in the middle of articles and no one noticed. Ernie Svenson had had a similar experience -- he and others put a lot of work into the firm's newsletter. And then at some point they discovered that the staff person who was supposed to mail it out hadn't done so. For two years. And no one had noticed.

Many people had found their audiences were different than originally expected. For instance, Lee and Amy at USF were writing for their own law school community but got hits from all over. They have also responded to search patterns: they'd had a few posts about how to survive the first year of law school that got lots of hits, so they intentionally created more content so those searchers would get a lot more when they reached the site.

People in our communities have different preferences about how they get information. Some like blogs, some would rather still see a print newsletter, some want email announcements, some only want to get information when they go out to search for it.

Many bloggers have found that blogging changes the way we read or take in information. It can help us focus. Several people said they blog partly to help themselves keep track of interesting material they have come across but would otherwise forget.

For more about law librarians and blogging, see Bonnie Shucha, The State of the Law Library Blogosphere, LLRX, Nov. 3, 2006 (winner of the ALL-SIS Outstanding Article award for 2007, by the way).

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Law Librarians at New Orleans Habitat for Humanity

Wow... I just went by Friday afternoon and took pictures for an hour, and I was exhausted. But these guys had been there since the early morning working on a few of the new Habitat for Humanity houses in the Musicians' Village. This is a slide show of the pictures I took:

LL-H4H Slide Show

The pics are also on the Flickr group with the relevant tags. If you recognize youself and want a full-resolution version for prints, let me know.

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Gadgethead Drama

This meeting has a lot of technological firsts for me:

1. This is my first annual meeting with a cell phone (I got a prepaid phone in January and just last week upgraded to a regular plan).
   
2. It's my first annual meeting with a laptop (I bought one in May).
3. And it's my first annual meeting in a hotel with high-speed Internet -- at least, I think it is, but I wouldn't have noticed because I didn't have a laptop (see #2).
   
4. And it's the first time I've written blog posts during an annual meeting -- made possible by #2 and #3, as well as a visit to the Internet room in the Activities Area.
5. It's also the first annual meeting when I lost my PDA.

What? Lost my PDA?

Yep, that's right. When I saw Jocelyn before a program, I reached for it to check for when I was going to a reception so we could set up a time to meet for dinner. Uh-oh! It wasn't there!! I double-checked all my pockets -- jacket, bag, jacket, bag, pants. Not there, not there, not there.

OK, think, think, think ... where did I last see it? At lunch with James? Yes, I think so. OK, go back to the Riverside Internet Cafe in the Riverwalk. Too bad the staff person hadn't noticed it. I left her my name and cell number (see #1), just in case.

Now what? Maybe I didn't really have it at lunch -- maybe I last saw it when I was at the Legal Research Instruction Roundtable. OK, go back to the Hilton. The room was being set up for something else. The man arranging the tables said I should look for someone in Security. I did, and she got on her walkie-talkie to the office. No Palm had been turned in, but she took my name and number (see #1). You never know.

OK, back to the Convention Center. No one had turned it in to Hospitality or Registration. I left a pathetic sign on the message board, then went upstairs to catch the end of the program I'd started to go to. Finally, I went to the AALL staff office. Nope, no one had turned in a PDA. Someone there also took my name and number (see #1).

I really was doing a pretty good job keeping a grip on my emotions. This was just a physical object. I was fine, my loved ones were fine, no one was in danger. Everything was backed up on my laptop (#2), as well as my work PC and our home PC. It would be disappointing if I never found it, but life goes on.

And then Mary said I should check my bag one more time. I humored her and took out every scrap -- the bag of nuts (in case I get hungry), the napkins (in case I spill), the biography of Sandra Day O'Connor (because I so enjoyed Joan Biscupic's talk), the umbrella (wasn't that an amazing rain storm?), the baseball hat (in case it rains enough to want to keep the rain off my glasses but not enough to bother with the umbrella), the final program (to keep track of what's happening where and when), the squeezeball I'd picked up in the Exhibit Hall. Not there... Oh! Look! It was there! Right at the bottom of everything! Wow. Good news. And wasn't it great that I got in that nice brisk walk from the Convention Center to the Hilton and back? And I can share my dramatic adventure in blog post (see #4).

Gadgets help us (setting up my lunch date with James was much easier than in past years when we just exchanged notes on the message board!), but they also present new challenges -- like keeping track of them!

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Fun Walk & Run

There were quite a number of us that started the Sunday early by celebrating the rain and humidity as we took part in the 25th Annual Hein & Co.'s Fun Walk and Run along the river. Escorted by local police, the participants finished the 3.2 mile track for the runners and (I believe) 1.6 mile for the walkers before 7:30 a.m.

And, as in past years, costumes were adorned by some of the participants, and of course, the Master of Ceremonies (Richard Spinelli)!

I must admit the goal for me was this year's t-shirt: a funky, cool tie-dye shirt!

Thanks again to Hein for sponsoring this wonderful event!

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Biskupic on O'Connor, Scalia

Joan Biskupic, author of Sandra Day O'Connor: How the First Woman on the Supreme Court Became Its Most Influential Justice, gave quite a wonderful keynote address this morning, discussing Justice O'Connor (of course), her research in writing the book, the latest Term of Court, and the book she's now working on, on Justice Scalia.

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Indiana University Reception

Alumni of Indiana University are invited to a reception on Monday, July 16,5:30-7:30 pm at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside in the Elmwood Room on thethird floor. If you attended the School of Library and InformationScience, or the Law School in Bloomington or Indianapolis, or ever workedat the Law School Library in Indianapolis or Bloomington, you aredefinitely invited! We will have IU people with us, including Vicky Martinfrom the IU Foundation and Sarah Burton from SLIS, as well as at least onemember of the SLIS Alumni Board. So come start your evening out bycatching up on Hoosier news and connecting with friends, old and new.

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