Wow, the first week of the school year is always a whirlwind! With 1L orientation on Monday, a journal sourcing assignment Monday-Wednesday, and 1L library tours Thursday and Friday, to say that it’s been a busy week would be an understatement. But entering my second year as a librarian here at Maurer Law, it’s also been really fun. Not only did I get to meet the students that will be in my two sections of Legal Research & Writing, but I also got to catch up with a few of my students from last year. I was thrilled to hear that one of them had been invited back to his summer employer again for next year – this is, of course, what we’re hoping for. (And it made my day when he told me he’d be sending all the 1Ls our way for research help!) Though I won’t be seeing my 1Ls this year again until October, I’m glad they can recognize me as a resource so early in the semester – it’s always nice to be able to put faces to names, especially in a new environment.
The library iPads we bought in the Spring have taken on all new services this Fall. While some libraries circulate iPads, ours are for the Reference Office, not for the patrons. We use them to test out apps and such, but we haven’t heavily used them in service…until this week. We had a journal student needing to scan a large volume of statutes from an enormous tome, making it a tedious job for him on the physical scanner, so, feeling bad for him, we lent him one of our iPads and showed him how to use the CamScanner app to scan his pages instead. (As an aside, do you know he was the second journal student who came in this week that didn’t have a smartphone? Both young students too – I was surprised. It just goes to show we really cannot assume that our students are completely immersed in the latest tech.) Anyway, this was a huge hit for him; he even lent it to another journal student as well (which frazzled me, but he did eventually bring it back to us, safe and sound!). I was thrilled that we could offer this service to the students, but we realized we had to rein it in, since our iPads were not meant to be lent out and we had no policies or enforcement procedures in place to handle that. So the downside is that we did get several more requests for the iPad, which we had to decline. But this situation caused me to realize what a great tool an iPad could be for a journal. Now they would of course have to be responsible for maintaining it and monitoring its use, but clearly there’s a need for it.
Then just today I received a call at the reference desk from someone across the country needing some historical Indiana bills. These are easy enough to find, but, as with the journal student’s problem, these bills are bound in massive, unwieldy volumes. Enter the Reference iPad! I scanned, OCR’d, and emailed them right from the iPad, no trouble at all. When we got our iPads, I imagined us using them in teaching, perhaps doing brown bag sessions with app demonstrations. I just love finding new ways to use library tools to augment our services, and I think I certainly saw that this week with our iPad. Finally, definitive proof that these were a good investment for the Reference Office.
lawbrarianship 