The Chicago Association of Law Libraries honors Lorna Tang with the 2015 Outstanding Lifetime Achievement in Law Librarianship Award.

Lorna Tang retired from the D’Angelo Law Library on June 30, 2015, after 38 years as a law librarian. She began her law library career at the D’Angelo Law Library (then called the University of Chicago Law Library) in 1977 as a law cataloger and has been an outstanding technical services librarian ever since. In 1980 she became the Cataloging Supervisor and in 1984 became the Associate Law Librarian for Technical Services.

In this position, she guided the department through two major renovations of the library building, each time reorganizing work spaces and revising workflows, and three Integrated Library Systems use and migration. Two of these ILSs were development partnerships between the vendors and the University of Chicago Library, and therefore Lorna participated in the design of the system as well.

She was an outstanding representative of the D’Angelo Law Library with colleagues in the university library system and has ensured that the unique requirements of legal materials are accommodated in their ILS platforms.

Lorna has been a member of CALL since 1977 and quickly began her service to CALL and to Chicago area librarians by becoming a member of the CALL Foreign Law Holdings Committee from 1978-1980. Over the years, Lorna has had a long history of service to CALL including membership on other CALL committees, such as the Membership/Directory Committee which she has served on twice, and chaired from 1982-1983; the Placement & Recruitment Committee (twice); and the CALL Meetings Committee (also twice).

Lorna has always advocated that technical services work also serves the public, by making library materials discoverable and easy to understand. One example of this is her work with the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin Focus Group, which seeks to make back issues of the newspaper available through digitization and, therefore, more accessible to patrons.

Lorna’s activities as a member of the American Association of Law Libraries have also served CALL well, as she has been an advocate for electronic resources and their addition and use in law libraries. She was the moderator of the AALL program “Negotiating License Agreements—Revised” at the annual conference in 2003, and the moderator and a speaker at the pre-conference workshop “Delivering the Goods: Effective and Efficient Acquisitions Processes” in 2007. In 2011 she coordinated the “Electronic Resources Management Showcase.”

Lorna has also been very active in vendor relations issues both in CALL and in AALL, serving on the American Association of Law Libraries Relations with Information Vendors Committee from 1999-2005 and 2008-2010. She chaired this committee in 2002-2005 and 2008-2010. As Chair of this committee, she helped arrange visits to publishers and vendors, including CCH and YBP. These visits helped foster understanding between the publisher/vendor community and librarians.

She has also been an advocate for electronic resource statistics, chairing the Project Counter Subcommittee of the Technical Services Special Interest Section (TS-SIS) Serials Committee from 2009-2013. As the chair of this committee, she has communicated the need that libraries have for standard statistical information from electronic resource vendors. This national participation enabled Lorna to increase her knowledge of these areas and assist local Chicago librarians with issues arising from electronic resources and vendor relations.

Lorna has also written many columns for the CRIV sheet, part of the CALL Bulletin, on electronic resource acquisition, problem solving with vendors, and vendor/publisher profiles. One article, “Problem Solving With Publishers/Vendors,” CALL Bulletin no. 214, Spring 2009, was recommended as “good reading” by the Law Librarian’s Bulletin in 2009.