The Lincoln Douglas debates were between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, not Frederick Douglass. FYI, Fox News researchers. If the debate had been between Lincoln and Frederick it would have gone:
Lincoln: I want to free the slaves
Douglass: Me too.
[END]
Only in San Francisco. I can say that having lived there for six years. Andrew Sullivan posted this sign and it was subsequently picked up by others. One such place was PrawfsBlawg where the poster thought Munich had been in East Germany. That poster was a professor at a major U.S. university now a visiting professor at another major university. This is nothing next to the writer at the L.A. Times who thought George Washington only served one term as president. Volokh got that person here. So the next time the media does a poll that shows that only 2% of U.S. teenagers can correctly place India on a map, they can run the concurrent percentage of how many adult professionals can't pick up a World Almanac. Ask your local reference librarian where the nearest one is.
It's very hard to answer a question when a student walks up with a T-shirt like this one. I was literally on the floor laughing. Then he wanted to know the difference between misfeasance and nonfeasance in Nevada law. Like I could answer that then!! The next day this T-shirt turned up:
Again, I was on the floor!
When computers became a mainstay of reference librarianship about 10 years ago, I vowed to do little computer use outside of work. If I was on a computer for eight hours a day, I thought I should read, garden, exercise, and ignore the computer. So the computer was work and not fun, and I did very little in the ensuing boom of computer usage at home.
An entire generation of students now communicate and network primarily using computers with IM and online sites such as MySpace and Facebook. The Harvard Law School Library now even has a fan page on facebook, so the librarians have been asked to create our own pages. So at the well-past-college-age that I am, I'm on facebook. But purely for work. Of course, I've been told this website can suck you in, but we'll see.
Now people can friend me. Yes, somewhere in the last few years friend became a verb. It seems a little like a cyberland middle school nightmare to me. "Will you be my friend?" What happens when you are ignored???? Too much pressure. I failed social politics once, I don't need to do it again virtually. But we are trying to reach out to the students in all ways and this is now another way.
I was helping a student last night with a project. He needed Library of Congress subject headings and we used both the books and the online catalog. While using the catalog, he wondered why when he clicked on a title he got an alphabetical listing of titles. I asked him if he had ever used a paper card catalog and he said no. Wow. If you've never used an old-fashioned card catalog before it wouldn't necessarily make sense to see how the online version mimics the paper version. He was probably a 1-L, undergrad of 2007, high school class of 2003, and therefore a member of an emerging generation that always had computers and online card catalogs.
It has me thinking that I'll be someone who remembers records and hifis, dial telephones, black and white TVs, and a myriad of other things now past.
Prof. Byse died on October 9th. Conventional wisdom is that Prof. Byse was the model for the character of Prof. Kingsfield in the novel, movie, and TV series of the Paper Chase.
I guess we need to ask John Jay Osborn, (Harvard Law, 1970) the author, the truth. I first worked the reference desk at the Harvard Law School Library from 1994 to 1996 and regularly served Prof. Byse, who was an emeritus professor by then and whose office was steps from the library in what was Langdell West (now Areeda Hall). When the movie Quiz Show was released in 1994, there was line that mentioned Byse playing tennis. He didn't play tennis. He had me track down the author's address and phone number so he could speak with him directly (Richard N. Goodwin, Harvard Law, 1958--married to author Doris Kearns Goodwin). I also had to track down an editorial in which his name appeared but the copy of which had no title, no journal name, no date, no page number and only the author's name at the end of the column. Back then, even Lexis-Nexis didn't have everything for all time searchable. I finally found it by tracking down the author and asking where it had appeared (not that he remembered right away). I'm not sure if I found him intimidating because he was or because everyone told me he was and I assumed it as a given. I knew he liked the online databases for their quickness and flexibility, but he was never going to learn to deal with computers and I did all the searching myself. I suppose in twenty years, if I'm still at HLS, I'll be one of those old-timers who remembers the legendary professors such as Byse, Cox, and Areeda.
