“We have just anything you could think of,” Amy Small says of the Texas State Law Library, where she is executive director. Open to all—no attorney license required—the library serves everyday Texans and the Supreme Court alike. In this episode, hosts Jody Sanders and Todd Smith invite Amy to unpack the library’s often-overlooked resources: remote access to HeinOnline, historical statutes back to 1879, eBooks with persistent annotations, Westlaw and Lexis access on the library’s public computers, and several dictionary collections. If your online research skills need a refresher, watch on YouTube as Amy shares her screen and navigates a database in real time. Stay tuned in as Amy recalls fielding a seventh-grade classroom’s question about the weirdest law in Texas. Hint: It has something to do with astronauts and voting.

The Texas State Law Library accepts questions by phone from 8 a.m. to 4:45 p.m., Monday through Friday, and on its website.

Visual references are included in this episode. Watch on YouTube to follow along with Amy’s screen shares.

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Welcome to the Texas

Appellate Law Podcast,

the show that takes you inside the

Texas and federal appellate systems.

Through conversations with judges, court

staff, top trial and appellate lawyers,

academics, and innovators,

we provide practical insights to help

you become a more effective advocate.

Whether you're handling

appeals or preparing for trial,

you'll discover strategies to sharpen

your arguments, innovate your practice,

and stay ahead of the latest

developments. And now here are your hosts,

Todd Smith and Jody Sanders.

Produced and powered by LawPods.

Welcome back to the Texas Appellate

Law Podcast. I'm Jody Sanders.

And I'm Todd Smith.

And our guest today is Amy Small.

Amy is the executive director of

the Texas State Law Library. Amy,

thanks for joining us.

Hi, thanks so much for having me today.

Some of our listeners may have seen you

in some of your CLE presentations that

you've done,

but just give us a little

bit of background on you

and kind of how you got to

the job that you are now.

So I have actually worked here since 2007.

I started as a librarian. It was

my first job out of library school.

And when I went to library school,

at the time I didn't know what kind

of library I wanted to go into.

So I kind of cast my net very wide

and was fortunate to get a job

at the law library. At the time,

the sort of philosophy was that I had

customer service experience and I had some

technology experience that

maybe couldn't be trained as

easily as legal research was.

So even though I didn't have any

legal background at the time,

they gave me a shot and I really liked

it. I was fortunate that they liked me.

And since then I've held a

variety of positions here.

So at this point I've been

exposed to a lot of the different

functions and services that the library

offers. We do a whole lot of stuff that

people might not know about. So I've

been an electronic services librarian,

which meant that I managed some of our

databases and I did a little bit of

coding for our internal app. I

managed our inmate copy service.

We do a lot of correspondence with people

who are incarcerated in the Department

of Criminal Justice Prisons, helping

them access their appellate records,

file writs, those sorts of things. So I

helped with that, did the finances here.

And then for the past, I

guess it's now three years.

I forget whether it's been three or

four years, but I've been the director.

So all of that experience, helping

people find legal information,

understanding what people are looking

for and specifically people of all kinds.

We do serve the whole

state and everybody in it.

You don't have to be an attorney to

use our library. So we do have a lot of

everyday people coming to us with

questions about the law. At the same time,

we directly serve the high courts.

So we have a specific legislative mandate

to serve the Supreme Court Court of

Criminal Appeals and the

appellate courts. So with that,

we have a wide variety

of people that we help.

And so we have a wide variety of items

and types of item in our collection.

Everything from literally

wills for dummies to Dursanios,

treatises from British law treatises

everything in between. I'm lucky

that I really enjoy what we do.

I think I find it really interesting.

And over the past few years,

I've tried to do a better job of

getting out to the community and

saying, Hey,

you might not know that we're here and

you might not know all of this stuff that

we have for you that is free. So making

sure that people know that this is a

tool available to them to

utilize in their practices.

Let's start with a basic question.

Where is the state law library?

If someone wants to

come, where do they go?

Absolutely. So we're in the

capital complex in downtown Austin.

We are sort of in a building that got

glued on to the Supreme Court building in

the 90s.

Accurate.

Accurate. Yeah.

And there are leaks in the building

where we got glued on where it wasn't.

So you can tell exactly

where the addition was,

but the brief history of the library is

that we were originally the library for

the Supreme Court created in the 1850s

very shortly after the Supreme Court was

created.

And so we've kind of been obviously for

a long time we were part of the Supreme

Court, but due to circumstances,

funding, staffing,

it became apparent in the 1960s that it

would be more efficient for us to break

off as a separate agency.

we officially became our

own independent agency,

but we still have the really

strong ties to the court.

So we're right next door to

the Third Court of Appeals.

We're in sort of the same building as

the Court of Criminal Appeals and the

Supreme Court and we're kind

of catty-corner diagonal

from the Texas Law Center.

We're open to the public eight

to five, Monday through Friday.

Anybody is free welcome to come in and

use all of our resources that we have

here.

So you don't have to have a library card

or any sort of subscription to show up

and use it?

No, no. If you would like

to use our computers,

you need a free library account, but

you can sign up for one of those online.

Free, it's simple. If you want to check

out books, you're more than welcome.

We ask for a little bit more information

in that case address where we can

contact you if you abscond with

our materials. But we also,

that's not even necessary because we

do have free scanners that everyone can

use. Some of them have document feeders.

So for those nice loose leaf materials,

you can just stick it in and scan.

I do want to stress also that we

want to be accessible as possible to

the population. Austin has a large deaf

population and a large blind population.

And so we have resources so that

people with disabilities can still

use our materials.

We have a book scanner that will

scan and either speak it back to you

or actually record an MP3 that you

can email to yourself. It's so cool.

We just got it a few years

ago and it's awesome.

And we also have screen magnifiers and

text magnifiers so that if you have some

vision, you can magnify the

text. Same on the computers.

So we are open and willing to

help anyone of all ability.

Is it still possible, Amy,

to do what I used to do

in my first experiences in

your library and make a good

old fashioned copy of

a page out of a book?

We do still have a copy machine.

It is less utilized than ...

Because I remember when I first started,

firms would send couriers all the

time to come in and make copies of the

appellate records from the Supreme

Court and the Court of Criminal Appeals.

And we don't see that all these days,

but that used to be a brisk

business for us. So if you want,

you can make a copy.

Also have a copy service where if

you don't want to make the trip,

you can give us a call.

We'll request the file from

those three high courts and then

email it to you or send you the

physical copies if you prefer that.

Wow, that's great service. I wish

I'd known about that 20 years ago.

Yes. Saved you some time

and effort I'm sure.

I can't wait to come in and try

one of those scanners though.

They're really cool. And this is sort

of getting a little bit in the weeds,

but one of them has a thumb eraser so

that if you're copying a big book and have

to use your thumbs to

press the pages down,

it'll take that out and make it

look a little bit cleaner, more pro.

If we could find a place to

record on location there,

we might just have to do that.

Yeah, there you go.

Todd,

I think we're going to have to do a

podcast field trip the next time I'm in

Austin. We're going to have to come in.

That's another resource

that our library offers.

We have a conference room that can be

reserved by members of the public or

attorneys at small firms maybe who

don't have a meeting room if you need to

record a deposition.

We have that that on our website

you can see the calendar and make a

reservation.

That is kind of transitioning into

the next thing I want to talk about,

which is what are the resources

that you offer? I mean,

there's a lot of lawyers that have kind

of their set things that they do in

their office or maybe they

have a local law library,

but what are some things that are

available at the state law library that

lawyers may not realize are there or they

might realize they can get through the

state law library?

The first thing I think worth mentioning

is that a lot of people here that were

based in Austin and say,

"Well, that's great,

but I'm in El Paso or I'm in

Lubbock. What did that do for me?

" That same question

was posed over and over,

specifically when we went

to the legislature to ask

for money to keep continuing

and saying, "Well, you're purportedly a

state agency, but you're only in Austin.

What can you do for the rest of the

state?" So we really took that to heart,

like I said, about 10,

15 years ago and started

talking to publishers at that

time to see if they would

let us make our resources available

electronically and remotely.

This was really new at the

time. It was pretty novel.

I don't know of any other law

libraries that were doing that.

These days it's pretty common. I think

COVID really pushed people towards that,

but we had it already set up.

And so there's really a wealth of

resources there that even if you have a

library in your office or a county law

library or university law library that

you go to,

you might see different things

online through our resources that

might compliment or supplement

what you have available to you now.

One of the best things that I really

like to sing the praises of is our

library of legal periodicals,

so law journals, law reviews,

and then we also have a portion for bar

journals that is available through a

website called Hein Online.

We used to get the law journals in print

and law reviews and they take up a lot

of shelf space. They're very

expensive. As pointed out,

they're only accessible

here in Austin. So Hein is,

I think they're like a family run

company and they are preservation and

digitization minded and

they're completist. So what

they do is they take the

actual print copies of

all these law reviews,

scan them exactly as they appear in paper

so it's adequate for citation and make

it available through this database.

They will not post something

to my knowledge unless

they have the complete run.

So you can be sure that

the very first issue going

up to the very most current issue

that they can have access to based on

embargoes and things will

be available through that.

So if you are looking for an

obscure law review article,

a really old one, those are oftentimes

available through Hein Online.

It's something like 9,000 titles or 9,000.

It's just a incredible just

comprehensive legal periodical

resource.

So how do you access ...

I'm familiar with Hein and I remember

I think you could have a direct

subscription to Hein at one

point, maybe you still can't.

How do you access that

through the state law library?

For all of our online resources, you just

need to sign up for a library account.

And if you go to our website, which is

www.sl.texas.gov, one of the

first links that you'll see,

we've got a quick links box that has kind

of the most popular things that people

want. There's a button that says,

"Get a library account." And one thing

that I will point out is that when we

were first starting this program,

one of the agreements that our vendors

asked us to make to them was that we

would put some sort of constraints on

the user base just so every attorney in

the world all of a sudden wasn't

having free access to this.

So they asked us to limit it

just to people who are in Texas.

And the way that we determine

that is if you come in in person,

we look for an ID or a piece of mail,

but online we use a geolocation feature.

So unfortunately we do run into this

where an attorney's licensed

in Texas, reside elsewhere,

practices in Texas. We can't give

an account in that situation.

If you are in Texas, you sign up for

a library account with that one login,

you have access to everything on our

website, including Hine online, eBooks.

We have a lot of specialty

databases as well.

We have a really popular

immigration law database,

but the two big ones are eBooks and

Hine online. We also offer fast case,

but you have access to that

through membership in the bar.

So that's not as I think exciting as the

ebooks really are one of the main draws

for, I think, practicing attorneys.

Gosh,

I can think of so many uses for that and

things that I would probably go and try

to get my hands on. Doing it

myself would take a lot of effort.

We lawyers sometimes forget that ... And

I'm here in Austin. I have no excuse.

I mean, Jody's in Fort Worth, so he

at least has the excuse of, "Well,

you're in Austin, what can

you do for me? " But gosh,

just knowing that that's available online,

it's as easy as signing up for a library

account that you just opened up a whole

new world of possibilities

for me and my research.

And I think even more to the point

about ease of acces and efficiency,

we have a whole staff of librarians who

are waiting for your emails and your

calls if you are to say, "I

need this law review article.

I need this citation. I

need something on this.

I need this old CLE article." We're

happy to pull that and send it to you.

Even beyond being able to

access and research yourself,

know that that's significant tool and

resource that we make available are our

researchers here.

How much help can attorneys

get from the researchers?

So we won't do case law research,

but we are happy to either

recommend resources.

If you're sort of indicating to us that

you are wanting to look into a topic in

depth, we can suggest some starting

points for you. And to that end,

we have put together a guide

containing our recommended theories,

ebook, and books. So if you're

coming to us and saying,

"Where are your intellectual property

materials?" We can point you to that and

it's going to have a lot

of great starting point.

So it might be excellent overviews,

it might be sort of the most

renowned titles on a topic,

but we'll get you started with that.

Otherwise, you can come to us and say,

"I'm looking for information

about how to accomplish X, Y,

Z." We'll check the resources that we're

familiar with that we know may address

that and say,

"Here's a chapter from this

resource discussing what

you're looking for. " If we

can't find something that really kind

of seems to hit on exactly what you're

looking for, what we might do is

send you a table of content and say,

"Here's a resource that we

think may be helpful for you.

If you want to identify some of these

sections that look like of most interest,

we're happy to send those along." But

typically sort of help identifying

resources, maybe help

determining a search strategy.

If you're working in Lexus or Westlaw

from home and aren't getting the results

you want and want to see if we can

suggest maybe how to refine it further,

we're happy to do that.

Always happy to pull citations for you

because we have access either through our

specific collection or professional

networks where we can put out fielders to

see if someone else,

a neighboring library perhaps has

something that you're looking for.

In terms of the search parameters,

are y'all using the full AI capable

features in Lexus and Westlaw?

So they will not allow us to make

that available for our patron use yet

because we do also offer free Westlaw

and Lexus access on our public

computers. So that's another perk.

If you're in the Austin area,

sign up for a library account,

you're welcome to come use our

Westlaw and Lexus for free.

They won't give us that yet.

And then in our professional

subscriptions for the librarians,

we have not chosen to integrate

that yet typically because we're

not doing the kind of advanced searching

on a patron's behalf that really would

make that most useful.

Both systems are starting

to integrate types of AI

into the searching a little bit.

There's some extractive AI that allows

you to do a little bit more natural

language searching, which

comes in our subscriptions,

but the things that they're really

selling like the briefwriter,

don't write briefs here so we don't have

any use for that. I think that there's

a document comparison feature in Lexus,

which is really interesting

that we do have access to,

but I think the really powerful AI

tools are really more geared towards

practicing attorneys and stuff that

we don't do on behalf of Patreon.

What are the types of things that you

see the heaviest use in your library?

Definitely our ebooks and even I

really wish we could make these

available remotely,

but the vendors just haven't

really opened that door for us yet,

but the O'Connor's books.

All of the O'Connors,

they're so popular for a very good reason.

We have copies that can be checked out.

Like I said, you can use the scanners.

The copies that can be checked out often

never come back and people love them

and rightfully so. They're super

easy to use. They're very accessible.

I would love it.

I think it would make so many people's

day across the state if we could make

that available remotely,

but we do have them available

electronically through

Westlaw in the library.

So there's that.

But then also our historical statutes

are another thing that when people learn

about them,

they get a lot of heavy use because

that's a question we get a lot almost on a

daily basis is what did X

statute read as of X date?

Yeah,

that's something I specifically wanted

to ask you about and make sure you talked

about because I have been down

that road, JV has too no doubt,

but there's a lot of us that go

down that road and as we all know,

our legislature is very

active and statutes get

amended and you buy the latest

O'Connor's version of CPRC or whichever

and it doesn't have that old text in

it anymore.

And sometimes you need to know because

the law has changed over and the old law

applies to your case.

I was going to compliment you and the

state library on that historical Texas

statutes service because I happened

to find that on my own about a year

ago and it made it so easy to

find the old statutory text.

And I did also discover that I think

it goes back to there's like a date

cutoff in there somewhere. I think my

notes say if it was amended after January

one of 2004,

then there's another service

that's available too that

would overlap with that.

But between the statutes by date site,

which is one of the ones I found in the

historical Texas statutes collection,

which you all have available,

it was amazing. I mean,

you can go back basically as far as you

want it to go in terms of legislative

history on a stat,

not legislative history like

floor debates or things like that,

but the actual statutory language, those

changes are not lost to history at all.

They're very findable and that's

an extremely useful resource.

Yeah. I think that there's only between,

like you said, what's on our website.

So probably about 15 years

ago we have this great print

collection that I think we've established

is perhaps the only complete on

the old versions of all the old laws.

And we approached the publisher at

the time to see if they would give us

permission to digitize

them and post them online.

And because they're unannotated,

they agreed because there's no material

in there that they hold a copyright to.

So they gave us the permission.

We were fortunate to receive a few grants

from like the Texas Bar Foundation and

I believe the Austin Bar Foundation to

have them professionally digitized and

then post them on the website.

So going from 1879 to 1984 is what's on

our website.

Statutes by date picks up at 2004 and

then if you have access to Westlaw Lexus

between them,

I think that there's only about two years

where there's not some sort of form of

them online.

And to be honest,

I haven't looked at the range that

Westlaw and Lexus cover recently.

They've been kind of working backwards.

So it's very possible that

we're all caught up to date,

but because we realized that people

really need to do that research and

sometimes they actually need to

come and dig around in the books.

We made some changes to how our collection

is displayed and presented to the

public this past year.

We used to have all of the old

superseded base volumes in the basement

and the public couldn't get down there

and we bound the pocket parts and they

were in another place and the

session laws were in another place.

And so you kind of had to run around our

library and call the librarian to pull

the base volume up for you.

So last year we finally put everything

together in one place so that the

public can come in and have access

to all the parts that they need if

they wish to do that research on their

own. So now that's on the second floor of

our library on the mezzanine,

you'll find I believe the annotated

or 1920. We started saving all of

bind them every year

and have them available.

So you can get together with the

session laws, you can get really,

really granular and pin

it down to a certain date.

Some of your listeners may not

have ever used a pocket part.

That's true. I was going to go

there. That was my question is like,

does anybody even know what

a pocket part is anymore?

It's really funny because when I do

tours and I show people here are the

statutes and print and I show that here

are the pocket parts and here is the

literal pocket in the book that they

go to. You can see they're like,

"Oh." But whenever we have

new librarians start here,

I train everybody in print

first because not only

do we have some of these old resources

that you have to know the mechanics of

them,

but I also think it's really critical to

understanding how the databases are put

together if you understand

where they came from.

They're replications of these print

resources and understanding how the print

resource works and is compiled I think

really helps you understand what the

database is doing and it's not just

putting words in and then they magically

appear. So all of our librarians,

we start in print and then move to the

databases later just so that we know

we're actually understanding the theory

behind why these books are assembled the

way that they are.

I'm still chuckling about pocket parts.

I remember learning about it in law

school and the first time I saw an actual

pocket, I realized, oh, okay, now

I get what they're talking about.

It makes sense.

Yeah. It's also really funny,

your listeners have also maybe

never done loose leaf updates.

You've got a binder with loose leaf

pages that are put in there and then to

update them, you got a

list of take this page,

pull it out and put in the new

one. And librarians, of course,

have a love for books. And so

whenever I train them and I say,

"You rip this page out and you throw it

away," sometimes they're like, "Really?

That's what we do. "

That's how that works.

That's how Dorsanios was when I started

practicing. What are some ways that,

and this is near and dear to Todd's

heart, but solo and small firm lawyers,

what are some ways that you guys can

kind of help level the playing field and

maximize for them?

Yeah, absolutely.

Definitely all of these extremely

expensive resources that

we make available. So Lexus

and Westlaw in the library,

but even beyond that are

collection of ebooks.

There are a lot of really,

really powerful practice treatises

and practice guides in there.

Dorseno's, for example,

the litigation guide,

that is actually one title that is kind

of reserved for government employees

only. That was another thing

that our vendors wanted,

that this was their sort of crown jewel

that they wanted to protect a little

bit. That said,

there are many other publications

that kind of reprint the chapters of

Dorsenios that you can check out.

So a subscription to Dorsenios

every year is super expensive and a

solo is probably not going to be able

to put those resources towards it.

Like I said, we're happy to send sections.

You can find a lot of that in

different sort of sectioned out

ebooks that we offer. So always feel

like you can ask a librarian and say,

"I'm looking for this

information from Dorsenios.

We can either potentially send you

the task from it or we can say,

if you want to read more,

this is replicated in Dorsey's

pretrial or appellate." But yeah,

I think that that is one of the

things that all of these expensive,

high value detailed

sources we have here that

can give you the tools to put you on

that same level as someone who's at a

big firm with librarians who are

pulling that information for them.

We have just anything you could

think of. We have jury charges,

we have pattern depositions,

we have legal encyclopedias,

we have federal practice and procedure,

just in everything in

forward, so you don't even need to ask us,

but then in print going back to the '80s.

So these are all things that a small

firm or solo shouldn't have to spend

money on because we are already spending

that money for you.

To that point,

I was thinking sometimes I'm a Westlaw

subscriber and I've got a lot of stuff

included within my subscription,

but sometimes there's something out of

plan that I think might be really useful

to look at, but I don't know that I

really want to push the button and say,

accept the charge. And

you're making me think, Amy,

maybe the next time that happens,

I'll have to look and see if that resource

is available through the state law

library.

A lot of that stuff,

whether it's Wright Miller or Moore's

or something that's through Lexus,

but we have that in print.

So even if it's outside of

your electronic subscription,

our print collection does a really

good job of supplementing that.

I know a lot of people want to believe

that everything is available online and a

lot is,

but we still make sure that we're

maintaining a print collection for sort of

those reasons, either accessibility

or licensing restrictions,

it allows us to make it

available in another form.

What are some ways that

lawyers can improve their

research efficiency using you

guys that maybe they don't

think about or even know about?

This is one of my favorite topics is

that even if you are an experienced

researcher,

you may not be using some of the

really cool features of some of

these databases to their fullest extent.

So here's where I will want

to share my screen We're.

Going to commit a podcast SIN and

do a visual discussion on here,

but we're going to take clips of this

and post them on our socials and maybe if

there's a way to make it available on

YouTube or something, we can do that too.

Oh, it'll be visible on YouTube.

If Amy shares her screen,

we will make sure that it

is fully visible on YouTube.

So this is an ebook that is part of what

we call our digital collection or our

ebooks and it's available through

a platform called Overdrive,

which you may be familiar with

through your public library,

university libraries, offer it,

but it's just an ebook platform that has

a lot of built-in features that I don't

think that people are maximizing. This

is an ebook that I have checked out.

So what I'm going to do is go into the

text by clicking the read button here

and it looks just like a normal book.

And one thing that you will see here

is that I just checked this book out

today,

but it already has highlighting in it

and that is left over from the last time

that I checked it out and made note.

What I kind of want to stress is that

even when you return an ebook from us,

even if you forgot about it and

it gets automatically returned,

your research is not lost.

It stays there and it's not just

highlighting.

There are several different ways

to really kind of maximize how you

are making your notes and

organizing your research.

So the first is if you click on this

highlighter little guy up at the top,

you will see that there's like a dozen

different colors and this is run through

LexisNexis and their reps

always say that's one of the

feedback that they get is

that more colors, more colors.

So there are a lot of colors.

It can be really useful because if you're

working on several different things at

once,

you can highlight in different colors

depending on what applies to what and it

lets you organize then based on highlight

color. So when you highlight text,

I just highlighted a section in

peach. My other highlights are in red.

If you click on the highlights,

you can note that I have made notes

to myself and I can go in and say,

"I want to come back to this for the

brief that I'm writing." And I can make a

note about why I highlighted that. I

think that I'm sure everyone else has been

with me that you flag a page for yourself

or you highlight something and then

you come back and you're like,

"Why did I think this is important?" I

just clicked on my annotation that was

highlighted in peach and

so I can make another note.

So the note for myself is like,

"I want to refer to this for this reason

and I'll click done." So then at the

top you'll see this little speech bubble

looking thing and this is a listing of

all of the annotations that I

have made ever in this book.

You can see some are in yellow.

It tells me the date that

I made that annotation.

It gives me the note that

I left for myself then.

It gives me a little sort of indication

as to where in the book it might be. And

I can also search and say,

"Was I right looking for

anything on mandamus?" No. Okay.

Where are my habeas notes?

So you can search by keyword there

within your notes. Say in theory,

I wanted to use red for one client,

peach for another. That's great. Okay,

that's all highlighted. Then once

I, let's say I close the book,

let's say I return it, I click

X so I'm out of the read view.

Looking at the main screen

in the digital collection,

you will see at the left hand side

some few options and one of them is my

annotation. If we go here,

this gives me a list of all of the

annotations I've ever made in any

book and I can go in and view them even

when I don't have the book checked out.

That's what I want to stress the most

is that I don't think people know that

this is there because this still leaves

all of your research sort of in one

central place. So operating on that

assumption that I'm color coding my

highlights per client.

I've got a yellow one here.

I'm going to click that now and say,

let's add this to my export queue,

which I will show you in a moment.

In the book that I was just in,

I also had some highlights in yellow and

then you'll see at the left hand side

just under my annotations,

you'll see my export queue.

So here are all the things that I've

said that I want to take out of here and

put into a document to compile.

So I only want the yellow ones,

so I'm going to click the checkboxes

next to all the yellow highlights.

Then I'm going to go back

up and under actions,

I have all these options how to compile

this information and export it for

use. So if you want ... It a spreadsheet

so that you can filter, sort,

things like that.

You can do that.

You can also export it just a PDF so

that you can email it to somebody.

And here, again, keeping in mind,

I don't have all of these

books checked out right now.

It's got the text from the

resource that I wanted to note.

It's got my notes saying why

it was important and it's

got the citation so that

you can specifically

go back and look at it.

This release is also

indicating the currency.

So if in fact this is a really

old annotation that I'd made,

it tells me the version of the book

that it came from in the event that it's

been updated.

That's another thing that's worth

noting is that the digital library

does have past releases. So

if you have a site that is,

especially for one of these

loose lease where, like I said,

we literally rip out the pages,

but you need to look back at something

that's maybe a couple years old. We can

see previous releases.

So let's go to this title and

I'll show you just real quick.

Can you bookmark different

publications there?

You can, you can. I believe

we can go to this and say-.

So you bookmark your favorites?

The way that I will do it is I

will add tags and I might say,

and so once I add a tag working on a

project and I say these books are all kind

of what I want, I can go look

at my tags and say, okay,

for the CLE that I gave in

January that I was working on,

these are the books that ID'd for

myself. I also believe that in my books,

this will show you what you've downloaded

in the past, what you've checked out,

what you currently have

out under borrowed.

So this might also be a way to say that

these are the books that I've relied on

in the past and I want to come back to.

This is the main landing page just

for this volume of this series.

So multi-volume set,

you can check out individual volumes at

a time rather than the whole thing. So

here in this sort of main menu,

you will se prior releases.

So you can go back fairly far

to see historical changes and

versions as of a certain point in time.

So I think that's really interesting.

Real quickly, another, before I go on,

any questions about the sort of research

tools within the Lexus Digital Library

or other things about this?

I just want to spread the gospel of

knowing that you can save these notes.

This is fantastic. We're

just letting you go for it.

It's like Kindle right there on your

computer with all your highlights and

stuff.

It really is.

And just knowing that you have the

ability to then sort of repackage

the notes that you made for yourself and

put them in a package that makes sense

is so much nicer than being like,

"Okay, great. There's this book.

I can go back and refer to it,

but then how do I make sense of what

I want to se out of there?" So I think

that's great.

I mentioned Hein Online earlier

and I do want to point out one very

interesting feature in it that I think

also maybe doesn't necessarily make your

research more efficient.

It does in some ways,

but I think it makes it way more

powerful is a feature in Hinonline that's

called Scholar Check. And this is very

similar to shepardizing for case law.

So it will allow you to see what other

articles have cited to your article that

you're interested in or how many articles

have cited to it that might indicate

that it's something that you really

want to take a look at because it's

considered to be important,

groundbreaking, noteworthy. Okay.

So I'm looking at Hine online and within

our subscription are a lot of sort of

sub subscriptions.

I mentioned our law reviews

and law journals because

that's kind of the meat of

what we, and the main

reason that we subscribed.

But there are a lot of other things in

here that you might find interesting.

A lot of federal

congressional and presidential

documents, Supreme Court

documents, things like that,

a lot of primary federal documents.

But really our law journal library is

kind of what people are interested in.

In the search bar for Hein Online,

it makes it very easy for you to ...

I don't have a citation on hand,

so I'll just probably search

for something for an author,

but it makes it very easy for you

to search and target your search.

So I'm in the search bar and

let's see if we can find some

articles from Chief Justice Hecht.

So when I fill that in,

it has some suggestions depending on

what it thinks you might be looking for.

So we can search for

his name under author.

Title would be the title of the article,

citation. If I had a citation here,

I could pop it in and it would

pull that article right up for me.

And then the catalog,

I believe these are the names

of the law reviews and journals.

So rather than the individual

article, the name of the whole work.

So we're going to search

for him as author.

It precreates this advanced search

for us. And what we will see,

I'm going to find a good one,

but on the right hand side here,

you'll see the scholar

check. For an article,

he wrote a forward that looks

like for another article in St.

Mary's Law Journal and ScholarCheck is

telling us that this is cited by nine

other articles.

So this then, when we go to scholar check,

it is going to list all of the articles

that cited to our initial article.

So it expands our network of research.

It allows us to continue that line of

thought and trace it through history,

see how it had an impact on other

scholarship or other jurisprudence.

It can be really

interesting. And like I said,

if an article is cited many times,

that may be a signal to you that this

is something especially significant that

you want to take a look at.

It does allow you to up at

the top there's a sort by.

It allows you to sort by number of times

that this article is cited by other

articles. It allows you perhaps

to select the most cited author

indicating perhaps that this

particular author is a notable figure,

significant jurist, things like that.

You might want to see the newest article.

It allows you to sort by that too.

So depending on your research goals,

it can organize this for you in a way

that allows you to take that next step.

I think ScholarCheck is super cool.

I love that they have taken that sort of

shepardizing concept and transferred it

here because it really makes it much

easier to find this line of thought

and then trace it and see sort

of the impacts that it's made.

It could be the legal equivalent

of searching up yourself on Google.

Yeah.

Wonder who cited my comment.

You absolutely can. You can search by

author and then see of my articles,

who's citing to it, things like that.

It's really, really interesting.

You talk mostly about law journals

and that sort of thing in Hines.

So it's really mostly I think about

legal scholarship as opposed to say

somewhere along the way you mentioned

like the Texas Bar Journal and some other

publications or legal news,

not legal newspapers per se,

but how far does it go? I mean, is it

like Texas lawyer or something like that?

I don't think it has Texas

lawyer. So I think it's pretty ...

I'm not sure how they sort

of draw their parameters,

but the bar journals would be national.

So all bar journals across the country,

because you can go into each database and

there is an explanatory guide for it.

If you're in Hein and you're not

sure perhaps what this encompasses or

how to best use it, you will note

... So here looking at Hein online,

you'll see this sort of research the

breadcrumbs across the top showing that

we're in databases, we're currently

looking in the Law Journal library.

There's both this little

eye giving you a very,

very broad overview of

what's contained in it.

So here this is of the journals,

there's almost 3,500 different titles,

92,000 volumes and 50 million pages,

but this lib guide is here.

This is written by the

people at Hein that go into

much more detail about what is in here.

So it might show you

specifically what's in there. It might

give you information on updates to it,

recent editions.

It's a very nice sort of snapshot about

what you might be able to find within

it. Well.

That's a great resource.

Yeah, it absolutely is.

Yeah. Hynes great.

I love sort of singing their

praises because not only

are they excellent at what

they do, the organization, the

user friendliness is just great,

but they're just like the

nicest people. Like I said,

it's like family owned company

and they go to great pains to

be responsive and helpful for us services.

So I love giving them the attention

and the credit that they're due.

I guess what are the things that you

think are underutilized that you wish more

people knew about and

would use at the library?

I would say definitely, although

this is starting to come around,

all of the dictionaries that we have,

I think I briefly mentioned earlier

that we had a big collection of

dictionaries,

but we didn't really have a sort of

systematic way to show people exactly

which ones we have and what time

periods they might be covering.

That's another thing that we get

questions about on a, if not daily,

weekly basis is that I

need a contemporaneous

definition of this term for

this sort of year. And we've

got a lot. Like I said,

we went through the list that's

in one of the appendices of

Reading Law by Scalian Garner

and took all the lists of the

general language dictionaries

and the legal dictionaries.

We have Blacks going back to the first

edition and specifically pointed out

where one might find them within the

context of our collection. So whether we

have them in print, there are some that

are available more widely on the web.

We link to those.

So knowing that people can access that

through us I think is really helpful.

What else is underutilized that

I wish people knew more about?

Hyen is one of the ones that I think

for library nerds like ourselves,

whenever I tell people that it's there,

eyes light up and just knowing the sheer

scope of what's within it is really

impressive.

The thing that I think I wish people

would utilize the most are our librarians.

We are always up for a

challenge. We're always up for,

we like weird questions,

but also most importantly,

especially for newer practitioners,

no question is a dumb question.

We are happy to help you get started.

We are happy to help

explain things to you.

We know that it's confusing.

We know that it can be hard.

We are here to not judge and just to

help and make you look like magic.

I really,

really do want to encourage that listeners

should please feel free to reach out

to us.

We accept questions by phone

8:00 to 4:45 I think is when our

phone cut off Monday through Friday.

We accept questions online through

our website, which again is

www.sl.texas.gov. And currently

in the upper right-hand corner,

you will see a box I think that

says questions, ask us, please do.

So you can submit a question through

the web there and we are in the

process of rolling out text messaging.

Ooh, look out.

Yeah. So we are waiting to

get our text messaging number,

but then you will be free

to text us day or night.

We will text you back because we know a

lot of people access our website from a

mobile device.

So we're wanting to make sure that we

can reduce as much friction as possible

between people having a question

and getting that question to us.

The wheels are turning. I hope that

by the end of May that will be live,

but keep checking that questions page

because we will put that text messaging

number up there as soon

as it's ready to go.

I mean, I know it probably

varies depending on the question,

but just turnaround times on

average, like if someone calls,

how quickly can they

expect an answer or not?

Just because attorneys love to wait

till the last minute to do things.

Yeah.

Our goal is to respond to somebody

within one business day and we are pretty

good about doing that.

The only exceptions are maybe if there's

maybe some back and forth and we need

clarification or things like that,

but you should expect to hear back

from us within a business day.

Don't wait until the last minute

and we're closed on weekends.

Okay. So don't wait until the last minute

to call the library and start early.

We can't help you with a

pressing research question at 20

AM on a Sunday, but we will

get back to you on Monday.

Are y'all seeing an uptick in

the number of pro se litigants

coming to you for research help?

I don't necessarily think that

there has been an uptick in

that. It has been steady.

What we have seen has been some changes in

our usage statistics.

Our websites may be getting less hit

interestingly and we think that's because

of AI because Google's AI

overview is taking our content and

presenting it in that AI overview.

Our phone calls have gone down

a little bit and we see that

as potentially being because of AI maybe,

but also I think these days people are

less comfortable with picking up the

phone and making a phone call.

So that's one reason we're introducing

text is to maybe get some of the younger

people who are growing up, didn't

really grow up making phone calls,

but as they're becoming adults

are running into legal questions.

So we want to be able to make sure that

we're able to communicate them with them

in a way that they prefer and feel

comfortable with. Because if you're a

non-lawyer and you're having

to reach out to a law library,

something's probably going not

great for you in your life.

And so you're stressed out,

you're upset and the last thing you want

to do is have to get even more outside

of your comfort zone.

So we are cognizant of that and

trying to make it as easy for people.

But just in the terms, the sheer

number of pro se litigants,

I don't necessarily think that's the case.

We have seen a deadly demand for a long

time, no signs at the meeting. Yeah.

That makes sense. I just,

I think we're seeing sort

of a proliferation of

self-represented litigants using

AI. I don't want to suggest that

they should all be calling you, but-.

They truly should.

We recognize that AI can be a powerful

tool and the horse has left the barn.

We're not going to roll that

back. So now the question is,

how can we help people use it responsibly?

How can we help them

verify their citations?

How can we help them find supporting

material that either confirms or

disproves what AI told them?

It's a great starting point.

There's a lot of additional, it's

not the end point. So I mean, please,

I never discourage anybody from

calling us. I want to say use us more,

call us more, because we're

always happy to help with that.

And in that AI has so much promise

for self-represented litigants,

but it also has so much

potential for problem.

And if we can help them forestall those

problems, we absolutely want to do that.

It will be for the benefit of

everybody, for them, for the judge,

for the opposing party,

just everybody wins out if we're

not cluttering the courts with AI.

Hallucinations. As a

practical thought on that,

if there's a self-represented

litigant who says,

"I want to file a motion for

summary judgment in a TCPA

case." There's resources that

would be available through you all

that would go far beyond

what they can find,

things that are copyrighted

and shouldn't be available,

at least through a general AI search.

You could steer them towards ...

We talked about Dorsenio earlier

as a resource. It's like, "Okay,

I'll take my tongue out of my cheek now

and agree with you that I would hope

that pro se litigants would contact State

Law Library for help because I think

it could help moderate some of

the sort of off-topic filings,

shall we call them,

that get put into court files because

people just don't know and they can't

afford a lawyer. And so they take

what ChatGPT generates for them,

slap it in a Word document and file it.

If they even had a basic form to go off

of that, I think would tremendously

potentially improve their product.

And as you say, Amy,

save everybody time and trouble because

we're not having them to respond to

things that really aren't relevant.

AI is being sold to everybody.

It's this magic solution,

this silver bullet that'll fix everything

for them and it's not quite that. So

I'm part of a working group with some

other law librarians across the country to

develop a best practices guide for

self-represented litigants using AI.

If you're going to do it and people

will, how can you do it well?

How can you do it effectively?

How can you do it responsibly?

So we're all seeing this and

we're all kind of trying to say,

how can we manage this? What

can we do to support it?

It can be so useful for a lot of things.

It can be so bad and dangerous

for a lot of other things.

I do have just one side

question that I'm curious about.

What is the most interesting or random

request you've ever gotten for research?

I love these questions. We actually have

a full moon calendar in our break room,

like an astrology person,

but I would swear that things get a

little weirder when there's a full moon.

There was a weird stretch one

year where we had a cluster of

interference with a corpse

questions coming up at once.

Just all of a sudden it was like we had

several people who this was on their

mind sort of at the same time.

Just to put this out there real

quick, when people call you,

it's not privileged and if you've got

confidential client information and you

share it with them, you may

violate your ethical rules.

So just be clear on that.

Now this is interference like a tort.

We're not talking about how to dispose

of a body. We're talking about how to ...

I thought you were talking

about a tort claim.

No, corpse. Yeah.

That their loved ones body

had gone to one funeral home,

but then another relative said that they

had the rights over it and so they took

it. I mean, there was all sorts of ...

It was like a very strange multiple

questions about that at once.

I think it was two or three years ago.

One of the most fun things that we've

done was the local Austin NPR station has

a series called ATXplained where listeners

can submit a question and then the

reporters will report on it.

And a seventh grade class submitted a

question about what are the weirdest

laws in Texas? Much credit to

the reporter, they came to us.

And so we pretty much had all

of the librarians getting to

be like,

"What's the weirdest question you've

ever gotten?" And we got to put them all

together. And my favorite one,

my favorite sort of little factoid

from that was not a law per se,

but an administrative rule is that the

Secretary of State in I think determining

voting where you can vote specifically

included a section stating

that if astronauts are

in orbit on election day,

they can vote from space knowing that

Houston has a space industry. I thought

that was super cool,

but one of the funnier questions that

we used to get a lot actually was some

sort of variation of, am I married

because of common law marriage.

People would not know the

sort of three-pronged test and

they would have someone saying like, "Oh,

my ex- girlfriend is saying

that we were actually married,

am I married?" So that was kind of

a fun, very, very common question.

Well, I mean,

that segues right into the tip or war

story that I'm now going to ask you for.

This is great.

And now we've added the element of

video such that we're encouraging

folks to check out the episode on

YouTube to see exactly what you took us

through, which was great. But

do you have as a parting though,

do you have a tip or a war story to wrap

us up on for the listeners and viewers?

I may need to think a little

bit more on the war story.

A tip is great. I mean, something

we haven't talked about.

I am always kind of up for, like

I said, we're up for a challenge,

so we don't ever really see things

as trials we were put through.

But as far as tips, I would

say if you're in Austin,

come stop by and walk around and

see if there's things that jump

out at you and see how you

can use our conference room,

see how you can use our

scanners. Like I said,

we have all of this great stuff in

print, Dorsenyo's, Wrenton Miller,

all the sort of Matthew Bender,

Texas practice material.

Come take stock and see if there's stuff

that you can bookmark in your mind for

later that you can call on us to send to

you. All the Black's law dictionaries,

the Prince's legal abbreviations thing.

We've got a lot of stuff that just kind

of take it in and it might kind of get

the wheels turning for you later about

how we can be abuse to you. I recognize

that a lot of your listeners

probably aren't in Texas,

so do the same thing on our website. Go

click around, go poke around and see,

visit our recommended books page.

You might be surprised what we have

that we can make available to you.

So just kind of do a

quick tour. Like I said,

it might kind of inspire things or at

least plant a seed in your mind for later.

Well, Amy,

you've really helped us out by explaining

just what it is that you all do.

So many of us know, hey, the state law

library is there. We've actually visited,

but it's such a great reminder,

especially hearing it from you as

the executive director. You're there,

what you do and even you've educated us

a lot about things that wouldn't even

even thought of that you do. So thank

you so much for your time today.

We really appreciate it.

Oh yeah. Thank you so much for

having me. I love talking shop.

I think it's really fun and interesting.

And like I said, come try to stump us.

We're up for it.

Yeah, that's right. Podcast field trip.

Oh, challenge accepted. Well,

thanks again for being with us, Amy.

Thanks for listening to the

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