From the Director
Professor Ann Puckett

Question: When are you permitted to eat in the Law Library?
Answer: Never – except when you are invited back to an alumni/ae reunion.

There are many rewards for staying the course in law school: access to jobs that bring power, prestige, and financial reward; knowledge that you have met a difficult challenge and conquered it; lasting friendships forged in the fires of shared adversity – and getting to do things you were never permitted to do as a student. Like practice law and eat in the Law Library.

That’s right, on Friday, September 24, 1999, graduates of the classes of 1949, 1954, 1959, 1964, 1969, 1974, 1979, 1984, 1989, and 1994 are invited to attend a catered dinner served in the magnificent reading room of the Law Library. They will pay $55 a ticket for the privilege.

Fund raising events of this type have become a necessity for publicly assisted law schools, because private supplementation of state funding provides the extra margin of excellence we all want our law school to have. We hope Dinner in the Law Library will become a popular annual event, and we hope to see some of you when you come back to attend it!

The main law library building will close at 1 p.m. September 24 to allow for cleaning and caterer set-up. Students who need to use library facilities for study will not be left out in the cold, however. The Annex will remain available throughout the afternoon and evening. For first-year students who may not know this, the Annex has its own entrance that ordinarily requires a key card. We will dispense with the key card requirement for the duration of this event. Books from the main law library building may be checked out any time on Friday morning and will not be due until Saturday morning, when regular hours resume. This includes Reserve materials, reporters, law reviews, statutes, everything shelved in the main building except rare books and special collections.

We hope you will look beyond the minor disruption this event may cause and see the benefits it will bring. Our law library’s budget is $500,000 less, on average, than the budgets of comparable law school libraries. If we do not take aggressive steps to address the shortfall, we will be unable to provide the fine library resources you and your classmates need during law school and after you graduate.

Meet Your Computer Lab Help Desk Assistants
by Carol Watson

The Law School is lucky to have such an able crew of undergraduates, all of whom are majoring in either MIS or Computer Science, staffing the Help Desk. Remember to give ‘em a call at 542-0895 or e-mail lawhelp@listserv.uga.edu when you need assistance.

Drinks Now Allowed in the Law Library
by Sally Curtis AsKew

In response to many student requests the Law Library now allows you to bring drinks into the library in spill proof containers. You may not take any drinks into the computer labs. There is a display of samples of approved containers on top of the browsing shelves at the entrance to the Law Library. These containers all have screw tops. The screw top is the key to a container being approved. Containers which are pasteboard and have thin plastic tops on them such as the ones you get at fast food places and coffee shops are not acceptable; neither are the plastic cups/mugs which have tops which snap on. Snap-on tops will come off if the cup is dropped.

The Law Library staff looks forward to your cooperation in following the rules for bringing drinks into the library.

Video Review: Archives of War
by Francis X. Norton
 
 

This may not be Blockbuster, but the law library does lend videos. The Sohn collection has recently purchased a four video series
entitled The Archives of War. It is not a “documentary” in the traditional sense: it does not blend raw footage and new script together to form a new product Instead, the producers of the series have gathered together an assortment of complete films, including a silent movie, newsreels, and programs designed for school children. In a sense, this collection does present a history of how war has been portrayed and sold to the general public.

The first video begins with a scene of mounted soldiers, a light cavalry troop, charging into battle. It is a 1925 British silent movie that portrays the battles around Ypres during the first World War. All British troops, even the Irish, are depicted as heroic. The German soldiers, predictably, are not depicted as kindly. Given the limits of production ability for the time, the film does present a vivid and moving portrayal of trench warfare.

The series contains a number of newsreels produced by the Pathe Gazette company. There is much “standard” film footage, such as scenes of bombs falling on Madrid, U.S. Marines landing on Tarawa, and Soviet forces entering Stalingrad. The commentary accompanying many of the films is very interesting. A viewer with a thorough knowledge of history, however, will recognize the distortions of “truth” as it is presented.

The material on the Cold War presents a nuclear exchange as acceptable and winnable. A regiment of U.S. soldiers watch a nuclear explosion, and then march to ground zero. An animated Bert the Turtle shows children how to “duck and cover.” A program shows how the homeowner can build his own backyard bomb shelter, or have a contractor do it for him. A man demonstrates that one can safely eat an irradiated banana after simply peeling off the skin. These films may be more chilling than the combat scenes.

The series ends with another scene of mounted soldiers charging into battle. This time, it is Russian mechanized infantry in a mock attack of  “enemy” tanks and artillery positions in a desert setting while ‘80’s synthesizer music plays. This may have been an effort to place a nice spin on events in Afghanistan.

The series demonstrates that war news has never been dispassionately presented. Governments have always placed a spin upon the events that they allow their citizens to view. This is a lesson from which we can learn much.
 
 

Library Hours

Regular Hours:
Monday - Friday 7:30 a.m. - Midnight
Saturday - Sunday 8:00 a.m. - Midnight

The Law Library will be open Regular Hours through November 7 with the exception of Friday, September 24, when the Main Building of the library will close at 1pm. The Annex will remain open until midnight. For more about the events in the library on the 24th, see Professor Puckett’s column on the first page of this newsletter.

Library Hires New Reference Librarian!

After a 4-month long, nationwide search, the Law Library is extremely pleased to announce that James Sherwood will join the Reference staff in mid-October as the Reference/Faculty Services Librarian. “Jim” fills the vacancy created when former Associate Director José Ramon Pagés retired on July 1. He earned his J.D. from the University of Alabama School of Law, where he was a member of the Law Review and Order of the Coif. In addition, Jim has an LL.M. in Tax from NYU and a Master’s in Library Science from the University of Alabama.

Please look for a more in-depth profile of our newest reference librarian in the October Amicus Briefs.

Circulation Office Welcomes Larisa Bosma

Welcome to Larisa Bosma, who recently joined the Law Library’s staff as a Circulation Assistant. She takes the place of Fran Norton, who you now see at the Reference Desk on weekends and evenings.

In addition to earning an M.A. in Journalism at UGA, Larisa has two Bachelor’s degrees from the University of Washington: one in Linguistics and one in Scandinavian Area Studies. And she may not be done with school yet: she’s contemplating earning a Master’s in Library Science and making a profession out of it! In addition to a stellar academic background, Larisa brings library experience to her current position. She worked for our Serials Department in 1998 as a loose-leaf filer.

Her personal interests are diverse, but music interests her the most, especially classical choral music. She sang with two choral groups as an undergraduate and, upon her arrival in Athens, sang with the Athens Choral Society.

Larisa’s dog, Clay, recently adopted a stray cat (now named Jasmine).

You can find Larisa here Wednesdays through Sundays, and we invite you to drop by the Circulation Office to meet her.