Jacob Sayward
Title: Director for Collections, Faculty & Scholarly Services
Library: Cornell Law Library
Location: Ithaca, NY
1. Favorite thing about my job? There is so much to appreciate about my job, from all the wonderful people at my library to all the opportunities for learning and fun on my campus. One thing in particular that frequently occurs to me is how great it is to have my hand in so many different aspects of librarianship.
2. Morning ritual? I usually find time in the morning for a couple of language lessons on Duolingo before catching my bus to work.
3. Favorite form of entertainment? I enjoy most of the same stuff everyone else does. But a favorite of mine that’s a little less popular is opera. I’ve been fortunate enough to catch a lot of opera in my life, including grand productions at the Met, summer festival stagings at Glimmerglass in Cooperstown, and avant-garde performances here in Ithaca.
4. Skill you’d like to learn? Foreign languages were always the hardest courses for me in school. I’d love to be able to confidently and effectively communicate in any other language with the nuance and facility I occasionally demonstrate in English. I think it’d also be interesting to reread a lot of great books in their original languages and watch a lot more great films without needing subtitles.
5. If you could change one law, what would it be? There are many larger-scale, more significant changes in laws that would have a greater positive impact on the human condition. But because I do Government Relations/Advocacy for ALLUNY, I will plug UELMA. Picking up where former ALLUNY President Amy Emerson left off, we’ve been working on getting New York to adopt the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act. This summer we had some success with both chambers of the state legislature passing a bill commissioning a study of UELMA’s potential impact on New York State (A00382 in the State Assembly and S6030 in the State Senate).