J. Paul Lomio is appointed director of Law School library
J. Paul Lomio, a specialist in legal research and the development of digital reserves, has been appointed director of the Robert Crown Law Library.
Lomio, who joined the Law School staff as a reference librarian in 1982, has served as acting director for the 2004-05 academic year following the retirement of Lance E. Dickson, a professor emeritus of law and former library director.
The job offer came as Lomio was on vacation in Washington, D.C., eating lunch after a tour of the U.S. Supreme Court and its library. "My cell phone rang. It was Larry Kramer," Lomio said, referring to the dean of the Law School. "The restaurant was noisy, so I didn't really hear what he was offering, but I said 'yes' anyway. All of the congratulatory e-mails and phone messages I've received confirm that I accepted the best job ever."
Along with overseeing the library's collection of 500,000 books and 8,000 periodicals, Lomio will spearhead moves to make the library's holdings "the best collection of online material of any law library in the world," he said.
The Robert Crown Law Library staff has long been producing a number of prominent online resources, such as Election 2000, an award-winning online compendium of more than 600 documents related to court cases in the disputed 2000 presidential election, including the Supreme Court decision on Bush v. Gore.
Lomio has been instrumental in the launch of many of these digital reserves, working in close collaboration with Law School faculty and fellow librarians. He played a key role in helping Joseph A. Grundfest, the W. A. Franke Professor of Law and Business, develop the Stanford Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, which provides detailed information relating to the prosecution, defense and settlement of federal class action securities fraud.
Funded by the North Carolina Institute of Research and Nasdaq Stock Market Inc., the clearinghouse is the nation's first "designated Internet site" for required electronic posting of court documents. It contains more than 8,000 complaints, briefs, filings and other materials related to federal class action securities fraud lawsuits that have occurred since the passage of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. In 1997, the Smithsonian Institution recognized the clearinghouse as a "visionary use of information technology in the field of education and academia."
Lomio also played a prominent role in helping launch the library's earliest online initiative, the Women's Legal History Biography Project, developed in collaboration with Barbara Babcock, the Judge John Crown Professor of Law, Emerita. The site features biographical chapters and archival information on hundreds of pioneering female lawyers in the United States.
Lomio has helped to develop several substantial online bibliographies, including Don't Ask Don't Tell, which contains primary materials on the U.S. military's policy on sexual orientation from World War I to the present. He is currently working on Same-Sex Marriage: An Annotated Bibliography.
He is a member of the Electronic Court Filing Task Force for the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California. As a past member of the Association of American Law Schools Library and Technology Committee, he co-authored "A Statement of Principles of Electronic Publication of Law School-Based Journals."
Lomio and the Robert Crown Law Library staff won the Law School's Class of 2002 Staff Appreciation Award, and in 1994 he won the Marshall D. O'Neill Award for outstanding contributions to the university's research mission. In 1989, he chaired the Stanford University Public Services Coordinating Council. He is currently a member of the editorial advisory board of DATABASE magazine and a member of the Law Librarians' Advisory Committee to the California Office of Administrative Law.
Lomio earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from St. Bonaventure University in 1972 before earning a law degree from Gonzaga University in 1978 and a master's degree in law from the University of Washington School of Law in 1979. He was admitted to the Washington State Bar Association in 1978 and served as a guardian-ad-litem for the King County Juvenile Court and clerked for Judge T. Patrick Corbett of the King County Superior Court in Seattle in 1980. Lomio went on to earn a master's degree in library science in 1982 from the School of Library and Information Science at Catholic University of America.