Farcical though it may be, Elizabeth Slusser Kelly, then the Southern Illinois School of Law Library Director and Associate Professor of Law, kept a cheat sheet of a position that fit this description (or close to it). In 1983 the position of Director of Biddle Law Library was open and she leapt at the chance. “The Biddle Law Library was in a very sorry state indeed when Liz Kelly was appointed,” recalls Stephen B. Burbank, David Berger Professor for the Administration of Justice and chair of the Library Director Search Committee in 1983. “The trans-formation for which she is largely responsible has been nothing short of remarkable in every dimension. Grossly underfunded, inefficiently staffed, not notably friendly to its patrons, and a technological dinosaur when she arrived, Biddle has regained its historic place among the great law school libraries in the country.” At the time, the Biddle Law Library was located on the second floor and higher in the original 1900 Law School Building, now called Silverman Hall. The space encompassed Goodrich Hall to the north and Sharswood Hall to the south – now the Levy Conference Center. A matter as fundamental to a library’s services as the location of its books was a mess. Kelly recalls a wry remark that Ron Day, Reference Librarian, had made: “At Biddle, we have elevated the locational question to a metaphysical level.” One of her first initiatives was to re-classify the books and move those most requested to the ground level, which began the famous turn-around in customer service that Kelly’s tenure came to characterize. She established a classification system modeled after the Library of Congress so researchers from around the country could function in Biddle much as they would in any other world-class law library. One year into the position, in 1985 Kelly stated in a news column that
her “principal goal, and the one which is the most fun for me, is to plan
the Library’s course towards the point where it once again merits recognition
as a truly great legal research center.”
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