John Palfrey has taken an unconventional path to leading one of America’s most influential law libraries. John is a law professor and current Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School, as well as the co-director of the Berkman center for Internet & Society — both dream jobs for law librarians or tech policy thinkers. But he did not cut his teeth in the library community — John was a practicing lawyer and worked in the Environmental Protection Agency. This different career path perhaps gives John a different perspective on his job, and you can see that in his promotion of new roles for law libraries and librarians in the 21st Century. John also has done foundational work in developing interesting new projects, such as the Digital Public Library of America, a “large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.”
