Elizabeth Adelman named SUNY Distinguished Librarian

Only nine others in the State University of New York system have been awarded this statewide designation, and only five, including Adelman, are currently serving in that role. The distinction recognizes librarians whose contributions have been transformational in creating a new information environment by providing access to information, sharing or networking information resources, and fostering information literacy.

“Beth’s honor is a testament to her exceptional leadership at the law school and among her peers nationwide,” says law school Dean S. Todd Brown. “We are extremely proud of her extraordinary work and her longstanding commitment to legal education.”   

A recent president of the American Association of Law Libraries, Adelman is the author of several books. She helped develop an open-access research repository that has registered more than 700,000 downloads, as well as the New York Codes, Rules, and Regulations Digital Archive, which provides the public with digital access to historical regulatory documents.

Adelman joined the law library in 2006 and became director in 2011. She holds a master’s degree in library science from UB as well as a JD from Albany Law School. In 2011, she received a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship, also recognizing her exceptional professional and scholarly skills.

Law libraries continue to evolve with the revolution in digital information and now the advent of artificial intelligence, and a brief conversation with Adelman reflected her thinking on some of those transformations.

In addition to your career as a whole, this distinction by SUNY recognizes the library’s development of an open-access research repository that has seen astronomical numbers of users. Please talk about its scope and how you see it removing barriers to legal research.

I’m pleased to have supported the UB School of Law repository initiative, implemented and populated by John Beatty, the law school’s faculty scholarship outreach librarian. The repository serves several purposes, including as a vehicle for making legal scholarship authored by UB Law’s faculty available without a paywall. The repository is a small, but important, contribution to the open-access movement.

Another major achievement, the library’s New York Codes, Rules, and Regulations Digital Archive, makes historical regulatory documents digitally accessible. Why is this niche of legal research important, even to non-lawyers?

The NYCRR Digital Archive contains replaced pages or “takeouts” from a publication called the New York Codes, Rules, and Regulations of the State of New York. The NYCRR Digital Archive includes takeouts from 1945 to 2001, and it is the only online source of New York’s regulatory history material covering this time period.  This free resource helps researchers, librarians and practitioners more easily determine previous versions of New York’s codes, rules and regulations, a task that is dusty, difficult and time-consuming when performed in print. It is a service to the New York legal community and the community at large but is also helpful to people in other professions concerned with code compliance, such as contractors and architects.

Today’s law students largely have grown up being able to Google any information they need. Is it a challenge to help them engage the wider context of their topic, rather than the narrow lens that a search engine often uses?

Law students are excellent Google searchers, but in law school the curriculum exposes them to other legal databases. Starting in their first year, they take a Research Lab course. With a focus on legal research, the course is taught in a flipped classroom style, so the in-class experience is largely active learning. Armed with a laptop, each student works through hypotheticals independently, and then the class collectively debriefs the exercise. These group experiences demonstrate the need to embrace the broader context of their topic within legal databases as opposed to Google.

You’re passionate about connecting students and scholars to the information they need. Does the law library of a public university like UB have a special obligation to serve all visitors?

The Charles B. Sears Law Library is open to the public. We recognize that the library is a vital community resource. As our mission states, “We are dedicated to serving our community and … provide … [e]xpert research assistance for all patrons with dignity and respect.”

You recently completed your term as president of the American Association of Law Libraries. From that vantage point, what’s the state of law librarianship as a profession in the United States?

Law librarianship is a strong profession. Throughout my tenure on the executive board of the AALL, I witnessed a steady increase in the association’s membership. There are more law librarian jobs available than employers can fill. I hear concerns about the prospect of AI taking jobs. I’m not sure what will happen, but librarians tend to survive changes in library technology over time. During the dawn of the age of electronic information, we often heard, “Everything is online, so why do I need a librarian?” Yet the market demand for law librarians remains robust. I feel confident we can survive integrating AI technology into the legal profession. Our value lies in connecting people with information, even if the tools, formats and/or methods change.