Benjamin Keele, Candidate for Chair Elect/Chair (2022 - 2024)
**Ben is currently on the LIPA Board and has been serving as its Secretary since 2021**
Benjamin Keele is Associate Director, Ruth Lilly Law Library, Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law.
As a law review editor, I worked to make the review open access in an institutional repository. This project introduced me to IRs and was my first hook into law librarianship. Over a decade later, I still spend a portion of my time working to preserve and increase access to legal information. Most recently, I’ve helped coordinate a project to digitize historic Indiana statutory codes.
In addition to advancing LIPA’s existing projects, I’d investigate further collaboration with other shared print consortia and look into controlled digital lending for scarce materials preserved by LIPA member libraries. Copyright is one of my research interests, so I would also tend to look watch for opportunities to preserve materials, especially orphan works, in ways that comply with copyright statutes and doctrine.
Michele Knapp, Candidate for Secretary (2022 - 2024)
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I am pleased to have been nominated for the position of Secretary of the LIPA Board of Directors for 2022-2024. I began my career in academic law libraries as a reference librarian nearly ten years ago and moved into collection management four years ago. I have found my niche in managing library resources. Acquiring the resources users need, managing access, negotiating agreements, discovering new tools, and determining which resources have outlived their usefulness is my preferred way to serve my law school community. Without preservation of resources in mind, I cannot accomplish my job successfully.
LIPA presents an opportunity to get more involved with preservation efforts, to work with like-minded library and legal professionals to build community around the commitment to preserve legal information. I will share my knowledge and experience and learn as much as I can from others. It is my goal to act on ongoing initiatives and determine if new or different initiatives are needed as our institutions and collections undergo constant change. Continuity of a strong and proactive coalition of preservation advocates is key, and I aim to contribute to it.
I have served in many leadership positions with the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL), San Diego Area Law Libraries (SANDALL), and the Northwest Interlibrary Loan and Resource Sharing Conference (NWILL). I have proven my commitment to social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion, from advocating for the establishment of a DEIA committee at my library, to undertaking significant improvements to our collection to better reflect the diversity of our student body and society.
I hope to have the opportunity to represent LIPA member institutions as Secretary. Thank you for your consideration.
Molly Brownfield, Candidate for Member-at-Large (2022 - 2024)
It would be my honor and privilege to serve as a Member-at-Large on LIPA’s Board of Directors for the 2022-2024 term. I had the great fortune to recently become Director of the Tarlton Law Library at the University of Texas School of Law and am constantly looking to see how others are managing and preserving legal information to help me make informed, responsible decisions regarding the development, maintenance, preservation of Tarlton’s collections. I and Tarlton have a great deal of interest in contributing in a meaningful way to national preservation issues, and I am committed to advancing LIPA’s mission of providing the leadership, the organizational framework, and the professional commitment necessary to preserve vital legal information.
My goals for serving on LIPA’s Board are to become a better informed and more active member of the legal preservation community and to support LIPA’s projects as much as possible. I am particularly interested in LIPA’s PALMPrint project and Digital Projects Registry. Tarlton has a large print collection with numerous U.S. federal and state primary materials, and a project such as PALMPrint offers wonderful opportunity for preserving and sharing these materials. The Digital Projects Registry is incredible resource, and I am interested in following the leads of those who have contributed. Serving on LIPA’s Board would be an unparalleled opportunity to learn, share, guide, and grow when it comes to legal preservation, and I would embrace this opportunity.
Gabriela Femenia, Candidate for Member-at-Large (2022 - 2024)
Having begun my law librarian career as a foreign, comparative and international specialist, I have been involved in collection development from the beginning, and have been mindful throughout the past thirteen years of the importance of preserving access to legal information from all jurisdictions. As law libraries face growing budget and space pressures, and as collections carefully built over generations age in less-than-ideal conditions, I am concerned that unique and important material is being lost. This concern has only been exacerbated by the recent crises and conflicts that have endangered libraries around the world.
I am committed to LIPA’s core mission of providing tools and advocacy for law libraries to preserve legal information, and have considered the responsibility to preserve Biddle Law Library’s historical collection central to my work as Associate Director for Collections and Operations. Having had more recent experience with born-digital preservation issues and the opportunity to learn from colleagues in archives about best practices, I am also interested in securing access to the increasingly large body of legal information that has only been available online, and which their originating organizations may not be concerned with preserving. I hope to use my tenure on the LIPA board both to learn more about the available options for addressing these issues, and to increase participation in LIPA’s projects toward those objectives.