5 Questions with a Loon – Lucy Curci-Gonzalez

Lucy Curci-Gonzalez

Five Questions

1. Advice to your 20-year old self? There are more than a few things I wish I’d known when I was starting out. I wish I’d understood office politics, contract and licensing negotiations, human resources and labor laws, budgeting, and that I had gotten a faster understanding of technology. I’ve often thought that even though I didn’t go to law school, I really should have gotten an MBA. Aside from that, I would say, be as professionally involved as possible. We all get by with a little help from our friends. Recognize that as the low person in the pecking order, you have the great opportunity to observe everything. Learn all you can about your job and others’ jobs, the business, the industry, and the corporate culture. Be fair and polite to everyone. Be the reliable one in the room. Be prepared to take a chance occasionally. Don’t be overly enamored with the technology — in 10 years you will have to learn three-plus newer versions and/or systems.

2. Favorite thing about your job? The variety, every day is different. When I arrive in the morning, I check to see what questions we’ve received, meet with my staff, and then I might be looking at new postage meters. I could be on the phone with our broker about insurance or with the building about a problem with a lock. Some days, I can be deeply involved in dealing with a vendor, looking at a contract; others, I could be doing bookkeeping, or backing up staff doing research. It’s very varied because in the end, as executive director, I’m running a small business that happens to be a library. I do a lot of marketing of webinars and hosting training webinars and phone calls; which takes up a lot of my time. We’ve always been out there marketing ourselves. As an executive director, that’s much more a part of my job; it’s actually part of my job description.

3. Last photo you took with your phone? We like to have a little fun here at The New York Law Institute. This past winter we built a snow person out of books in our collection and put it to our members to name him or her. All of us so liked our Kata Logue snow person that, after the holidays, we changed its outfits for Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s Day. Alas, with the coming of Spring, Kata Logue “melted” and we took photos as we staged the disappearance of our snowy friend for the year.

4. Favorite item in your library? That’s a tough one. We really do have a robust collection of rare and varied works on legal topics dating back to 1558. Our print holdings range from rare medieval case reports in the form of Year Books of the Kings of England to John Selden’s masterpiece Mare Clausum: The Right and Dominion of the Sea (London, 1663) which is signed by Alexander Hamilton; we also have Hamilton’s account ledger. Our e-book holdings are robust including 160,000 plus titles on everything from accounting to zoning, LLMC’s digital collection, the entire Nutshell series, and selected Bender and Wolters Kluwer titles, all of which our members either access remotely as part of their NYLI membership or our librarians can access in-house for the member. On the print side, we’re a US GPO government depository, have a good collection of superseded and current statutes and treatises, a collection of PLI course handbooks and much more. I’m a mother, so I don’t have any favorite, but I really like the title on one e-book so much that we use it in our member training webinars. ABA’s Little Book of Elvis Law has such a cool title for a desk book on handling issues related to licensing and other matters for the estates of deceased celebrities.

5. Favorite book? I don’t have a lot of time for pleasure reading these days, but one book that I found quite on topic and entertaining was Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World. When I first read this, the history geek in me was fascinated by the wonderfully written, illuminating analogies and enlightening comparisons Carr makes between the commoditization and societal effect of electricity in the 20th century and cloud computing in the 21st. It was when I re-read the 2013 revised version that this book made its vital impression. At that time, I was enmeshed in the transition of research techniques and platforms from Lexis to Lexis Advance and from Westlaw to Westlaw Next, my firm transiting to a cloud computing environment, and the constant pressures on law firm libraries to do so much more with so much less in the “new normal” economy. Now, as the executive director of a small business/non-profit lending library, the lessons learned from this book could not be more important. Carr puts computing in perspective as a service and a function, not a place or a department. The Big Switch convinced me that the idea I have held for my entire career — that law libraries are an information function using the best that technology has to offer — is the right one. This really mirrors what we are doing at NYLI.