NJLLA Founders Grant Recipient Mandy Lee Recaps Her Experience at the AALL Meeting and Conference in Portland, Oregon
Thanks to NJLLA’s Founders Grant, I represented NJLLA at the AALL Annual Meeting and Conference in Portland, Oregon, July 19-22, 2025. This year marked my tenth(!) anniversary of AALL membership.
Over the conference’s four days, I attended a workshop and several programs that proved to be insightful and informative. The workshop, Step-by-step: Drafting NextGen Legal Research Performance Task Questions, showed sample legal research question formats and offered the chance to try to formulate questions. The program, How Law Librarians Can Lead Amid Volatility and Evolution, encouraged me to, “stay constantly uncomfortable.” The panelists in, AI in Law Libraries: Ethical Considerations, reminded me of the urgency of incorporating ethics education into AI instruction.
Throughout my stay in Portland, I also reconnected with colleagues spanning the decade of my law library career, from my graduate student days in Illinois to my present job in New Jersey. Further, I made new acquaintances from around the country, and even across the pond. One of these new friends and I even fangirled Bob Ambrogi! All of these connections represent potential information-sharing and future collaborative possibilities.
Additionally, the Founders Grant afforded me the chance to represent the AALL Nominations Committee, of which I am a member, at the Meet the Candidates event on Monday morning. In addition, I was able to attend the Asian American Law Librarians Caucus business meeting lunch, at which I was elected Secretary.
In the exhibit hall and in vendor-sponsored events, I was able to speak with vendors with whom I had wanted to ask specific questions. I also learned about new features in products which I currently use, such as Bloomberg Law’s Build custom charts to compare laws across jurisdictions using Bloomberg Law’s Chart Builders. I even brought back swag for colleagues and baseball caps from Geneva, Switzerland, that became prizes for a coworker’s friend’s local youth soccer team’s players.
I am so grateful to the New Jersey Law Librarians Association, particularly to the Grants Committee, for having awarded the Founders Grant to me to facilitate my participation in the American Association of Law Libraries Annual Meeting and Conference in Portland, Oregon. The programs were insightful and I reunited with former colleagues and met new ones. After a decade of law librarianship, I continue to appreciate my good fortune at having found and stayed in a profession that allows me to do work that I enjoy, among people who have become not only colleagues, but also mentors and friends. I look forward to next year!
Please find a photo gallery documenting my experience:
