Shift #5 (3.75 hrs) - In Custodia Legis & Law Library Collections Webinar, Weekly Check-in Email & Blog/Collections Research

Shift #5 - In Custodia Legis & Law Library Collections Webinar, Weekly Check-in Email & Blog/Collections Research

Friday, May 24, 2024 | 12-3:45 pm CST/1-4:45 pm EST (3.75 hrs)

Details

Michelle Hurt, student/intern

Jennifer Gonzalez, practicum supervisor

This is a screenshot of the first page of participants in our intern cohort. This was for a webinar about In Custodia Legis, the Law Library's blog.

Thanks to my summer work schedule, I have Friday afternoons off that I can dedicate to longer webinars and research. This Friday, I participated in a required webinar about In Custodia Legis, the Law Library's blog (where our blog post could be published in!), and the Law Library's digital collections. We had two presenters, Jennifer our practicum supervisor and another staff member, Bailey DeSimone. Jennifer and Bailey provided an introduction to the blog and gave an approach to our blog post assignment. Because In Custodia Legis is a means of an introduction to other collections in the Law Library and other divisions, will our blog post help people to engage with the collection and beyond? They also spoke about how the Law Library should be our first and number one resource as we begin our research and writing efforts. They encouraged us to think about how law touches everything - from food to sports. They also told us to think about what makes us unique - our interests, our goals, and even our background. Paired with research the Law Library's digital collections, we can begin homing in on a topic or two that we will run by Jennifer for approval next week. 

This is a screenshot of a slide from Jennifer's presentation, discussing topic requirements. Both Jennifer and Bailey (the other presenter) gave us lots of ways we can come up with a topic. 

Other things that Jennifer and Bailey talked about was how we need to make sure that we write with a neutral tone and to proceed with caution, taking care to steer away from hot topics. We should not be writing legal analyses of a particular topic, because we are not the experts. However, our blog post can lead the reader to the experts, the authors of documents within the Law Library's collections. We should focus on the digital collections as our resources, and as we do our research (while taking into account what we're interested in), we will be led to our topic. Our writing will be in the AP Style, and we can use resources outside of the Law Library (with sources that are freely available/no paywall, without advertisements, and that are reputable and neutral). We should make sure that we err on the side of over-sources (and not under-sourcing) and that we should not editorialize or write in overly verbose language. Jennifer and Bailey also provided us with examples of published blog posts written by past interns, so we could get a feel and understanding of how we should conduct our initial research and how we will write our post. They also set aside time to go over the digital collections within the Law Library and which ones would be most helpful for us to use. 

Besides this webinar, I also took time to do my weekly check-in email to Jennifer. Every week, she has 1-3 things that we are required to do as part of this check-in email that we send on Friday or Saturday. For this particular check-in, we had to submit our signed volunteer application form and include a code word that Jennifer said in the pre-recorded Library of Congress introduction webinar. She also wanted us to write about our initial thoughts and concerns about the internship. 

Lastly, I began my research into the Law Library's collections and looking at examples of past blog posts. There are 21 digital collections total, like the United States Statutes at Large, Piracy Trials and Native American Constitutions and Legal Materials. Today I focused on the Code of Federal Regulations collection as I thought about my topic ideas. Some of the blog posts I read were about 17th-century witchcraft, the conscription system in South Korea, child actor laws, and the theft of famous artworks. I feel a little overwhelmed with the amount of information at hand, so I think I need to formulate a plan to research the collections while thinking about my topic.