Introduction
Welcome to the site. My name is R. Martin Witt ("Marty") and this website has been developed to provide a bit more detail than a traditional curriculum vitae/cover letter allows, including some samples of my work and activities. If you have any questions or would like further information on anything mentioned here, please do not hesitate to contact me (rmartinwitt@gmail.com).
I encourage you to visit different areas of the site using the expandable navigation menu to the left. To return to this Introduction page at any point, simply click the R. Martin Witt in the upper left.
About Me
Born and raised in Albany, NY, I remained there through both undergrad at UAlbany and law school at Albany Law. Like many librarians, I was an ardent user of the library during my youth. Many an afternoon turned into evening with me camped out in the Pine Hills Branch of the Albany Public Library. My first UAlbany job was a work-study position in the University Library, and after my work-study eligibility ended I was able to continue working there as a library assistant. While I appreciated libraries a great deal, I didn't really think of librarianship as my calling until years later.
While working at DeGraff-Foy as an associate attorney, I began to think about law librarianship as a career alternative. In the fall of 2008, I went so far as to email Bob Emery, a law librarian at Albany Law and my legal research instructor, to ask about the profession. Soon thereafter I learned about the Law Librarian Fellowship Program being established at the University of Denver (DU) and it seemed as though the stars were aligning perfectly. I applied for the program and in the spring of 2009 I was accepted and awarded a fellowship. After spending the first 30 years of my life in Albany, I moved out to Denver with little more than a carry-on worth of personal items - thus beginning my journey into law librarianship.
Since making the professional leap, I've done my best to build a strong foundation that serves to make me the most effective law librarian I can be. In addition to specialized law librarianship classes, the practical experience I gained during my time at DU was varied and tremendously helpful. Though most of my work in that time frame was done within the confines of traditional academic law librarianship, I also took advantage of the relative proximity of the National Indian Law Library (only a 2-hour bus ride each way) in Boulder, Colorado to complete an independent study there.
Further afield, I arranged to have my final practicum project be completed in Shenzhen, China, much to the chagrin of my non-law adviser who was accustomed to conducting in-person site visits of practicum locations. Though it took some convincing, my time at the Peking University School of Transnational Law, Legal Research Center was well worth it, not only for the experience serving a distinctly different patron population, but also for the experience dealing with uncommon challenges within librarianship. It can be so easy to take the little things for granted - like working within library systems that use Latin characters.
While in China, I was offered (and I accepted) my first post-MLIS position as Reference Librarian & International/Comparative Specialist at Florida Coastal School of Law - a job I'd interviewed for before leaving for China. In addition to the wonderful people at Coastal, a big reason I took the job was the chance to build further upon the foundation I'd begun at DU. The position included not only all of the "traditional" duties of a newly-minted law school reference librarian - reference, research, instruction - but it also bore responsibility for all things dealing with foreign, comparative, or international law (FCIL). From collection development to international/foreign instruction to specialized reference requests, wearing the additional FCIL hat required continued development of my organizational, time-management, and analytical skills, and it made it so there was never a dull day!
Though I liked my work at Coastal, when the opportunity came in 2013 to move to Columbia Law I simply couldn't pass it up. In many ways, the position was a perfect fit for me, especially at the time. The administrative rotation used within the reference department here at Columbia Law meant that I could continue to develop skills in a variety of areas of law librarianship while also gaining more experience as a supervisor. Plus, the collection of resources here is rivaled by very few institutions in the world. After completing the four administrative rotations at Columbia Law, I served as the Head of Public Services for two years. In July of 2019, I moved into a a newly-created position at Columbia Law - Assistant Director for Special Projects.
If you've read this far, you have my thanks. I encourage you to look around the rest of the site and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me (rmartinwitt@gmail.com).