Barbara Bintliff to Become Next Director at the University of Texas Tarlton Law Library

From Acting Director Terry Martin's email to the Tarlton family of librarians:

It has been my privilege and pleasure to serve as director of the Tarlton Law Library for the past two academic years. But I am nonetheless relieved and happy to announce that service approaches its end.

In 1966, Dean Page Keeton went looking for a library director to succeed Helen Hargrave, who served 25 years as the Tarlton Director and was much beloved by law students who had interrupted their studies to serve in WWII.  Keeton contacted Dean Edward King at the University of Colorado for advice.  King bragged about Colorado’s new librarian, Roy Mersky.  As King later told Mersky, “I mistakenly told him you were the best law librarian in the country.”  Roy always wondered about the true sentiment behind that phrasing.  At any event, Keeton persuaded Mersky to move to Austin and history was made.
 
If not once, why not again?  Putting aside any concerns about a pattern of repeated raiding of a fellow institution, Dean Larry Sager has also found the next Texas director at Colorado.  I am very pleased to inform you that this coming August Professor Barbara A. Bintliff will become the Joseph C. Hutcheson Professor in Law and next director of the Tarlton Law Library.

Barbara is well known as a leader in the law library profession, a former President of the American Association of Law Libraries, a member of the American Law Institute, a noted teacher, scholar, and consultant.  She is involved in cutting-edge issues, having served on the ALI Consultative Group developing Principles of the Law of Government Access to and Use of Digital Information and serving as Reporter for the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws Drafting Committee on Authentication and Preservation of State Electronic Legal Materials. She recently organized the Conference on Legal Information: Scholarship and Teaching held at the University of Colorado Law School that produced the Boulder Statement on Legal Research Education.
 
Barbara is well regarded as a mentor and educator of law librarians.  She will be a natural successor to Roy Mersky as the director of the Tarlton Law Library and as a leader of the new Texas dual MSIS/Juris Doctor Degree program.

As a scholar, teacher, colleague, and library manager, there are few in her class.  The entire staff and I are thrilled. Wish her well.

The law school's announcement is here.

[MG]