Sarah Weld

Sarah is an experienced editor, writer and reporter and has spent the last five years working in higher education. Most recently, she worked as the communications manager for enrollment services at Cal State East Bay. Before that, she was the lead editor and writer on the communications team at Saint Mary’s College. Prior to joining Saint Mary’s, Sarah worked for many years as a journalist. She spent six years as editor and co-editor of the East Bay Monthly, and has worked as a daily newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and freelance writer, frequently focusing on stories about education. She lives in Oakland with her husband and two children.

Adele Perera

Adele Perera recently joined Berkeley Law as a Legal Assistant in the Faculty Support Unit. Previously she worked on campus in events and program support, and as a molecular biologist. She has a degree from UC Berkeley in Genetics and Plant Biology, and lives in Oakland.

Meet the Law Library

We’re down on LL1 and LL2 in the fancy, newish part of the law school. Our Director is Kathleen Vanden Heuvel who you can find in Rm. 216 near the Dean’s Office. Our Associate Directors are Marci Hoffman and Michael Levy. Marci is also the Foreign and International Law expert while Michael teaches Advanced Legal Research.

Then there are the Reference Librarians, Dean Rowan (Director), Marlene Harmon, I-Wei Wang, Joe Cera, Romona Collins, Janice Kelly, Keri Klein and Edna Lewis. Currently we also have 2 fabulous student research assistants, Maia Livengood (2L) and Gus Tupper (2L). We staff the ref desk, answer faculty and student research questions, teach legal research, maintain the law school’s institutional repository, and most importantly fill the candy bowl.

Ref Desk Staffers I-Wei Wang, Ramona Collins, Keri Klein (seated), and Marlene Harmon

Our back office has our Collection Services folks who you may not see but make the trains run on time. They handle ordering books and other materials, cataloging the stuff, and making sure everything is available on the shelves or via the website. These include catalogers Chris Tarr (head of cataloging), Enedina Vera, Irina Migal, and Shelly McLaughlin.

Catalogers Shelly McLaughlin, Chris Tarr, and Irina Migal

Our acquisitions/serials/conservation/stacks staff are Joaquin Clay, Precy Garcez, Oliver Kay, Monique Macauley, Kathy Renfro, and Blanca Sanchez.

Collection Services Joaquin Clay, Monique Macauley, Kathy Renfro, Oliver Kay, and Precy Garcez

The Circulation people who manage the circ desk (and our wonderful student workers) are Ramona Collins and Doug Avila.

The Computing folks are Mike Lindsey (Director of Web Development), Allison Cogen and Thomas Lee. Thomas also handles library administration and budget monitoring.

The Law Journal staff are Kira Abrams and Maria Vidal-Manou who work with the law school’s 13 student journals. Kevin Durkin-Oritz is the managing editor of the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, a multilingual legal journal index covers over 500 journals published worldwide .

What else do we do? Publish the semiannual book list (we want your reviews!), throw the new student party every August, hand out morale boosting donuts and cookies on holidays, provide study break puzzles and games stations throughout the law library, create research guides (including a student wellness guide), curate the popular reading and law in movies collections, organize the annual Faculty Book celebration, and so much more. As the adage goes, you can’t judge a book by its cover so come down and see us sometime.

ShoutOuts

Mallory Lass

Technically she is employed by UDAR, but her services encompass everyone doing fundraising in Law. Mallory is flexible, thoughtful, and incredibly patient. She has produced innumerable reports that guide my planning, and she has provided invaluable orientation in the ways of UDAR and Berkeley fundraising as a whole. She is a trained lawyer which may explain why she is such a clear communicator and incisive thinker. I would have been at a total loss without her encouragement and direction in this first year of my working here.

~Judith Katz

Emma Lindley

We received feedback from one of our Lecturers today, who reached out to compliment Emma Lindley, describing her as “prompt, friendly, professional and a pleasure to work with.”  We feel the same way!  Thank you, Emma, for all you do! We’re so thrilled to have you on our team!!

~Marva de Marothy

Roberto Contreras Osorio

He is so helpful with anything having to do with the very important issues having to do with the physical office space. Friendly, modest, and meticulous about details. He hung up a number of framed items in my office, schooled me on office temperature control, and advised me on the care of my fake tree, based on his own experience decorating the home of a famed Hollywood director.

~Judith Katz

Matthew Ray

Thanks for the good company and all the community and capacity building you’ve facilitated leading the Center Admins group. (We tried lobbying for 4 more years but settled for your moving on to another exciting position.)

~Your Center Admin devotees

 Ron Skinner x2

Thank you, Ron, for managing the Mail Room and single handedly making sure that mail and supplies are delivered in a timely fashion. You are living up to the Postal Service creed “neither rain nor snow nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Thank you!

~gar Russell

Thanks SO much for keeping the boat afloat in stormy waters!

~Charles Cannon

Delia Violante & Rachel Zuraw

Thank you Rachel and Delia for starting the Knitting Club! You inspired me to learn how to crochet and knit and now I’m sufficiently embarrassed by the size of my yarn stash, just like a real knitter. It’s been really fun to learn. But maybe most importantly, I especially appreciate the opportunity to get to know staff members in other departments and on other floors through non-work activities.

I know it’s not easy to manage this group on top of all that you both do for your day jobs, so I wanted to say thank you!

~Anya Grossmann

Oliver Kay, Monique Macaulay, Kevin Durkin-Ortiz, and Doug Avila

We would like to nominate four library staff members for ShoutOut Awards. We feel they deserve this recognition for helping the library keep the Circulation desk staffed during the first two weeks of law school in January when we had no undergraduate student assistants. These four people set aside their normal responsibilities to make sure that students, faculty and staff received excellent service at the Circulation desk at a time when the rest of the campus was still on break. We shouted out “help” and they stepped up!

~Marci Hoffman and Michael Levy

Toni Mendocino

Thank you Toni for your hard work–well beyond the call of duty with technology recalcitrants!

~Charles Cannon

Marva de Marothy

During this frightful transition to UCPath, Marva has been really looking out for my group to make sure we are prepared for the transition. Although my group of visiting scholars and visiting student researchers are unpaid non-employees, Marva still treats them with the same level of importance as paid employees. She has been proactive and diligent. I am so grateful to her. Thank you, Marva.

~Farrah Fanara

Emma Lindley

Emma Lindley is great, really. This week, we asked her to help with two field placement things and she turned it around in no time and she helped to clarify a discrepancy she discovered that will make all lecturers helping with the field placement program much happier and our lives a bit easier in terms of administering the program! While generating the information may have been part of your regular job, her willingness to do it immediately and to find the answer that benefits all is the above and beyond!

Thank you, Emma – cheers to you,

Sue Schechter and Kristen Holmquist

I-Wei Wong

Thank you I-Wei for making my life infinitely better by finding a Restatement in an editable format when nobody else could help me. You even made a movie to walk me through it. You’re a fabulous part of the excellent law library team. Thank you! With respect,

~Toni Mendicino

David Whiteneck, Anthony Chin, Julia Lai, Melissa Kendrick

Thank you so very much for your hard work expanding and improving the law school’s departmental budgeting process. However much the results are behind the scenes, the impact on the school is tremendous. The Berkeley Law budget process and materials have never been this good!

~Charles Cannon

10-Second Bio: Tyler Slay

NAME
Tyler Slay
EMAIL
tslay@law.berkeley.edu
MY ROLE:
Staff
DEPARTMENT/UNIT
FSU
WHEN I STARTED WORKING HERE:
June 2015 in my current role, though I had assisted during exam periods since 2011.
WHAT I DO IN FIVE WORDS OR LESS:
Printing. Lots of printing these days…
THE BEST PART ABOUT WORKING HERE:
The vibrant community at the law school.
SOMETHING YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT ME:
I was once helped on the side of a road by John Grisham.
ONE OR TWO TIPS ABOUT THINGS YOU LIKE TO DO AROUND THE BAY AREA:
Monthly classic movie screenings at the Paramount Theatre. BBQ from Everett and Jones.

Lynn Kwon

Lynn Kwon recently joined Berkeley Law as the Instructional Technologist. She comes from her most recent job at Stanford School of Medicine as an Academic Technology Specialist. Lynn holds a PhD in Instructional Systems Technology at Indiana University at Bloomington. She also has vast interests in measurement, statistics, data science or any other methods or tools that can innovate teaching and research. She currently lives in Palo Alto and likes playing tennis.

The Statewide Database – Berkeley Law’s Best-Kept Secret!

The Statewide Database moved to Berkeley Law in 2009 from the Institute of Governmental Studies.  For most of the past 9 years, we’ve been Berkeley Law’s best-kept secret! We were located at 2850 Telegraph until mid-2017 when we were repatriated to central campus and we are now occupying 3 offices in Barrows Hall.

The SWDB is the redistricting database for the State of California, which means that we build datasets that merge voter registration and election data to census data. Our datasets go back to 1994 and include all of California’s Statewide elections.  Our data are used to draw electoral lines on all levels, to assess jurisdictions for compliance with the Federal and State Voting Rights Acts, and for research in many different areas, ranging from access to healthy food to gun ownership.  All of our data are free and we provide assistance with using them.  We work with agencies and department on the State and Federal levels, ranging from the California Secretary of State to the Department of Justice and the Census Bureau. We also frequently collaborate with good government, voting rights and advocacy groups including the League of Women Voters, Common Cause, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

We currently have 12 team members at UCB and were unfortunately only able to corral a few of us into a photo on short notice.  Our P.I and biggest cheerleader is Professor Chris Edley! Our GIS team consists of longtime staff member Nicole Boyle, Anushka Thakkar (Grad student in Public Health), and Anne Price (Undergrad, English).

Our IT and Application Programming team is led by Seth Neill in collaboration with Linus Kipkoech.  Mahmoud Hamsho (Graduate student, Information Science and Management) is working on our data management applications and Tyler Jacobson (Undergrad, Math and English) assists with data collection from the counties.  Data access and outreach is in the capable hands of Jaime Clark with assistance from Nicholette Tolmie (Undergrad, Urban Studies).  Karin Mac Donald is the Director of the SWDB and would be lost if not for the admin and research assistance of Melodie Deisher (Undergrad, English).

Please visit us in Barrows Hall to learn more about the Statewide Database!

Using gmail work management tools

Two helpful hints for email and task management

If you live in the Gmail universe as I do, you might like these two tricks.

When you are reading an email and want to deal with it “later” or even on a specific date, you can click on the vertical ellipsis at the top of the inbox, click “add to tasks” and the email will become a task in your task list on the right side of your gmail screen. Once in the list, you can modify the task, set a date, or mark as complete. I find this really helpful especially at the end of the day when I want to get through my inbox but can’t deal with every message that has arrived. This way, when I open up my email the next day, I have some tasks already in a queue. It’s also a great way to keep track of things while you are waiting for someone else to get back to you.

I also use the “keep” tool, which I call “ideas” because of its lightbulb emoji. When I need to keep track of a specific URL to send out in emails, or a block of text to keep answering the same questions over and over again, I create a note to “keep.” The taskbar and the keep bar are easy to call up on the screen and access when needed.

Judy Wong

Judy Wong has joined UC Berkeley as the Junior Systems Analyst. Previously, she worked at San Francisco State University as a Service Desk Technician. She currently lives in El Cerrito with her two cats.

Karly Kurkjian

Karly Kurkjian recently joined Berkeley Law as an assistant in the Registrar’s Office. Previously she worked at Susie Cakes Bakery doing pastry work and guest service. She has a B.A. in History from U.C. Berkeley, and lives in Piedmont with her parents and brother.