UK Law Hosts Regional American Association of Law Libraries Conference

By:  Whitney Harder

The University of Kentucky College of Law Library is often a place for study sessions and important discussions, but its true mission is to help produce outstanding lawyers and expert legal scholars.

The Law Library — containing more than 850,000 volumes representing 340,000 titles in a variety of print, microform, and electronic formats — serves the legal information needs of students, faculty and citizens of the Commonwealth. Last week, the library also welcomed around 140 law librarians from across the nation as it hosted the Southeastern Chapter of the American Association of Law Libraries (SEAALL) Annual Conference.

The conference was held April 16-18 and included a day-long program on privacy, library tours including UK Libraries, a series of professional sessions, and a trip to Keeneland. The keynote address featured a recognized leader in oral history, archives and digital technologies: UK's own Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History.

With SEAALL attendees coming from a number of professional law library settings — academic law, state law and law firm libraries — a wide variety of topics were covered in sessions. Topics included law libraries' role in access to justice, legal research instruction, career advancement, and the law of bourbon, among others.

"Law librarians form a small but active subset of librarians, with a strong sense of community across the nation," said Beau Steenken, librarian at the UK College of Law Library and SEAALL local arrangements committee chair.

Assuming a central role within that community as host of the conference, the UK College of Law Library was also selected by the SEAALL board as the official digital repository for SEAALL records.