Memorial: Grace “Betty” Woodall Taylor (1926–2013)

LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL Vol. 105:4 [2013-32] Memorial: Grace “Betty” Woodall Taylor (1926–2013) Face of University of Florida Law, Futurist, and Mentor* ¶1 I didn’t know Betty Taylor in 1962 when, as a junior at the University of Florida (UF), I contemplated three-and-a-half years of teaching to pay back a state scholarship before I could fulfill my dream of attending law school (without an identifiable source of funding to do so!); nor would any undergraduate woman have dared to enter the bastion of male chauvinism that constituted the law school of that period. An interview Betty gave to the Florida Alligator after a fire in the law library reading room changed the course of my life. She described her long course of J.D. study, first full time, then, after marriage to a young lawyer and motherhood, as a full-time reference librarian in the main library and part-time student who began studying every morning by 4 a.m. to be prepared for class, because she knew she was being watched critically. For approximately twenty-five years, Betty pro- vided the model, which many of us followed, of studying law part time while working full time in law libraries (generally first as catalogers), which allowed women to gain a foothold in the profession. ¶2 Upon graduating from the new Master’s in Librarianship program at the Florida State College for Women (now Florida State University [FSU]) in 1950, Betty applied for a job in the Harvard Law Library and sought admission to its law school, only to learn that the law school did not accept women. Faced with the choice of paying back a State of Florida scholarship or working for the state, she accepted a position at the mainly male UF. Part-time law study was possible there, but the law school was famous for faculty who harassed the few women students for taking places that should have gone to male breadwinners. The male students mocked women for speaking in class and shuffled their feet on the bare wooden floors in the library until any woman left. Betty Taylor endured such treatment during the twelve years it took her to earn her law degree part time. Betty trans- ferred to the law library in 1956, after earning half of her law credits, and became director three weeks after graduation in 1962, albeit at a salary twenty percent less than was offered to a male candidate. The promotion included a position on the faculty; after her immediate appointment as faculty secretary, she advised other women never to attend a faculty meeting with a yellow legal pad! ¶3 The UF law library had 62,000 volumes when Betty took over. In those days, directors generally also served as the sole reference librarian and taught a show- and-tell legal bibliography course. Catalog card entries were searched in the Library of Congress National Union Catalog and individually typed. The creation of union * © Kathleen Price, 2013. 575 576 LAW LIBRARY JOURNAL Vol. 105:4 [2013-32] lists of regional holdings was a major improvement, and Betty compiled twelve volumes of southeastern law libraries’ union lists. This was only a small part of the over one hundred speeches, articles, and presentations; eight books; and numerous audiocassettes and indexes for which she is responsible. As her library grew to 600,000 volumes, this pioneer in forecasting and using technology to improve legal research correctly predicted that hard-copy collections would shrink over time. Laborious manual processes, lovingly cherished by legal traditionalists, would give way to Westlaw, LexisNexis, and the other tools that she was the first to bring to law libraries whose directors at the time considered them outlandish. ¶4 Betty often recounted her introduction to technology: When she was appointed to a law school committee to predict the increases in enrollment to be expected from Baby Boomers, she visited the university’s underutilized computer center to enlist the assistance of a statistician and correctly predicted that the num- ber of law students would increase dramatically. When she was later offered the opportunity to conduct research with an assigned graduate student assistant, the resulting Florida Bar Association Journal Index produced from punch cards was one of the first uses of computers to organize legal documents. It garnered her an invi- tation to speak to the 1967 inaugural International Computers-in-Law Conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Betty had foreseen the conversion of library catalogs to databases but had been told that they could not handle languages other than English. The foreign-language databases she saw in Geneva were the inspiration for her ensuing proselytizing for the use of computers in research. The culmination of Betty’s acceptance as a predictor of the influence of technology in law libraries was her appointment as the chair of the program committee for the 1981 AALL Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., for which the program focused on technology. A highlight was a roving robot! ¶5 Betty advocated for the use of both LexisNexis and Westlaw. A member of the first Westlaw Academic Advisory Committee, she also served for twelve years as a trustee for the National Center for Automated Information Research (NCAIR), funded by LexisNexis’s purchase of New York State’s legal database. That organization is best known for its grants to Peter Martin’s computerized casebook and distance education projects as well as its early support for CALI. She later led the effort to bring that organization to UF with a grant of $2.5 million plus a state matching grant of the same size.1 ¶6 Betty’s continuing national prominence was recognized by FSU’s library school with its first Outstanding Alumnus Award and by AALL with the Marion Gould Gallagher Award in 1997 and membership in the 2010 inaugural class of the AALL Hall of Fame. She served on the AALL Executive Board from 1981 to 1984, ran for Vice President/President-Elect in 1990–91, and either chaired or served on committees as diverse as Placement, Nominations, LAWNET, National Legal Resources, and Local Arrangements. She served as president of SEAALL (Southeastern Chapter of AALL) and codirected its institute in 1974. Her law school classmate Sandy D’Alemberte, then President of the American Bar Association (ABA) and Florida State University, appointed Betty to the Facilities 1. See infra note 9 for more on NCAIR. Vol. 105:4 [2013-32] MEMORIAL: GRACE “BETTY” WOODALL TAYLOR 577 Committee of the Law Library of Congress while I was the Law Librarian, which was probably the only time when our supporters really understood our program! She served as a member of numerous ABA accreditation inspection teams, as well as sitting on committees on science and technology, international information net- working, and law libraries. Her AALS service included membership on its accreditation committee. Betty’s law library interests were not limited to technology; for example, she cochaired the program committee for a Rothman-sponsored work- shop on acquisitions in 1980. ¶7 Betty was even more active at her home university. She was among the first tenured law faculty members; the first woman to hold an endowed professorship at UF (that professorship honored beloved professor Clarence J. TeSelle, and Betty also became curator of his bust!); president of the Phi Beta Kappa chapter; and a member of Beta Phi Mu, Phi Delta Delta, and Florida Blue Key. Her great love was teaching her seminar on computers and the law, which she did from 1983 to 2003. She also taught legal writing to undergraduate freshmen in the Frontiers of the Mind program and served on the doctoral committee for one of her students. ¶8 Unlike members of my generation, I never knew Betty to have an older, authoritative mentor. She was an original—an energetic, hard-charging lady with partners, collaborators, and cheerleaders such as Dean Frank Maloney; West Publishing Vice President Roger Noreen; and coauthors Dan Henke, Director of Hastings College of the Law Library, and Bob Munro, research librarian at the Levin College of Law. ¶9 She backed Dean Maloney’s controversial decision to leave the center of the UF campus for a new entity called a “law center,” with space for academic programs, clinics, and a law reform enterprise that partnered with law firms, government agencies, and international organizations. When I visited UF to recruit students for Duke Law School in the 1970s, Betty proudly showed me around the building she had a major part in designing. It included then-unheard-of separate rooms for Westlaw and LexisNexis, a computer lab, and an open-plan area with six classrooms that could be cordoned off to form an auditorium so that 1000 students could be accommodated at one sitting, an idea with more promise than practicality. I never asked Betty if the gain of adequate parking was worth the loss of proximity to the business and accounting schools that expanded into the vacated law school space, but the explosive growth of the law student body left them little choice but to move. ¶10 Betty was always conscious that she was a role model for women in law. She authored A History of Race and Gender at the University of Florida Levin College of Law 1909–20012 and coauthored Women at the University of Florida3 as well as a major bibliography on feminist jurisprudence.4 Betty was famous on campus for the orange and blue suits she wore on game days and for always taking time to counsel women students as their numbers rose. Dean Bob Jerry, in appreciation of 2.

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