NPR headquarters is located in downtown DC near the DC Convention Center, and this is where many of its news programs, such as Morning Edition and All Things Considered, are produced.  About 15 LLAM members were taken on a tour of their facilities guided by NPR librarians.  The librarians took us though the building, pointing out high points of the NPR news process while describing the varied duties of the librarians themselves.

The tour started in the Broadcast Library.  The Broadcast library is where most of the NPR library collections are housed.  The major collection is the recordings of NPR- produced shows.  For many years, there was only 1 copy of the shows, and they were stored on analog tape.  These reels are now kept in a climate-controlled archive connected to the library, and earlier years can be found at the National Archives.  In 1999, NPR began making show copies on CD-ROM, with both a circulating and an archival copy.  One major reason why this was done is because analog tape can get a condition called “sticky-shed syndrome”.  This is when the layers that make up the tape separate and become sticky resulting in shedding when the tape is played.  NPR actually uses a convection oven to “bake” these tapes, which fuses the layers back in place temporarily, allowing a copy to be made. Now the CDs are in the process of being saved to servers as backup to the CD copies.

The other two major collections housed in the Broadcast Library are the music and the spoken word collections.  There is a music librarian who helps directors and reporters make selections of the music that is played within segments and through the shows. As you can imagine, NPR has several thousand CDs to choose from, as well as several online sources.  Spoken Word is a collection of historical sound ranging from old radio newscasts to early TV programs, commercials, and political speeches.  Anytime you hear archival sound in an NPR program, the chances are it came from the Spoken Word collection.  If the library does not have something a producer or reporter needs, the Broadcast librarian will make every effort to find it.  The Broadcast librarians rotate manning the main information desk, and when they aren’t on reference, some are cataloging NPR programs, working on digital projects, and gearing up for a migration to a new library system.  Selection of a new system for their catalog has been quite complicated as they are trying to find a system that can work with all the other systems throughout NPR.

Inside Studio 4E.

There are also reference librarians “embedded” throughout the News division, and we met some of them as we moved on through the building.  The NPR News division is divided up between both shows and units; e.g. there is an area where all the Morning Edition staff works and another area for the Science unit, etc.  The News Division is spread over four floors and there are five librarians located throughout.

Other stops along the tour included Master Control.  This is the central area where all NPR’s input and output gets coordinated.  It looks like a space ship with hundreds of blinking lights & buttons.  It is continually manned by engineers making sure everything gets where it needs to be.  We were also able to go to one of the studios while the show Talk of the Nation was on the air.  There is a viewing area for guests where you can see both the director and the show host.  We saw their state-of-the-art Studio 4A that is used for live interviews with recording artists.  As you can imagine the digital revolution is huge at NPR, so we stopped by two projects that focus heavily on the digital world.  One was called NPR Labs and the other was Digital Music.  NPR Labs’ sole purpose is to explore new technologies and their possible uses throughout the NPR system, and Digital Music allows for a central location for musical genres and a variety of media platforms.  Lastly, we stopped by Morning Edition and heard how a show is produced, including how the various news pieces come in and how they piece together the segments.

It was fascinating journey into the behind-the-scenes action at NPR, highlighting the news, music, digital, and library missions.

Janet Camillo, the Director of the Montgomery County Circuit Court Law Library and active member of LLAM, will be retiring at the end of this year.

Janet’s library experience began in high school and continued through college and law school.  Her first job after law school was as a research librarian at her law school law library.  Janet pursued a legal career as a public interest attorney working for Neighborhood Legal Services and Legal Aid, but took a break from lawyering with the birth of her two sons.  She decided that it would be a good time to go to library school and pursue a career that might fit better with her new role as a mother.  While in library school, Janet was able to work part-time for the law firm Linowes and Blocher, and became the head librarian there after graduation.  After 11 years, she moved to the court library sector as head of the Arlington Circuit Court library.  Janet later moved to the Montgomery County Circuit Court Law Library as assistant librarian and eventually became the director.

It will be hard to say goodbye to someone who has done so much for LLAM.  Janet has served as Secretary, Vice President, and President.  She has chaired and served on many LLAM committees as well, most recently Archives, Nominations, and Awards.  She is responsible for getting the LLAM Procedure Manual together; she served on the 25^th Anniversary Committee; and she worked on the bylaws revisions and researching LLAM’s tax status.  Janet was also part of LLAM’s planning committee for the Northeast Regional Conference held in Toronto in 2007.

It will be hard to day goodbye to someone who has contributed so much on the national level as well.  As the photo attests, Janet worked as a function coordinator at the AALL Annual Meeting held in Baltimore.  You can find Janet’s name on the roster of various AALL SIS committees: Nominations for SCCLL, Awards and the Ad Hoc Professional Development Committee for TS-SIS, and the Patron Services Committee for RIPS.  She co-authored the LISP Public Librarian’s toolkit it for Maryland.  Janet is now a member of the AALL Maryland Working Group and is contributing to the National Inventory of Primary Legal Materials.

It will be hard to say goodbye to someone who has taken such an active role in the formation of the official Conference of Maryland Court Law Library Directors.  Janet was instrumental in getting this conference going.  We will miss her as the current chair of the conference.

It will be hard to say goodbye to someone who always had an idea for a program, whether local, regional, or national.  Janet shared her expertise on preservation with LLAM, and joined me at Jessup to teach legal research to the women there. Janet got the Conference of Court Library Directors to present at MACCM and coordinated a program for the SEAALL annual meeting.

It will be hard to say goodbye to our social coordinator at AALL.  Janet was always able to organize the LLAM Dine Around and get the LLAM runners together for the Hein Fun Run.

Looking at all of Janet’s accomplishments, we might easily see why she would want to retire.  Still, I had to ask her what she will do with her new found time.  Janet will be jumping right into a big home renovation project.  She looks forward to travel with her husband, Larry, taking classes, and continuing her volunteer work with therapeutic riding.  Janet will be careful that she doesn’t end up with too many commitments at the start of her retirement.  She will be available to help with the transition of the new library director in Montgomery County.

When asked what she will miss most, Janet was quick to say that she will miss more than anything the people she has worked with over the years: her staff and colleagues in Montgomery County, and all of the members of LLAM she has worked with and gotten to know.  When asked what she will miss the least, Janet answered that she is not sorry that she will no longer have to negotiate contracts with vendors.

I asked Janet if she had a “best” memory of her years as a law librarian.  She could not boil it all down to just one memory, but helping people is what made it all meaningful.  Janet remembers an Asian couple who returned to the library to thank her for all of the help she was able to provide in the library.  They insisted on a gift of a small Vietnamese bowl which serves as a lovely reminder of what Janet loved most about her career.

It will be hard to say goodbye to someone who is such good friend.  I know we will all miss her and hope that Janet keeps in touch as she begins this new and exciting phase of her life.

LLAM volunteers pictured l to r: Pat Behles, Univ. of Balto.; Jean Hessenauer, Tydings & Rosenberg; Sara Thomas, Whiteford Taylor; and Kathy Sweeney, Semmes, Bowen & Semmes

For the past two years, LLAM has been serving dinner twice a year at the Ronald McDonald House.  Each time we serve, four or five LLAM Members have volunteered.  We purchase the food, transport it to the house, prepare it, and then serve it.  The house holds approximately forty people, and it is usually full.  The Ronald McDonald House is set up like a small hotel.  On the first floor there is a nice family room with a large TV, a playroom, and a game room.  The second and third floors each have kitchens and hotel type rooms.  The kitchens were recently  remodeled and  are very well equipped.  We try to serve several choices of nutritious food and our “bakers” always whip up tasty desserts.

I have been serving dinner at the House for about eight years, and I think everyone who has participated will say how rewarding it is.  The families are so appreciative to have dinner waiting for them when they return from the hospital.  Last month, one dad said, “it is so nice to come back here at night and not have to worry about preparing dinner for my daughter and me.”  Having a very sick child is stressful, so it is nice to be able to take some of the burden from these families.

◊AACC Offers CEU Classes in Legal Research
◊AALL Maryland Working Group Update
◊NPR Tour
◊It’s Going to be Hard to Say Goodbye to Janet Camillo
◊Dinner at Ronald McDonald House
◊Holiday Party

Anne Arundel Community College, known for its strong paralegal program, began offering continuing education unit (CEU) classes this fall in the areas of legal research, negotiation, and mediation.

The legal research classes were taught by Mary Jo Lazun of the Maryland State Law Library. The first class focused on print sources and the second class on using online resources. Ten people got up early on a Saturday morning to attended the first session and fourteen for the second. About half the class were practicing attorneys and the rest were a mixture of paralegals, students and even a librarian!

In the first class, held at the State law library, focused on the print sources. Mary Jo taught students how to maximize the use of secondary sources and how to locate superseded Maryland Code and COMAR and do a basic legislative history.The session was designed so that over 50% of the class time was devoted to using the materials in the library. Students quickly learned their way around the library and were impressed the library’s collections, particularly its superseded codes.

The online class, offered in one of the college’s computer labs, gave students a hands-on opportunity to compare Lexis and Westlaw while learning the basics of Boolean searches and locating case law by topic and headnote. Having access to both databases was a major plus. Students either focused their attention on the database they used the most or used the class as an opportunity to learn a new system. Like the “print” class, most of the time was devoted to hands on exercises and kept Mary Jo very busy answering moving from computer to computer.

According to Karen Cook, the director of the Legal Studies Program at AACC, “The feedback from the courses has been wonderful!.” The college is working on its fall schedule of CEU classes and both legal research classes offered again.