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Expert Opinions | Editorials | Faculty Activities |  Faculty Spotlight | Faculty Home
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Current Spotlight | Spotlight Archive
Professor Szymczak began working at the Law School 12 years ago as an evening reference librarian, after spending a year at Pace University, where she became interested in the technology side of library research. At Pace, she helped build a case law database containing the decisions of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. “I taught myself HTML and database design,” she explains. “My older sister is a programmer, so I was exposed to Internet technology before it boomed.” After finishing college at SUNY-Buffalo State and securing a job as a paralegal, her original goal was to practice international law, which was still a relatively new area in the 1980s. “I enjoyed working with people from all over the world,” says Professor Szymczak. “The deals were complex, and I was learning about finance, which I found really interesting.” At Duke University School of Law, she found herself attracted to working in the law library, and she was hired there as an international and foreign law research assistant. She helped found and then served as executive editor of the Duke Journal of Comparative and International Law. After graduating with a J.D./LL.M. in comparative and international law, she returned back east (she is a native of Brooklyn) for an internship with the Attorney General’s office in the Eastern District of New York. While she found criminal law fascinating, she was still interested in teaching and research, so she pursued a Master’s in library and information science at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.  My future research directions include defining output measurements for law libraries and analyzing the impact of open source initiatives on law library operations. While attending Pratt at night, she worked as a senior reference librarian for the New York office of what is now Thelen Reid Brown Raysman & Steiner LLP. “Once I earned my degree, I had to finally decide whether to practice or continue on in school,” she says. “I told the firm I wanted to go into academia.” Her next job at Pace led her to Brooklyn Law School a year later, in 1996. In addition to working on the Second Circuit database at Pace, she taught international and environmental legal research and discovered that she greatly enjoyed instructing students. Professor Szymczak’s scholarship addresses the role technology plays in information literacy, library services, and legal education. An active member of the American Association of Law Libraries, she chairs its Computing Services Special Interest Section. She has conducted many workshops about legal technology, including presentations for the AALL, the American Bar Association, and private corporations and organizations. Her publications have appeared in journals such as Legal Reference Services Quarterly, International Journal of Legal Information, Brooklyn Journal of International Law, and the Journal of Law and Policy. Her co-authored article “Teaching Foreign and International Legal Research” was selected as one of the top 20 articles on library instruction for 2001 by the American Library Association. As the new Library Director, Professor Szymczak is further developing the collection and services of the Law School’s research facility. She established Brooklyn Law School as one of the charter law schools to receive access to Bloomberg’s news and legal databases, and she helped to create the BLS Library Blog. The move from books to electronic sources is complicated, she explains, adding, “I love the challenge of negotiating our contracts. Publishers and vendors approach their licensing contracts in very different ways, especially in other countries.” Westlaw is a Canadian company, and LexisNexis is Dutch. “In a way, I’m back where I started, practicing international law!” she says. Still working to satisfy the curiosity that has made her such a successful librarian at Brooklyn Law School, Professor Szymczak says she enjoys helping the Law School to build its electronic resources. “My future research directions include defining output measurements for law libraries and analyzing the impact of open source initiatives on law library operations,” she says.
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