What Your Law Librarians Are Doing

When we as your law librarians wrap up our time in the fall Legal Research, Analysis, and Writing (LRAW) classroom, other than our hours helping patrons at the reference desk, our work might not be so visible. But we are definitely still at work.

Here are just a few of the projects we’ve been working on:

Preparing for Westlaw Edge

Law students will experience a new Westlaw interface with additional features starting in January 2019.

Law librarians are working now to adapt our LRAW materials for the new interface and features.

Meanwhile, a quick preview is here:

Training Public and Academic Librarians

Part of the role of the University of South Carolina Law Library is to serve the public.

Four of our law librarians—Terrye Conroy, Dan Brackmann, Aaron Glenn, and Eve Ross—presented 2 hours of content on November 2, 2018, at the South Carolina Library Association conference in Greenville. Our “Shine a Light on Legal Research” presentation was designed to help public and academic librarians help their patrons with legal research.

In partnership with the South Carolina State Library, the same four law librarians are now preparing an all-day workshop in December 2018 for public and academic librarians who want to improve their legal research skills.

As part of this preparation, we’ve been revising and updating our online guide to basic legal research, designed for South Carolina librarians as well as the general public:

Library Tours

Our law library may not be brand new anymore; we’ve been here since May 2017. Nonetheless, many folks are just getting their first opportunity to take a library tour.

Rebekah Maxwell of the law library, and Judge Goolsby, a retired judge from the South Carolina Court of Appeals, gave the students of Judge Lockemy’s class a tour of the library’s South Carolina Legal History Room on November 15, 2018.

This was a special opportunity because the Legal History Room is usually kept locked, and because the collection of judicial figurines in the Legal History Room was donated by Judge Goolsby.

a few of Judge Goolsby’s judicial figurines
Judge Goolsby describing the judicial figurines in his collection
Rebekah Maxwell leading a tour of the Legal History Room