Welcome to the seemingly futuristic year of 2022! Sure, it isn’t quite what we were promised in the movies, but regardless of a lack of flying cars, the Law Library does have a top-of-the-line website that pretty much transports you to a futuristic Eden of library bliss (okay, a little hyperbolic, but still it’s a great website). Let’s take a tour of the website and discover how it can help you get back into the groove for the semester.

Let’s begin by highlighting how you can communicate suggestions, recommendations and concerns to the Law Library staff. We have a digital suggestion box where you can provide input on how to make the Library more welcoming or suggestions for services (we also have a physical suggestion box in our Copy Center!) In addition, you can also make purchase recommendations. If we don’t own a journal, article, or database that you’d find helpful, tell us about it! It will not only help you, but it’s likely others will appreciate it as well.

Those two online forms are far from the only way to speak directly with a Law Librarian. You can also chat with us. From wherever you are, just click on the Chat Now link in the red bar at the top of any page and you’ll be connected with a Reference Librarian. We staff our chat services from 9am-9pm Monday-Thursday, 9am-5pm on Fridays, and from 1pm-5pm on Saturdays and Sundays during the semester. Ask us anything – how to conduct legal research, where to find a pesky source, Bluebooking questions, or just to let us know about someone who is too loud in the library. We love getting your questions and look forward to helping you.  

Libraries are known for many things, but we at the Law Library are possibly best-known for our quiet and professional (and welcoming) space. Did you know we have five whole floors of space for you to use? It can get confusing, but we have maps available on our site, as well as hours in case you are an early bird or night owl.

Besides our five floors and hundreds of seats, we also study rooms that you can reserve ahead of time straight from our website. You can review each room to see what amenities they have, how large they are, and when they are available via our Study Room grid. They are perpetually popular, so get them early! 

We keep ourselves busy helping you and you can find the results of librarian work and research on our web site. The Reference staff have lovingly crafted over 50 research guides on a variety of law school topics that allow you to hit the ground running while conducting all types of legal research. These are so amazing, I think they merit another article, but please peruse now or ask us for help in locating the best one for your work.

You can also find, wayyyyyyy at the bottom of the homepage, all sorts of great stuff that we’ve written and produced. Our Law Library Director, Bonnie Shucha, maintains an amazing blog about legal topics and research called WisBlawg that you can review. Along with our weekly newsletters on a variety of topics (like this one!), we also have monthly podcasts where we interview faculty members about their work. There is some great stuff in there, give them a listen when you are walking to campus!

That is just the tip of the iceberg with our site. We also have databases, our digital repository, and a whole boatload of policies in case you are curious about how and why we operate. If you remember nothing else from this article, please just get in touch with your questions or concerns. We want you to be as well-positioned for success and the more we hear from you, the better we can do just that.

Have a great semester, we look forward to seeing you either in-person or on the information superhighway of 2022!

Submitted by Turner,Kristopher on April 20, 2022

This article appears in the categories: Law Library

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