Archives & History – Law Librarians of New England

Update from the Archives Committee

Like most things during the pandemic, being responsible for the LLNE Archives has been challenging since the committee can’t visit the Archives in person. So your Archives committee is trying to see what we can do to create a digital archive and come up with policies to use going forward. The committee is currently made up of Dana Lusciano, a reference librarian at Silas Bronson Library in Waterbury Connecticut, Andrew Roache, the Associate Law Librarian at the Maine State Law and Legislative Library in Augusta Maine, Olga Umansky, the librarian and archivist for the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute in Newton Massachusetts, and Stefanie Weigmann, the Associate Director for Research and Instruction at Boston University School of Law in Boston Massachusetts. Andrew has been reaching out to past presidents to see what digital materials they might have in their files, Dana has been looking at how other regional organizations organize their archives, and Olga has been drafting a collection document. Our main goal is to grow and organize our Archives.

So while we are still in COVID we would like to reach out to you. Do you have any pictures or other interesting digital materials from events or committees you served on during your time with LLNE? Please send it to Andrew.Roache@legislature.maine.gov.

Archives Committee update

By Ron Oppenheim

Greetings, LLNEers! This abbreviated post is focused on you, the member/user/history-seeker. We’ve got some ideas bubbling about content we’d like to show you that we are still tinkering with a bit and, in the interim, we wanted to reach out to find out what you want to see.

Let us know if there’s anything in particular you’re interested in, whether it’s a topic, time period, or event; we’ve got some cool stuff in our archives, i.e., photos of dated hairstyles (we kid, we kid…).

Speaking of photos, if you have any from past LLNE events that you’d like to share or donate to our archives, please reach out to us (you can email Ron here). If you have any other materials that you think might want to make the archives their home, please contact him as well for more details.

Hope everyone has a happy and safe holiday season!

Archives committee updates

With summer officially behind us, the Archives & History Committee is ready to get started on its agenda for the year. We’ve got a number of things planned, many of which would benefit from member input!

First and foremost, we’ll be conducting an inventory of our holdings. There are three main reasons for this: 1.) it allows us to spot any acquisition priorities, gaps in our holdings, etc., 2.) it gives us a chance to revisit the processes we have in place and see if any need updating, and 3.) it lets us know what cool stuff we have and how best to showcase it!

One of the best ways to highlight our material is through this site, llne.org. So another key goal we have is to increase the activity on the Archives & History portion of the site. And this is where the member input part comes in. Let us know what you’d like to see on the site. Thoughts, ideas, or questions—however general or specific—are welcome, encouraged, and appreciated.

Lastly, we’ll also be starting to think about how we store our born-digital materials (i.e., those things that do not have a physical format). Getting a solid digital preservation policy is key, as we are all aware of the growing number of things that only exist as ones and zeroes. We’ve got a full plate for this year, but like I said in the previous post, I’m really excited about getting started.

Hello from the Archives Committee

By Ron Oppenheim

Greetings, fellow LLNE members! I’m Ron, the new chair of the Archives & History committee. I’m writing a quick post to introduce myself and let everyone know how excited I am to help preserve LLNE’s history. Now, you may be wondering just how genuine could one’s excitement be towards this endeavor? Well, let’s just say that as the archivist for an insurance company, I am used to working with materials whose ability to inspire enthusiasm aren’t, ahem, readily apparent. That, and like many of my fellow librarians, I find joy in organizing things. So whether it’s teasing out a story hidden in some old documents or getting the satisfaction knowing that everything is in its proper place, I am excited to get to work. In the meantime, if you have any questions or requests, please feel free to email me!

LLNE Archives: Cooks Reports Salad Dressing Recipes

By Heather Pierce

Summer time to farmers markets is like the bat signal to Batman and with all these farmers answering the call to provide fresh veggie goodness people are going to be making a lot of salads. So the most important question here is what kinds of dressings will you use? Well look no further than LLNE’s good old Cooks’s Reports for those answers. Here are six dressings that will add a bit of awesomesauce to your salad creations.

salad2

Cooks Reports

By Laurel Davis and Heather Pierce

Heather found this gem tucked into one of the LLNE archives boxes. The cleverly titled Cooks’ Reports: Being Reports of Recipes is a cookbook filled with recipes contributed by LLNE and SNELLA members. It was compiled by the Education Committees of both of those chapters and published by Cookbook Publishers in 1983.

It’s easy to imagine some of these items being served at parties on Mad Men. They probably don’t have a huge following in the fresh and local food movement of recent years! One eye-catching recipe that hopefully doesn’t get much play these days is reproduced below:

“Gotta Get Back in Time” – LLNE Ten Years Ago

By Laurel Davis, Boston College Law Library
Archives Committee Co-Chair

Writing this post is making me want to buy a Huey Lewis & the News album or watch Back to the Future, but I’ll try to finish writing before allowing the distraction to overtake me.

So, what were the folks at LLNE up to 10 years ago? To find out, I combed through the first LLNE newsletter to come out in 2005.

Susan Vaughn, then at Suffolk University Law School and now a colleague at Boston College Law School, was writing about a struggle that we still face today when teaching legal research. She posed a question about what level of focus should be kept on print resources and how to convince students that sometimes print is the way to go; she also made the point that, while these specific questions are important to explore, the more important lesson for the students is the one about the process of research—not the particular sources or platforms.

Other notable pieces included: an update from then-President Raquel Ortiz about LLNE’s activities (including a new blog and a new LLNE academic scholarship!) and the upcoming annual meeting in San Antonio; a fun “Legal Limit” cartoon by newsletter co-editors Sharon Persons and Susan Vaughn about the desolation of nighttime roving reference duty and more; a quite amusing Miss Nomer advice column; some Feng Shui advice for one’s office; and news about the new Social Law Library space in the John Adams Courthouse!

Take a look, and enjoy this glimpse back in time at LLNE!