Life skills and career tips for Canada's lawyers in training
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50905
BY MICHAEL MCKIERNAN kingdom I Key to the Treasures await in the stacks and staff knowledge at your law school library and good research skills will only serve you well in the practice of law. n the blur of orientation week, be- tween the bonding sessions, the pub- crawls, and the overwhelming stack of introductory materials, you may have a fuzzy memory of an introduction to one of the most important buildings on campus — the library. "Orientation days are programmed to the minute and I will get to talk to them for maybe three minutes," says Kathryn Arbuckle, head law librarian at the University of Alberta's John A. Weir Memorial Law Library. "For some of them, it's the only chance I may have to speak to them in their whole fi rst year." With convenient course casebooks doing the search work for you and the multitude of materials available online, the law library can become little more than a social space or quiet environ- ment for exam-time cramming aſt er that fi rst encounter. At Osgoode Hall Law School, which is in the middle of a two- year renovation, the library may struggle even to achieve that status, with rooms and resources scattered across the York University campus. Its main reference section is housed in an old cafeteria in the basement of the Health, Nursing, and Environmental Studies building. Half of its books are still in the old building, surrounded by construction while two- thirds of the reference collection is locked up in a warehouse in Bolton, Ont. Luckily, there is much more to the library than a building, says Osgoode's chief law librarian, Louis Mirando. "Th e library as a physical place is really im- portant, but students shouldn't forget that it is a resource and an active re- source. Increasingly it is the virtual li- brary they are accessing, but a lot of the keys to accessing that are in the library," says Mirando. Chief among those keys are the librar- ians themselves, according to Nancy McCormack, head of the Lederman Law Library at Queen's University. She says there is nothing better a student can do than to schmooze their local law librarian. "Th ey will do all kinds of things if you are nice to them, and it's in our nature to help. Th at's why we went into libraries." David Michels, a librar- ian at the Sir James Dunn Law Library at Dalhousie University, says the staff at his library is its biggest asset. He doesn't have a background in law, but if there's one thing he knows, it's how to fi nd in- formation. He's happy to work one-on- one with students because they're more likely to retain the knowledge he teaches them. "Law students and new lawyers are not going to have time to keep up with the latest developments in research practices. I may not understand the spe- cifi cs of what you're looking for, but I C ANADIAN Lawyer 4STUDENTS F ALL 2010 21