And within our tribe, we mirrored the social strata of the outside world.  Public services librarians had the flashy, exciting jobs that people who visit the library see.  They hold the story times and talk about the validity of comic books as literacy tools and teach computer skills and help students find that perfect resource to finish their thesis.  Meanwhile, Tech Services librarians are the anal retentive weirdos in the back that don’t like to talk to people.  I can’t be the only Public Services librarian that told an outsider, “you think I’m strange, you should meet a cataloger.”

Let me tell you something.  Tech Services librarians are Goddamn Heroes.

For you non-librarians, in short, Technical Services librarians get the resources in a library collection and make sure that people can find it.

• They sort out the myriad licensing agreements and format possibilities offered by publishers and distributors who seem Hell-bent on putting libraries out of business.
• They were working with metadata before metadata was cool – providing human classification on terms and concepts that can’t be programmed out by a computer to find.
• And they make sure that the information is going to be there 100 or even 1000 years from now.

To name just a few of their activities.

And yet, even though their activities are so important to the functioning of the library, they get the short end of the stick so often.  In my corner of LibraryLand – law libraries – specialized law library tech services departments are being combined with main campus libraries.   Some libraries are deciding to outsource their cataloging operations to third parties that – according to their job postings – only require high school diplomas and pay accordingly.

The library community has been struggling with its relevance in the age of bookstore cafes, amazon/kindle and Wikipedia.  Yes, there are probably more comfortable places to study, easier ways to get ebooks and good sources of information that you don’t have to leave your home to access.  We’re working on that.  We can also point to the fact that we’re one of the few places that will protect your privacy in accessing information and make sure all information is available regardless of its popularity.

But I think we fail to appreciate and promote the value that Tech Services Librarians bring to the community as a whole.  We live in an information age and Tech Services librarians can provide the tools and knowledge to make it easier to navigate, via standards like RDA.  Our classification schema and abilities are the crown jewels of libraries and it’s time to polish them up and show them off to the world.

So thank you, Technical Services Librarians, for all that you do and have done.  I’m sorry that I have failed to truly appreciate you and acknowledge your contributions to libraries and, hopefully, the future of the Internet and digital information.

Photo Credit: ex.libris via Compfight cc

I’m going break the first rule of presentations, and start off by reading two longish quotes off my slides.  I know if you were my 1Ls, you’d flip to facebook by the time I got through the first sentence, but I’m hoping you have slightly more patience than that.

And let it be noted that there is no more delicate matter to take in hand, nor more dangerous to conduct, nor more doubtful in its success, than to set up as the leader in the introduction of changes.  For he who innovates will have for his enemies all those who are well off under the existing order of things, and only lukewarm supporters in those who might be better off under the new.  – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

and

Punk said that anyone could take part – in fact anyone should take part.  …It is about looking at the world around you and asking “Why are things as fucked up as they are?”  And then it’s about looking inwards at yourself and asking, “Why aren’t I doing anything about this”  – Dan Sinker, Founder, Punk Planet

Now, I watch a lot of HGTV.  On a lot of the home decor shows, they start with an “inspiration”.  They’ll do the redesign of an entire kitchen based on an artichoke or something like that.

And that’s these quotes are.  Our inspiration of what we’re going to think about as the possible future of law librarians.   Understand that innovation and change is hard, and usually wins you more enemies than fans, especially from people who are doing pretty well – which, let’s face it, describes most law school administrators and professors – but combine with that towards a punk attitude of jumping in trying anyway.

One more thing before we really dive in.  In the past year, I bought a house, had a renovation from Hell, illness and major surgery.  As we say back home, “shit got real.”  Mortgage, construction bills, medical bills.  This has huge introduction to reality and responsibility.  I do realize there is a tendency when discussing The Future there can be a mutual antagonism, where the speaker dismisses anyone who doesn’t follow their path as future roadkill and the audience annoyed that the speaker must have been born on mars to think that anyone could actually implement their suggestions.  Being at the forefront of technology and innovation in libraries is awesome, but know what is also awesome?  Keeping a roof over your head and food on your table.  So if you personally, don’t feel like you can make some changes, that’s cool.

I just ask, if nothing else, keep an open mind on the profession.  Librarians are going to be taking on all sorts of job titles and duties in the coming years.  Our strength in our profession as well as in our professional associations will come from embracing the diversity this will bring to the table, as it does with all other types of diversity.

Okay, that’s part one.  What we’re all going to keep in mind for the next part.

If you are ignorant of both your enemy and yourself, then you are a fool and certain to be defeated in battle.  If you know yourself, but not your enemy, for every battle win you will suffer a loss.  If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win every battle.  – Sun Tzu, The Art of War

This quote is a little more aggressive than I mean it to be.  I do have a bad tendency to look at everything through the perspective of a fight to be fought. Our employers really aren’t our enemies, even if they act like it sometimes.  But before we make any moves, we do need to understand the playing field and the players on it.

So, what are the challenges facing law schools and legal education?

Okay, another quasi math problem…

What happens when you multiply The Hindenburg by The Titanic and then divide by a Herd of Cats?  Yes.  That is the state of law schools and legal education.

Now, please note that I did not use a picture of the burning Hindenburg or a sinking Titanic.  They, however, are well on their way to those states. Like the Hindenburg, which used Hydrogen instead of a more stable, less flammable gas like Helium, law schools and legal education have a fundamental design flaw in their current states.  And, like the Titanic, even though there are warnings of possible dangers, many in legal education are steaming full speed ahead.  And they act like a herd of cats,  each law school has to do its own thing, since they are competing against each other for potential students and “reputation points” and even within each law school there are competing forces.

What are these design flaws, bearing in mind that someone could – and has – done a talk concentrating on each one of theses?   Well, the curriculum is terrible – in many ways, in most ways, it has remained unchanged in style for over a hundred years.  The caselaw method and socratic method is far from the best way to teach law. And there is a stubborn refusal in the acadame to teach practical skills.

Law schools, like most of higher education, suffer from extreme adminstrative bloat and an aging faculty with 20 year experience salaries.  This is driving up costs and making the ROI for students unfeasible.

If that were bad enough, we have a whole host of upcoming issues that many in the legal academe are choosing to ignore.  As many of us in libraries know, scholarly publishing is broken.  Both financially speaking in that we cannot afford to keep subsidizing publishers as well as the fact that compared to other scholarly or professional peer reviewed publications, the quality of law reviews is almost embarrassingly bad. Which brings me to the status of law professors as faculty within the university environment – law professors are some of the best compensated, but their course loads and academic output when compared to traditional faculty…well, once law schools cease to the be the university cash cow, change is gonna come.

Meanwhile, students aren’t getting summer jobs, post grad jobs or articling positions.

The over all result of all of these, is that students are choosing to not go to law school.  Which is meaning declining budgets.  And what’s one of the first targets when it’s budget cutting time?  That’s right…libraries.  Eventually there will be more and more faculty buy outs and even some closing law schools.

Of course, law schools and law libraries do not exist in a isolated bubble.  It’s just a part of a whole world undergoing riotous change and filled with terrible problems.  There’s a huge justice gap, where 80% of people who need legal representation are unable to afford it.  That’s why we’re seeing things like Legal Zoom and other disruptive forces where technology or outsourcing is replacing some of the standard duties of attorneys.  There’s the possibility of the non-lawyers being able to own law firms.  And the rise of Free Law and Open Law allowing for more innovations than we can really dream of.

It’s a crazy time.  And that’s all a little scary.

So instead of being passive victims to it all, let’s think about some of things we can do.  What are some strengths that librarians have?

Well, for one thing, in many cases, we fly under the radar. Our legal research and writing courses aren’t “real courses” and therefore no one really cares what we do.  Which is a good thing, because that means we can get away with a lot and try new things.  Secondly, we are some of the few people that have always ALWAYS taught practical, real world practice skills.   Along with that, we, unlike the teaching faculty, have many real world practice connections and work professionally with them.

Librarians are very lucky because we have skills and knowledge in areas the rest of world are suddenly discovering are important – knowledge management, metadata, information literacy.  I mean, this is the information age and we are a profession that specializes in information organization and access.   And these skills can be transferred.

Time to bring it on home.

So, let’s put it together.  We’re going to take a punk rock and jump into the fray and do something attitude and our librarian strengths, and apply them to the problems facing legal education, bearing in mind that law schools and law professors are like a herd of cats and if you are able to get enough momentum to change something, you likely will piss a bunch of people off.

That sounds bad.  But it’s a positive situation, if you make it one.

When I was asked to do this talk, I was asked to come up with stats or a study about different career changes and options for academic law librarians.  And the more I looked around at job titles and people were slowly stepping out of the box, I realized that stats were sort of meaningless.  There are people like me who have left academia and gone into publishing, but how many jobs like that are possible?  And for all the jobs of “emerging technology librarian”, some of those are meant to run social media accounts, some of those run institutional repositories, some are doing historical digitization.  It’s really all a case by case basis.  What works in Toronto is not going to work in Halifax is not going to work in Thunder Bay.  And what works for one person is not going to work for another.

So, big changes, small changes, find what works for your individual situation and go for it.

Think about your strengths. And what deficits you see in your world, at your library, in your school.

And then look for opportunities.  Either for yourself personally or for your library.  Maybe you partner with a law firm librarian to teach a real world boot camp.  Or you get into doctrinal classes to teach a specialized research component.  Or see a job opening like the one CanLII posted earlier this year for a content developer and get into publishing.  Or you partner with a local legal aid or pro bono group to do research workshops for the public.

In some ways, you are only limited by your imagination.  There is a such a wide range of opportunities out there for librarians to take advantage of, no matter how restrictive your budget is or how understaffed you are. I can’t promise that any change is going to make the administration all of a sudden look up and say, “oh my God, the library is the most important part of this school! Why haven’t I realized that earlier?? Double it’s budget and give everyone raises!”

I gave an alternate title to this presentation “The Future of Legal Education and How Librarians Can Stop It.”  Now, are librarians going to be able to stop the bubble crash that’s coming? No.  We are in for tough times ahead. Even if you can only do one brownbag lunch a year on extra research skills that students could use in the real world, then you’ll have made even the slightest bit of difference in the life of a student.  And doing something is always better than nothing.

Thank you.

As with change, many people view disruption as one would a cloud of locusts on the horizon.  And react accordingly. Others,  on the other hand, are more like “disruption deniers” and refuse to believe that any significant change is coming to the industry any time soon and, oh by the way, anyone that tells you different is a loser that can’t hack it in the real world.

Listen.  If making fun of futurist, trend-spotting douchebags that wouldn’t know shit from apple butter when it comes to reality is wrong, then I don’t even want to take the time to learn to be right.   But most of the people predicting disruption are far from this and attacking the messenger isn’t always the best tactic.  Just saying.

So then there’s the third camp, which I happen to fall into.  I am waiting for disruption like a fat kid for the Easter Bunny, a Born-again christian for Jesus and Linus for the Great Pumpkin… COMBINED.   Disruption can’t hit my industry fast enough.

I have been vague in defining “my industry” thus far in this post because, as I have said before, my professional career has landed me in the square in the Epicenter of Suck.  I could be talking about legal education, the legal industry, academic publishing, legal publishing and information, or libraries.  For the sake of discussion, let’s take legal information and publishing as an example.   I was supposed to talk about this last week at Lexthink.1 last week, but had to bow out because 2013 has put me in the medical epicenter of suck as well.

As Sam Glover on Lawyerist points out, the switch to electronic legal publishing/research has not been disruptive.  I would agree with that – as far as it applies to lawyers.  It’s been hellishly disruptive to libraries and librarians, who have had to change the way they collect, access, distribute and pay for legal information, but for the end user it hasn’t really been too much of a change.  Disruption is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.  But that being said, legal publishing needs to be disrupted because legal publishing is broken.

Legal publishing is broken because it only serves to keep information locked away from people.  And, given the unique status of legal information (which we can define here as cases as well as laws and regulations passed by all levels of government bodies), you don’t even have to be one of those “information wants to be free” hippies to agree that there is no reason why this shouldn’t be free, open, accessible and preserved for all.

From the very beginning of our nation, government outsourced some of the publishing of its information products to private publishers.  I’m not so much of a socialist that I think all privatization of government services is automatically bad.  Actually, hats off to John West for coming up with the Key Number indexing system and making it easy in pre-computer days to do cross jurisdictional research.  Even today editorial content additions to primary law – such as in the recently released DC code – have value for researchers billing in six minute increments.  But having to pay for primary law without editorial content is wrong.

Allow me to double down on that.  Not only is it wrong, but I truly believe human rights – if not U.S. constitutional rights – are being violated by the government not providing access to legal information.  Hopefully someone with more time, energy and patience than I can write a brief or law review article drawing a line from the 6th Amendment to Gideon to a Right to Legal Information Access.

And then sometimes the corporations won’t even sell you the law.  Lexis is the Official Publisher of the Georgia Code.  Another publisher, Fastcase, asked quite reasonably to purchase a copy – after all West buys one.  Lexis said, ” Nope.  Hit the bricks, Ed.” While on one hand this is a very understandable business tactic, on the other….isn’t the idea that a corporation has the final say on who can access the law that governs us sketchy as Hell?

Of course, when government does publish its own law it sucks at it.  Bad formats, limited preservation and little to no authentication or even “official” status.    A PDF on a website is not open publishing.  It’s free to read, sure, but the information contained within that PDF is as locked away as it would be if it were a book on a shelf.  The whole purpose of making electronic information (aka “born digital” information) is that its creation is merely the starting point.  Each case, law or regulation is a building block which can be should be able to be remixed, reused and combined in new ways.    Imagine being given a pile of lego bricks and being told that you can build something with them but you’re not allowed to click them together.   That’s what a bunch of PDFs on a website is.

The preservation and authentication is no small matter either.  With so many jurisdictions switching to electronic publishing because it’s “cheaper”, yet not authenticating or preserving it properly, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that one day in the future we will have no idea what a law was on a certain date.   Sure, it might be something “minor” like what the zoning code in Valparaiso, Indiana was in 2014, but I personally am not ready to accept that only “major laws” that affect people that live in cities in the east coast are the only ones worth preserving.

Finally, in a move that really chaps my ass as both a lawyer and a librarian, both corporations and governments slap copyright notices on law.  Not just, for example,  the statute headings which some corporations have had to fill in because governments never bothered to do that.  That’s understandable.  Sort of a dick move, but understandable.  No, I’m talking about the actual text of the law.  Copyrighted.  Look at the Wyoming Statutes page.  LOOK AT IT.  What the Hell is wrong with those pe0ple?  Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, breaks it down better in this VoxPopulii post “Tear Down This Pay Wall.”

Of course, even though all of the above have been issues for a while, libraries have always been the work around.  Can’t afford Wexis?  Go to a library.  They’ll have everything on the shelves.  Unfortunately, the consolidation of the legal publishing market has had the same effect that most monopolies have – libraries simply cannot afford to keep primary law available, let alone any the secondary materials necessary to understand what the primary law means.   While that now is hitting libraries and only poor people use libraries so who cares, I don’t think its unthinkable that soon small and solo practitioners will have difficulty practicing in certain areas because they simply cannot afford the research costs.

So, think about it.  At the present time, 80% of people who want legal representation aren’t able to afford it.  However, if they do want to help themselves, they are unable to access the information they would need to do so.  They have two strikes against them and that’s before they even set foot into the legal system.  That will soon work its way up and lawyers on the bottom of the economic ladder will soon be knocked out as well.

In my dream world there will be a government run Digital Public Law Library of America.  It would contains all the primary law from every jurisdiction in the United States and allow for front end cross jurisdictional searching by the public as well as bulk downloads in malleable formats for developers.

So yes, I would LOVE for my industry to be disrupted.  There is a huge market out there of people who need to access legal information and new technological advances are happening every day that will easily replace the old editorial content additions.   But disruption in legal publishing will never happen until the raw material – aka law – is made open and accessible from the government.

Photo Credit: TechCrunch via Compfight cc

I buried the lead in my 2012 Year in Review post, and after years of teaching 1Ls, I know that people won’t read past first paragraph of a webpage, let alone 3 blog posts in.  So, here’s the deal:  I am having/have had a hysterectomy on Tuesday, February 26, 2013.  I will be going off the the grid for a little while as I recover from surgery and otherwise enjoy have no responsibilities for the first time in a long time except being totally selfish and concentrate on taking care of me.

I will check my gmail account occassionally and work email very infrequently.  Like, maybe not until April.  Who knows about Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook. The only thing I really plan on keeping up with is my Flickr 365 day project, and I might even make those private so I don’t have to deal with creepy dudes with librarian fetishes.

Or turtleneck fetishes. Yes, those exist and they have found me.

So, if you are trying to contact me and I don’t get back to you immediately, be patient, and I’ll eventually get around to it.

Image credit:  Georgia O’Keefe, Blue Flower.  WHAT. IT’S A FLOWER.  WHAT ARE YOU SEEING IN IT?

Few things get me as professionally revved up as Open Law/Open Government.  And, as you know Gentle Reader, I have a stubborn belief that librarians – with our unique knowledge sets – can be EXTREMELY useful in this crazy information centric world we now live in if people would only realize what we have to offer.    I know there must be librarians out there interested in free law, but I don’t know too many of them, especially newer librarians.  As I am now outside of traditional librarianship, I probably won’t easily meet any of them.  And librarians that are interested in Open Law/Open Government might not be aware of all the projects that are going on since it seems people working in free law are siloed away from each other. Free law people might even know what’s all out there – I know I see a press release about once a week that announces some new search engine or some such thing.  Also, people in the free law world need a safe space to meet librarians so that they can run ideas by them and have an army of testers, focus groups, etc.

So that’s the problem.  How to fix it?

Now, I am not proposing a committee or advisory board anything so formal. Definitely nothing officially affiliated with AALL/SLA/CALI or any other organization.  (Although I can see meeting up just to chat at these conferences to put a face to a name on a listserv.)   I’m thinking something like ‘The Archive Team‘ – a band of interested parties that can be called on when necessary.   Mainly a wiki and listserv where people can list things like hackathons and other local events that librarians can crash and meet techies.  And the Open Gov/Open Law developers, when the need arises, can shoot out emails asking for help or advice or whatever.

Here’s the wiki: Free Law Users Group You’ll have to request permission to post, but that’s just to keep out spammers. There’s also a Google group for a listserv.   The listserv and wiki is co-moderated by myself and Charlotte Schneider of Rutgers-Camden Law.  Now, with all wikis and community generated content type things, it will only work if people participate.   I would be totally remiss if I didn’t mention Rob Richards’ wonderful blog and listserv that has a ton of great relevant information on this topic, as well as Tim Stanley’s Free Law Google Plus group as well as probably other things I’m missing.  That’s the point.  I believe the power and knowledge of the collective will always be a resource that should be tapped.   It may turn out that there’s only five or so of us that are interested.  But at least now we’ll know and can move on from there.  I just figure it never hurts to ask.

Photo Credit: Twm™ via Compfight cc

Most people think of someone like our friend pictured here, a ne’er-do-well who exists to steal the credit card and personal information of good citizens.  At the very best, maybe they think of someone that breaks into government computers “just to look around.”  Now, to be sure, there are hackers that are Bad People Doing Bad Things.   And quite a few are doing illegal things with no ill intent – just curiosity.  But a large number of hackers are people that just like to tinker around with electronic information and materials.   Remix, reuse and recycle the work of others and add to it to make something useable.

I am far from an expert in the history of the hacking scene.  Or even of technology.  (I’m already bracing for the corrections that will be commented or emailed to me – and that’s fine.  Law school destroyed any ego or self esteem that I had. Please don’t hesitate to correct me.) However, I do have a degree in anthropology and like to think I’m a pretty good observer of technology and its place in our society.  So I thought I’d take the opportunity to explain some background and why I call myself, along with many of my professional colleagues, a “hacker”.  And hopefully, afterwards when you hear about “hackathons” or “hackivists” etc., you won’t immediately assume something nefarious is going on.

For the first 20 years or so of the web, it was mainly the domain of geeks, nerds and other people who wanted to take the time to learn some basic code and had the hardware to do it.  Sure, there were bulletin boards and usenet groups, but to get your own personal web presence took a little effort.  Time rolled on and by the early years of the 21st century, consuming information on the web was easy but that’s it.  Then something called “Web 2.0″ showed up and things got really interesting.  Because, thanks to sites like blogger and flickr and wikis, Jane and Joe Average were able to get on the web and start producing content without too much technical know-how.   People + Platform = Content.  I refuse to make a judgement call about the quality of the content at this point.  (It’s the anthropologist in me)  To me, uploading a picture of your cat to Flickr is just as valid as writing a 1000 word blog post on why you love your cat.  The similarity is that someone gave the average person a platform that they then could use to publish their content to the Internet without having to know a lick of code.

Unfortunately, as anyone who has tried to maintain a blog or wiki or even a photography project on Flickr knows, the creation of content is difficult.  It requires creativity and time, two things in short supply for most people.  It also requires everyone to reinvent the wheel each time they begin a creation.  You want to talk about a current event?  You need to create a blog post and write about it.

Content creation is hard.  No platform is going to change that.  But fortunately, in the past 5 years we’ve entered into a period called Web 2.5.  And it’s currently going like gangbusters.  The main reason Web 2.5 services (think Tumblr, Pinterest, and to a lesser extent Facebook and even lesser extent still Twitter) are so wildly successful is that they allow for easy sharing of the content of others.   Content + Easy Sharing Capabilities = Building Block.  Web 2.5 provides building blocks.  Think about it: without the reblog or repin buttons, Tumblr and Pinterest would just be another Blogger.  Same with Facebook and Twitter with their share/retweet functions.  These, as well as the ubiquity of “add anywhere” type buttons on content all over the web allows people to take building blocks of content from all over the web and easily assemble it and share to their connections.

Connections? Ah yes. I would be remiss if I didn’t take a moment and point out another reason for the popularity of the Web 2.0s is the connections you have with other people via friending, following, or whatever other terms they use for it.   Web 2.0 allows for you to push your content at others as well as receive it in a one stop shop that allows for passive consumption as well as passive and active communication.  Personally, I find that this more often than not gives the illusion of human interaction rather than true connection, but that’s another essay for another day.  Anyway….

Assembling the building blocks of others + new content (optional) = Curation  Ah, curation, the buzzword du jour!  It gets mocked a lot, but using the building blocks of others isn’t without an intellectual component.  People just don’t blindly reblog things.  From the 13 year old on Tumblr that loves Justin Bieber to the Wedding Planner that uses Pinterest to collect ideas to the Right Wing blogger that selectively sends out tweets, these people are all curating the content that they find on the web.  All of these people likely look at similar sources (e.g. the blogger probably reads Fox News and Drudge), but he or she has cherry picked from that content to find the ones that they think are the most interesting, possibly adding their own original content in the form of commentary or entirely new content and then share it with their audience.  They maybe even go so far as to add a folksonomy (“Justin Bieber” “Bieber” “Beliebers” “Bieber Fever”) to their curated content so it can also be found by others not in their content push streams.

But even with the new technology of Web 2.5, many people are still content to just consume the content or curations of others.   Here’s my completely unscientific breakdown:

So, what of hacking? You know, the original topic of this post?   In my definition, hacking is more like “curation plus”  While with most curators, the old content/new content ratio is 80/20, with hacking there is a larger emphasis on the intellectual contribution of the curator, so the ratio is more flipped of 20 percent old/80 person new contributions.   And often, the new whole is greater than the sum of its parts.   Have another chart:

Or maybe this one makes it easier to understand:

This blog post is a bit of a hacking operation – it start out life as a email to my boss and I’m using part of that email content here as well as in a blog post I’m co-writing with my colleague Elmer Masters.  I can do that because it’s mine.   I wrote it, I own, it’s  mine mine mine.  Because, of course, the big looming problem with hacking and curating is Intellectual Property law.  You know, copyright.  I work in education and legal information – two areas where theoretically most things are either in the public domain or should have a license that allows for free re-use. (Note that I have a Creative Commons license on this blog.  Go wild, kids.)   However, there are still many roadblocks in the way of hacking the information in these areas (and there’s a WEALTH of it) which prohibits people from properly accessing and manipulating it.

Lest you think that professors wouldn’t dream of hacking, I submit to you that they already are.  How many of your classes used a single text book that the professor used from start to finish without skipping any chapters, jumping around in the text or adding any extra readings?  Yeah.  Exactly.  Professors take extra readings and put them on reserve in libraries or have students buy course packs or sometime two or three books for a course.  By doing this, the professor has curated a selection of information and hacked it into a new course.    With the technology platforms available, there’s very little stopping professors from distributing these hacked course materials at a significantly lower cost to student except for….the licensing fees for the intellectual property that they want to distribute.  I am not a copy-leftist.  I do believe that content creators have a right to be compensated for their work.  However, when they have already been compensated for it or the content was paid for by the government, that’s enough compensation.  But that, too, is another blog post for another day.

When you think of it, hacking is all around.  You might even be a bit of a hacker yourself.  So take pride in the word and open yourself to the work of other hackers.

Photo Credit: Stian Eikeland via Compfight cc

Bad graphs by me. 

If 2011 was the year of making big decisions and changes in my life and career, then 2012 was the year of adjusting to these changes.  I’m sure I’ve quoted it before, but I think this scene from Tony Kushner’s Angels in America captures the feeling best:

Harper: In your experience of the world, how do people change?

Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it’s not very nice.

God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can’t even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It’s up to you to do the stitching.

Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.

Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.

Harper: That’s how people change.

So that was me in 2012.  Walking around, mangled guts just pretending that I wasn’t terrified the whole time that I had just completely ruined my life.

Last year wasn’t bad. I had a lot a great experiences and met some awesome people. But through it all was the feeling that there was something just not right with me.   It’s hard to describe it in words, but basically I had gotten everything I had ever wanted in life but at the same time everything was falling to pieces.  I moved to the big city and was ready to take it on like a post-modern Mary Tyler Moore but most evenings and weekends I found myself unable to pry myself off my couch and explore around.

Most distressingly, I began to have severe cognitive issues.  The best way to describe it is “brain fog.”   So adding to the stress of starting a new career and job was the fact that I kept screwing things up. Simple things, like making tons of typos (that I didn’t catch) or forgetting processes.  For someone who based a lot of their self-worth on being smart and capable and successful, this was bad. Very bad.   I practically coasted through two graduate degrees, got an A- in organic chemistry in college, have an IQ towards genius levels and all of the sudden I can’t remember basic HTML tags?  Or how to work my phone? WHAT THE HELL?  Anxiety, depression, fear and self-loathing were pretty much my constant companions.  I really started to wonder if I had made a mistake leaving libraries – I was an excellent librarian but suddenly I was a barely passable Director of Content Development.

Late summer came and I bought a house in the country because I thought city life wasn’t agreeing with me.  I had the home renovation from Hell and some personal life drama and then basically I broke.  I was depressed and having panic attacks and barely able to pry myself out of bed and crying constantly.  It was not a good look.   I finally realized that I needed serious help and went to a doctor.

My doctor was and is….fabulous.  She listened to my symptoms and was all very matter of fact about it which helped a lot with the shame I felt through it all. She got me on anti-depressants, hooked me up with a wonderful therapist and in the normal course of things, ran some blood tests.  This is where things got really interesting.  Because it turns out that I’m anemic.  Severely anemic.  Like, almost requiring an immediate blood transfusion and she wondered how I was still walking around anemic.

After some poking and prodding and horrible medical tests that should only happen to Hitler, we found the underlying cause of my anemia – I have a big honking tumor in my uterus.  There are many horrible things about gynecological medicine, but one that I particularly hate is that uterine tumors are measured in terms of fetus size.  Isn’t that horrible?   So basically I have a 14 week fetus sized tumor.  I guess this is why most lay people describe gynecological tumors in terms of fruit or sports equipment.  Mine is apple/baseball sized.  See?  Much better!

So I have a tumor.  It’s not cancer, but it is causing physical issues so late next month I will be having a hysterectomy.  This, of course, brings its own set of psychological issues.  I guess I always had a “if it happens it happens” attitude towards having children, but this has been a giant “LIFE SPOILER ALERT! YOU’RE NEVER GOING TO BE PREGNANT!” and it really sucks, much more than I thought it would.  Not to mention all the other ickiness of being helpless post-surgery and physical and financial strains it causes. But, on the bright side,  after I recover from surgery, my blood counts will steady improve.  Because oh, by the way, the side effects of anemia?  Exhaustion, emotional trouble and cogitative difficulties.   After I found this out, I was actually really – oddly – happy.  GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! I HAVE A TUMOR.  I’M FIXABLE! Don’t get me wrong, all the changes I had in 2011-2012 were enough to throw anyone for a loop and require a little psychological maintenance. The anemia just exasperated it.

So this is all horribly personal and private information to be be sharing in a professional blog.  Mental health, gynecological issues…gosh, if only there was a way to bring up  diarrhea so I could hit the trifecta of Things One Does Not Talk About in Public.   But I do have a professional point.  Because after my 2012, my resolution for 2013 is to embrace my humanity and imperfections as well as accept it in others.  Because we all like to think that we keep personal life at home and professional life at work, but “business in the front and party in the back” only works for mullets.  We’re all human and have illness, death, birth, marriage, etc going on that are going to be running in the background when we’re “on the clock.”  And no one reading this blog has a job so important that personal well-being should be put aside so that their job can continue.   But of course, this requires communication.  And the bravery to admit to someone – especially your supervisor or anyone that you work on projects with – that you have something going on and may not be 100% for awhile. I’m very very fortunate to have a boss and job that allowed me to take the time to figure out what was going on in my life as well as work around my issues.

On a broader level, as you know Gentle Reader, one of my favorite topics is librarian/vendor relationships.    It’s easy to think of BLOOMWEXISBERG as faceless corporations that are out to screw over libraries whenever they can.  And, frankly, they sort of are, as corporations’ main goal is making a profit.  BUT! They are run by human beings.  Humans that – in my informal polls among them when I’m hang out as a booth bunny – hate being called “vendors” and wonder why people hate them due to where they work.   Try to not let the sins of the father/employer fall upon the son/employee, as it were.  Everyone is just trying to make a living here, we’re just on opposite sides of the same hustle.

So that was my 2012 and what I hope my 2013 will be.   It’s going to be a long road of recovery ahead of me.  As I said, I’m having surgery in late February and will need 6 weeks or so to recover from that and then another 6 months or so until my iron stores are rebuilt enough to fix my anemia.  In the mean time, I’ll be still sleeping 16 hours or so a day, dealing with fatigue so severe that I can barely lift my arms some days and getting confused easily all while trying to still do my job and maintain a semblance of a normal life of a gal in her 30s.

Finally, like I said, I’ve been trying to write this blog post for a month now.  However, the recent suicide of open access activist Aaron Swartz, was the kick in the ass I needed to talk about the past year and my own struggles with depression and anxiety.  If you are experiencing mental health issues, talk to someone.  TALK TO SOMEONE.  A friend, a professional, an anonymous hotline – whichever your comfortable with.  Because it’s nothing to be ashamed of.   I was an anthropology major in college and as a professor of mine was fond of saying, “Your brain spent millions of years to be perfectly adapted to a way of life that hasn’t existed for a few thousand years.  You’re bound to feel a little fucked up every now and then.”

You don’t have to live in misery or, God forbid, shouldn’t think that life is no longer worth living. You have options.  Talk to someone.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/70626035@N00/

It occurred to me that most of the people that read this blog, besides my mother, are librarians.  And as such, most of the people that spoke at LVI are probably not as familiar to them as they are to me, since due to my career path and interests, I tend to pay more attention to the open law developer space.  Basically, what I want to do in this blog post is highlight some of the cool presentations and projects discussed at LVI that you, as someone interested in legal information delivery, should probably be aware of and pay attention to.   Who knows…you may be inclined to reach out to this people and offer some assistance.  Librarians need to stop waiting to be invited to the Open Law party and just accept the fact that we’re going to have to crash it.

David Curle – He’s actually not a developer and didn’t have a project to demonstrate.  David is an analyst for Outsell, Inc. and studies the business of information delivery.   Personally, I know that I am amazingly ignorant about the economics of the information world which is crazy because most decisions vendors and publishers make are based on economics.  (No, really.  They don’t actually hate you. It’s just business.)  I’ve heard David speak several times and if you ever have the opportunity, listen to him.  He has some very fascinating insights.  LVI video.

Anurag Acharya, Google – If anyone is the 800lb gorilla in the information delivery space, it’s google.  Much to my delight, for about three years now, google has been delivering case law and law review articles within the Google Scholar framework.  (Of course, much to my dismay, Google Scholar seems to be becoming more and more hidden on Google.)  I didn’t attend this particular talk, but in it Anurag gives a behind the scenes look at Google Scholar’s legal holdings.  Maybe once you see how the sausage is made you can feel better about recommending it to patrons.  LVI Video.

Michael Lissner, CourtListener.com, Rowyn McDonald and Brian Carver, UC Berkley School of Information – These are two presentations and projects that are tied together.  Michael developed CourtListener, a “real time alert tool for the US Judiciary.”  Basically, a case law repository.  He created this as his Master’s thesis at UC Berkley and his work was expanded upon by Rowyn in her Master’s thesis, who created a citator to go with it.   These were the presentations that made me a little nervous, because they talked about “normalizing citations” and removing things like the “et al.” from case names.   So, while I don’t agree with all of their methods, they are making some interesting strides, and it’s important to be aware that like a lot of developers in this area, they’re not lawyers and they’re not law librarians and so they’re making choices that those of us who are may not agree with.  We have two options: ignore them and hope they don’t become the prevailing standard or reach out and try to educate as to some better choices that can be made.  Lissner materials and video.  McDonald materials and video.  ADDENDUM:  I spoke with Brian Carver last night and he assured me that CourtListener and its citator  do not actually change the text of the opinions. From the presentation at LVI, it sounded like they were.  I feel a lot better about CourtListener now and I’m glad Brian contacted me to clear this up.

Elmer Masters, CourtCloud and The Free Law Reporter – First, a disclaimer: Elmer is my co-worker at CALI and otherwise my home skillet, but even if he weren’t, I’d still want to highlight his projects because they’re pretty damn cool.   The Free Law Reporter (FLR) started at CALI basically because if we wanted to publish casebooks and other legal educational resources, we needed the raw materials to do that.  The one thing I really like about it is that because Elmer is both a geek and a lawyer, he preserves the integrity of the cases while at the same time making them easy to search and manipulate.  CourtCloud is a way for local courts to add their cases to the FLR using an open source Dropbox-like tool.  Courts send word docs to the FLR via CourtCloud and in return get PDFs, XML and HTML versions back to post on their local websites as well as free and secure hosting of their caselaw.  For free.   Pretty cool, huh?  LVI Video.

Tina Ching, Emily Feltren, Judy Gaskell, AALL National Inventory – I did not attend this presentation, but that is not a reflection on how important I feel this topic is to the area of open law development.  God bless librarians, I think we’re the only people crazy and anal-retentive enough to do a state by state survey of the status of legal materials provided by governments.  An open law ecosystem is only as good as the raw materials available to it from the government.  And Federal, State and local governments?  Are still putting out mainly unusable formats and unauthenticated and even unofficial versions of their laws.  One thing that I don’t think is obvious from the AALL publications and datasets in this area is that they are CC licensed and you can and should feel free to use them in your work in this area.   LVI Video.

John Mayer, A2JAuthor – Another disclaimer, John is my boss and another person who I am quite fond of on a personal level.  And again, I would still talk about this project even if he weren’t because it’s pretty amazing.  If you are aware of access to justice issues or the legal education crisis or the rapidly changing nature of the practice of law,  you are aware of a few facts:  (1) A vast majority of people that need legal representation can’t afford an attorney (2) Due in part to this, as well as to advances in technology that are making the automation of documents used in transactional law easier, we are seeing the rise of companies like Legal Zoom that are cutting into lawyers’ profits. (3) Law students are, for the most part, not learning practical skills that they can use in their future careers while in law school.  If you were to draw a Venn Diagram of these, A2J author would be smack in the center as a solution.  In laymans terms, it’s a document automation tool used by legal aid societies and law clinics to create documents that those unable to afford an attorney can use.  For example, a “stop contact” letter to creditors. (See existing list here.)   Law students learn both the law needed to understand the questions in the creation of the form as well as technology skills.  People who otherwise can’t afford an attorney can get the help the need.  Winner winner chicken dinner all around.  LVI video and materials.

Waldo Jaquith, State Decoded – Okay, so apparently this wasn’t even discussed at LVI, so I can stop beating myself up for missing it.  BUT, this is a cool project that you should be aware of.  Starting with Virginia and now moving through states, Waldo is creating a platform for state codes.  Learn more about State Decoded.

Finally….

Birds of a Feather – Ed Walters on Twitter described it best:  This session is a poetry slam for open law developers.  Ed Walters of Fastcase talked about their Data Visualization tools that will change the way you think about citation analysis.  Joshua Tauberer talked about GovTrack.us. Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation discussed Scout, a legislation tracker which is going to be so useful to catch hidden appropriations and discussions of topics. And Anurag Acharya from Google was there to talk more about Google’s projects.  Basically, if you want to be awed and humbled,  watch this.  LVI Video.

So, that’s just a small fraction of the presentations that occurred at LVI and there’s lots more happening in the Open Law world at large.  Do yourself, your profession and your country a favor and try to keep an eye on developments that are happening in it.  It’s really not a matter of if any more – it’s a only a matter of when Open Law will become the prevailing information delivery standard in the United States.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jikomanzoku/

…not a mirror to reflect reality but a hammer to shape it.

I saw quite a few projects that could best be described as “early beta” or “proof of concept.”  Despite the fact that the Legal Information Institute has been around for 20 years, we’re still trying to figure out the best ways to get law online.  It’s so much more complicated than just getting the raw text of the law on a webpage.

I don’t know about information, but data definitely wants to be free.  And law is data.  And personally, I will gladly pay someone to turn that data into usable information.  Most of the attendees at LVI were interested in releasing data/law into the wild in a format that can then be turned into information. Some are leaping ahead to making it into information, but for the most part, it’s still at the stage of trying to wrest it from the government.  Here in the United States, where law is publicly owned property, it will happen sooner or later.

This is why I was somewhat disappointed to not see any representatives in attendance from the Big Law Publishers.  (I did meet someone from Wolters Kluwer, but that’s it. It’s entirely possible reps from Thomson, Lexis and Bloomberg were there, but they were quiet.  )  Free law will never be a direct competitor to Big Law Publishers.  It doesn’t want to be.   Free law is in the data business and Big Law Publishers are in the information business.  Granted, once legal data becomes free, there will be individuals that will manipulate it into usable information for free, but for the most part, especially in the legal practice world, there are always going to be lawyers that will prefer to pay for information, at least for another generation or so.  I truly believe that Big Law Publishers will benefit from this new era as civic minded data wranglers will do a lot of the R&D for free, which can then be adapted and put into a nice shiny commercial package.

Law is data, but data is not law.

It’s only been in recent weeks that the idea that law is just another type of data that can be manipulated and extracted into information has really sunk into my brain.  For an example of this, check out Fastcase’s Timeline which uses data visualization as supplement to search results.   There were actually several examples of these data manipulations throughout the conference, and while they were exciting, they also made me a little nervous.  Especially when presenters started mentioning that they were “cleaning up” and “normalizing” some of the data, and by that they meant fixing punctuation and changing case headings.

Law is not like any other data set.  When the interpretation of a contract or piece of legislation can turn on the placement of a comma, it’s critical that we not mess with the content that is created by the originating bodies.  If the way it comes out makes it hard for you to manipulate it, well then you need to find a new way to process.

I guess it’s because I’m a librarian, but I still have a strong belief that there needs to be a “god copy” of every piece of law.  The immutable, authenticated and preserved piece of law that we can all go back to and say “this is the official copy, it contained original intent, any discrepancies lose out to this one.”   This is an idea that is not well received by many in the free law business.  The general feeling that I got from people when talking about it was that there is no such thing as permanence – paper degrades, microfiche melts, even stone tablets eventually break.  Every storage format has it’s faults, so why do we stick with the least user friendly and accessible ones?  Clearly this is an area that will require more collaboration and work to ensure that all parties are satisfied with the stability and accessibility of legal information.

Intermediaries in the time of disintermediation

We live in the age of disintermediation.   I mean, that is really exactly what Law via the Internet is all about – making these large datasets of law available to whomever wants it without having to go through commercial publishers. And while there are a large number of data wranglers out there who are quite happy with just access to data, that’s really not enough for most people.  There’s an even greater need out there for this data to be transformed into meaningful information.  That’s why we’re seeing communities develop on Data.gov or pro se form creation tools like A2J Author (which my boss demo’ed at LVI) – experts are needed to makes this information flood manageable. Rather than killing libraries and ending the need for librarians, the advent of open law and information will make them more necessary than ever.

On a personal note, I did wonder at times “what the Hell am I doing here?”  I am not a programmer.  I don’t work for a LII or the government.  Some would say I’m not a librarian anymore.  I basically know just enough about all of the relevant issues to be dangerous.  So I’m not entirely sure what my role in the Open Law movement will be.  It may be as just an enthusiastic cheerleader.  I do seem to know and get along with people in all of the various involved parties, so perhaps I can be an intermediary of some sort and help foster collaborations and understanding between the various camps.  I am happy to do whatever I can to help – access to legal information is a basic human right.  The faster we can all work together to make true, meaningful and free access a reality, the better off humanity will be.

….

So those are just my rough impressions from the conference.  I do want to thank the Legal Information Institute for hosting us and wish them a very happy 20th birthday.  May you have many more!

But what happens when you get EXACTLY what you want, what you spent years working for and dreaming about and then it turns out that, for whatever reason, it’s not actually want you wanted at all?  It wasn’t all it was cracked up to be or maybe you changed somewhere along the way or – SURPRISE! – maybe it turns out that you just don’t like being married after all.  Pop music never prepared me for the massive blows to the psyche that these situations cause.

Take, for instance, my former career as a librarian.  Before we delve too deep, let’s not confuse “profession” with “career”.  I still consider my profession to be “librarian” even though I don’t currently work in a traditional library setting…although I imagine I’ll find my way back to working in a more traditional library setting sooner rather than later.  Maybe.  But more about that later.

No, I’m talking about librarian as career.  In my corner of libraryland, at least,  there’s a somewhat set career path with achievements to unlock like it’s all a giant video game, assuming video games had faculty meetings, that is.   Get on committees. Check.  Give conference presentations. Check. Write articles. Check. Get some management responsibilities. Check.  Join more committees and take on leadership roles. Check.  And on and on.   And everyone you know professionally is roughly on the same career path, which makes it easy to start to gauge your “success” by how quickly or slowly you see them unlock these achievements.

For added fun, librarians of my generation have flocked to social media and the Internet with few “experienced” librarians around to show us the way. The result is something of a cross between Peter Pan’s Lost Boys and The Lord of the Flies.   Professional fortunes rise fast and professional jealousies even faster, cults of personality form and outcasts decided.

When I was just starting out as a librarian, I went to CONELL at AALL and drank the Cornell Winston Kool-Aid. (Anyone who has heard his “Get Involved!!!” speech will know exactly what I’m talking about.)  I set out goals of what I wanted to accomplish professionally – again, this is all career stuff outside of my 9-5 job – and worked my ass off for the next few years to get there.

Imagine my surprise when I got there in about 4 years instead of 20.

Imagine my even greater surprise when it turned out that it didn’t really make me…happy, I guess?

Well I’ll be damned….

Imagine the greatest surprise of all when I realized that I had gotten to the end of the race and there was just a treadmill for me to keep running on.  Or maybe a hamster wheel. Really, Gentle Reader, use the theater of your mind and come up with your own metaphoric imagery.  It doesn’t matter to me.  All I know is (1) I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next and (2) that there were only so many ways I could keep saying: “Access to information is a fundamental human right but unfortunately there’s a Information Industrial Complex out there that’s putting profits over this basic human right. Librarians are uniquely poised to stop the machine and save humanity. So go do it.”

In a cosmic coincidence, it was at this exact moment that I was offered my current position completely out of the blue.  I leapt at the chance to take myself out of the game and try something new.  Don’t get me wrong…I mainly took the job because I believe strongly in CALI and for all the reasons that I wrote here, but I don’t know if I would have even considered it if I weren’t plagued with massive career ennui at the time.  And I have to admit, the minute I realized that I didn’t have to worry about tenure or not offending TOO many people such that I’d be permanently blackballed from AALL committees or otherwise keeping up with the Joneses, I felt a huge weight come off my shoulders.

If you’re a woman and you’ve gone to an ER or Urgent Care recently, at some point you were probably taken aside and asked quietly yet urgently if your partner beats you.  And you reply, “….no, I have an ear infection?”  That’s sort of what it’s like for me when I got to library conferences now.  “How does it feel to not be a librarian anymore?” “Is your boss treating you nice?” “Do you regret it?” “Are you okay?”   I appreciate the care and concern from ER nurses and librarians at conferences alike, but at the same time it makes one momentarily  wonder, “Oh, no, do I look like I’m having trouble?”

For the record, the answers are, “I’m still a librarian, goddammit.”  “Yes, he’s a very nice man.”  “No, I don’t regret it. ” and “It’s complicated.”

Look. I won’t deny it: I miss being a librarian that works in a library.  I miss teaching, I miss the reference desk and I miss hunting down a hard to find piece of information that’s seemingly lost to the world until I unearth it for someone.  Mostly I miss the immediate feedback – the sighs of relief, the smiles, the thanks you and even the times where I’d shut my office door and let a student cry their eyes out on my desk because being a law student is pretty damn hard.   Basically, all the thousands of little ways that librarians can see that they’re making a difference in someone’s life.

My current job allows me to still help people but more on a macro level.  My organization is working on projects and doing things that will literally change the future legal education and information distribution.  Instead of helping a handful of law students, I’m helping them all.  Just not in person.  Most days it seems like an even trade. It honestly not something I see doing for the rest of my life but for right now it’s a satisfying and fun job and I’m gaining knowledge and experiences that I never would in a library.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about careers and even myself over the past two years or so, it’s that I have no idea what’s coming next.  Or what I even want to come next.  When I was in law school, my contracts professor had a simple phrase for us to repeat when – surprise, surprise – contract law wasn’t as cut and dried as we thought it should be.    He’d say, “Embrace the ambiguity. EMBRACE THE AMBIGUITY.”   Which is really not an easy thing to do with your life and career, especially if you’re like me and always need to have a goal to work towards.  But it’s what I’m trying to do right now.

Let’s end this on another one of my favorite quotes.  This time from Auntie Mame:  “Life is a buffet and most poor suckers are starving!”  I think “life as a buffet” is a pretty good metaphor, but that’s not exactly an accurate sentiment.  Do you go to a lot of buffets?  Because I do.  And trust me,  no one is ever sitting there in the corner not eating.  Instead – especially if, God forbid, you go on Crab Leg Night – people are PILING their plates with crab legs or prime rib or whatever their favorite thing is that they can now get in bulk.

What a waste.

Life, like buffets, gives you an opportunity to try dozens of things while you’re there.   Some of them will be awesome and some of them will be less so.  But you don’t know until you try.  And personally, I’d rather have a half eaten serving of some sort of mystery chinese dish that turned out to be sort of blah than spend the entire ride home wondering if it was as good as it looked.

If food related metaphors make you nervous because of some of your personal issues, maybe think of it like being Dr. Who and changing your looks and persona every few years and then going on more adventure with new companions.  Or maybe check out this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.   Really, whatever gets the idea across best to you.

I’m not saying you should do it.  I’m just saying this is the path I’m on right now.  And I have no idea what is around the bend or over the next ridge and I’m trying to learn to be okay with that.   Maybe I’ll go back and work in a library.  Maybe there’s a third career out there waiting for me. Maybe I’ll move to another country.  Maybe I’ll move back closer to my family.  Maybe I’ll give living in a big city another try.  I honestly don’t know which way it’s all going to turn out.

 (Author note: Gentle Reader, you may notice I haven’t been writing as much as I used to.  There’s lots of reasons for this, not of the least of which is because topics that my blog is supposedly about – libraries, legal education, technology – are topics that haven’t been entirely front and center in my mind.  But I’ve decided that since my name is on the blog, I can make it any damn thing I want, so expect more “career” “personal” “navel gazy” types posts from me in the future.)

Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lucias_clay/ , http://www.flickr.com/photos/donsolo/ , http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051383/