Featured Faculty: Christopher S. O’Byrne
Research Librarian
Give someone a fish, and they’ll eat for a day. Teach them to fish, and they’ll eat for a lifetime. Chris O’Byrne says that adage is his guide as he helps students pursue legal research at the Kresge Law Library. He wants to arm them with the skills, resources, and confidence they need to find answers to their legal questions, both for coursework and when they enter the profession.
“The small school environment at Notre Dame provides a lot of opportunities for librarians to interact with students, and Research Services has a central role in teaching legal research,” says O’Byrne, a member of the Law School faculty and one of four full-time librarians in Research Services.
Besides teaching the 1L Legal Research class and offering research seminars for 2L and 3L students, O’Byrne and his colleagues visit other professors’ classes to share information about resources and methodologies. They compile research guides, organize tailor-made training sessions to help students prepare for summer jobs, and assist those who stop by the library with specific questions.
“Our doors are open,” says O’Byrne of the Research Services team.
In the technology age, teaching students to fish is a complicated task. “Each new 1L class is more familiar with online resources than the previous one, thanks to an increasing emphasis on the use of commercial databases at the undergraduate level,” says O’Byrne. “But as more information becomes available online, students will have to focus on being more critical about both the relevance and authoritativeness of the results they’ve found.”
Computer searches can lead quickly to specific data, he adds, but “there is a temptation to stop where the search results stop” and to assume that “if you find something relevant, you’ve found everything,” rather than examining a particular legal case within the context of the law as a whole.
Since law is an increasingly inter-disciplinary field, O’Byrne shows students how to access nonlegal databases to find information about medical, financial, environmental, or policy issues. They become comfortable using the print resources that they will find in most professional legal settings and the electronic resources available in state-of-the-art law libraries like Kresge.
Because graduates can’t prepare for every professional possibility, O’Byrne says, “Our goal is to train students to learn the law in any subject area on their own.” That approach is building confidence: according to a recent survey, 98 percent of Notre Dame law students returning from summer jobs rated their legal research skills as equivalent, or superior to, their peers from other law schools.
To learn more about Chris O’Byrne, view his faculty profile page.
