Information bloodhound, law library jewel honored

BY BARBARA PALMER

When Erika Wayne talks about her work as reference and Internet services librarian at the Robert Crown Law Library, you can almost see the gleam in her eye over the telephone. The research problems she likes best, Wayne said, "are the ones that are almost too hard to solve."

In seven years as a law librarian here, Wayne -- the 2002 recipient of the Marshall O'Neill Award for outstanding support for university research -- has earned a reputation among law professors for pulling off the nearly impossible.

In the wake of the 2000 presidential election, Wayne put together a massive database listing thousands of legal documents and reports related to challenges to voting resu

lts; the website she created is widely regarded as the best online source available to legal scholars and the general public. Her work was a tour de force, not only because it was the only online source for many documents but also because Wayne was often the first person to post opinions as they were handed down, said law Professor Pamela Karlan.

On Dec. 12, 2000, the night the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision on Bush v. Gore, Wayne leapfrogged over thousands of people trying to log on to the entry pages of the Department of Justice website and immediately downloaded a copy of the opinion by directly typing in the document's URL. Wayne had noted the method used to create URLs for Supreme Court documents and correctly deduced the opinion's URL, Karlan said. Wayne's detective work allowed Karlan and Law School Dean Kathleen Sullivan to be among the handful of academics who had read the opinion and could accurately comment on it that night in the national press, Karlan said. The American Association of Law Libraries named the site, http://election2000.stanford.edu, "Best Nonprint Publication" for 2001.

It was Wayne's idea to create a website containing research on pioneering female lawyers being gathered by law Professor Barbara Babcock and the students in her course on women and law, after hearing Babcock lament that she was often the only one who read her students' terrific but unpublished papers. The website, called the "Women's Legal History Biography Project," has grown to the point where, in what Babcock called a "postmodern move," the course has become its own textbook, Babcock said. "The collaborative effort that the website represents is typical of Erika Wayne," she wrote in nominating Wayne for the award. This year, Wayne began co-teaching the course with Babcock.

Wayne's routine response to legal research requests is always speedy, creative and exhaustive, law professors say. "Wayne provides not only the reference materials that you request, but the materials you would have requested had you thought as thoroughly as she has about the potential match between your research objective and the available resources, " said Rick Banks, associate professor of law.

One of the secrets to her research success is the fact that she's "incredibly stubborn," said Wayne, who works in an open office with three other reference librarians at a desk covered with stacked file folders, boxes of tea and a liberal dusting of yellow sticky notes. When she's looking for something -- an obscure legal reference, a bit of text buried in a multivolume set of books -- "I just can't stop searching," she said, "It's the joy of the hunt."

Wayne earned history and political science degrees at Duke University before entering the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Like many law students, she was uncertain about her future, she said. "I wasn't entirely sold on going into practice."

Wayne credits law school librarians -- and her librarian father -- for helping her discern her career path. "It became perfectly obvious by the third year that this is what I wanted to do," she said. After earning a law degree, Wayne earned a master's degree in library and information science at the University of Illinois and came to Stanford to work as a law reference librarian in 1995.

Since then, her title has expanded to include Internet services. When she started, the Web was around, but law libraries were just starting to tap into the usefulness of the Internet, she said. While many of the tools she uses are Web-based, being able to use printed resources is crucial, she said. "Books are incredibly vital." The argument presented to the Supreme Court last month against extending copyright limits by law Professor Lawrence Lessig, a leading authority on cyberlaw, was based in part on centuries-old texts, she pointed out.

Wayne makes frequent use of other low-tech tools, too, like being nice, she said. "Just being approachable and eager to help goes so far." She is as likely to pick up the telephone as she is to fire up a search engine, she said.

Wayne, who once convinced a court clerk to fax a 300-page opinion to her, is terrific at "wheedling favors," said her boss, Paul Lomio, assistant director of information services for the library and a 1994 O'Neill Award winner. "If somebody has something and she needs it, she will get it from them."

One of the things that makes her job so enjoyable is that all faculty research interests -- many of them "fascinating, front-page topics" -- percolate down to the library, she said. But whether Wayne is assisting a first-year law student or a professor she might see later that night on "Nightline," her enthusiasm is guaranteed, colleagues say.

"Wayne is a truly delightful person to work with, and I can think of no staff member more appreciated or respected at the Law School," said Sullivan. "She's a research superstar."

Wayne will be honored Friday afternoon at a reception at the Faculty Club from 4 to 6 p.m. The award, named in honor of Marshall O'Neill, former associate director of the Hansen Lab, is accompanied by a $3,000 cash award.