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34 FCIL Newsl. 1 (2019-2020)

handle is hein.lbr/aafcnlt0034 and id is 1 raw text is: 0 f &\ Volume 34, Issue I October 2019 FOREIGN, COMPARATIVE, AND INTERNATIONAL LAW SPECIAL INTEREST SECTION &\'aff\A Grn Re i' Nt N \N' The Schaffer Grant journey started off as a very narrowly defined mission - as ex- pressed in my grant application - we had just commenced a new programme to col- lect government gazettes from African countries to consolidate and digitize the laws of African countries. Our initial re- search had shown that huge historical col- lections of gazettes, unavailable even to most government libraries here, are availa- ble in the United States among a handful of other developed countries. The matter is urgent, the story needed to be told. Announcements for the 2019 Annual Meet- ing and Conference popped up on the Int- Law mailing list. I was curious, but had no funding to travel to the United States, so when the FCIL Shaffer grant was an- nounced, I thought I would give it a try even if I did not fit the traditional law li- brarian profile. Little did I know that most of the people I would meet in D.C. would defy any stereotypical profile - serving in the military, legally representing Hollywood stars, or having studied a variety of subjects in the humanities, were just a few examples of what formed part of some FCIL folks' progression to the law librarian profession. In hindsight, one of the most valuable parts of the experience of being a Schaffer grant recipient in 2019 was the opportunity to meet such interesting people, and hear about the dedicated work to their field and to serving legal (and often foreign) knowledge to their diverse audiences. Diversity and richness are probably the two words that best describe the AALL 2019 programme. I expected the conference to be big - after all, I had already downloaded the conference app, and had managed to face my first disappointment at not being able to attend all the sessions I was interest- ed in. If only one could be at two (or three) places at the same time! AALL 2019 kicked off with a keynote presentation by Shon Hopwood. If one ever needed an affirmation of the im- portance of law libraries and law librarians - Shon was the poster boy. A convicted fel- on, he studied law in the prison's library by reading law reports and started to write briefs by learning from others in what was publicly available to him. He became a jail- house lawyer to help fellow inmates. Once released from prison, he became an appel- late lawyer, and then a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. With- out librarians and the prison library, Shon said, he would not be there speaking to us. A fascinating and inspiring story of over- coming your circumstances and gaining the community's support and trusty, that to someone with my background growing up in communist Eastern Europe, was a re- minder of the equality and opportunity em- bodied in the American dream. Other notable sessions in the programme that I attended were on virtual reality in the classroom, a practical session on deploy- ment of alerts, on engaging public librarians in the access to justice movement, on the Al regulatory landscape across the world, and on the GDPR and its effects on law libraries. The sessions were brilliant and the takeaways will guide me in my work, pre- dominantly as we deal with these issues in daily operations, and as we consider new activities and collections. The exhibition was huge, the stands were fantastic. The programme even included legal research robots wars. There were two topics, however, that I took away as urgent and which I thought needed to be discussed with law librarian colleagues here in South Africa: the issue of bias in Al iw tag~ 3

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