Renae Satterley the Librarian at Middle Temple writes…..For those of you who have not yet come across the First hundred years project, they have recently written a blog post about female legal librarians: http://first100years.org.uk/legal-librarians/.
Overall the project aims to collect the stories of women in the legal profession. Law librarians have of course contributed much to helping women to advance in the profession. If you have any stories that you would like to share, please do get in touch with the project organisers. You can do so anonymously on the site as well.
www.middletemple.org.uk/library
Here’s how the article starts – and we suggest book marking this site if you haven’t already
On the recent donation of one of our #ontheroll artefacts, it was suggested by a librarian that First 100 Years look into the innovative and important work done by female legal librarians over the past century. This is a field that is very un-worked, and we welcome any contributions from legal librarians on your work and experiences. This piece gives an overview of a couple of female legal librarians who made significant changes to the way legal libraries work.
Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Moys was born in 1928, and began her impressive career as a librarian in 1951, going on to become a ‘giant’ in the field and founding member of the BIALL. First she was deputy librarian to Howard Drake, and responsible in the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies (IALS) for compiling the early editions of lists of serials and foreign law. These were essential between the 1950s-1980s before computers. Betty published the Moys Classification and Thesaurus for Legal Materials in 1968. It is a classification system designed to work with the existing Library of Congress Classification (LCC) scheme. The LCC did not have a fully developed K class (class for Law), and this is what the Moys system addressed. It was adopted worldwide with a level of enthusiasm that testifies to the great demand for a Law classifying scheme and also to the excellent quality of the Moys system. Described as possessing ‘rationality and elegance’, as well as ‘clarity and clear logic’, the classification scheme demonstrates her deep understanding and commitment to the subject. The most recent edition was published in 2012, describing Betty in the front matter as ‘a hard act to follow’ and dedicating the fifth edition to her memory.
She first developed and tested the Moys scheme whilst working at the then new University of Lagos in Nigeria. She classified the entire law section, and went on to hold the post of librarian at the University of Ghana. She also edited The Law Librarian, the first issue of which appeared in April 1970. Her publications were also influential for legal librarians, and after five years working with a number of contributors, the Manual of Law Librarianship was published in 1976. For her work on this she became the first recipient of the award from the Howard Drake Memorial Fund in 1977.
Read the full article at the link above
