Gabriela Femenia is Director of the Law Library and Associate Professor of Law.
She received her MLIS from the University of Washington and her JD from the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she holds degrees in History from the University of California, Berkeley and Harvard University, with a concentration in medieval European legal history. Gabriela practiced intellectual property law in California, then administered international programs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education before entering law librarianship.
Having specialized in foreign, comparative and international legal research, she has focused throughout her librarian career on the importance of preserving access to legal information from all jurisdictions. As law libraries face growing budget and space pressures, as collections carefully built over generations age in less-than-ideal conditions, and as conflicts and crises have endangered libraries around the world, unique and important material is being lost. She is equally interested in securing access to the increasing body of born-digital legal information that has only ever been available online, and which the originating organizations may not be concerned with preserving. She is dedicated to enhancing collaboration across law libraries to preserve historically important collections and secure access to legal information, and is a current board member of the Legal Information Preservation Alliance to advance those objectives.
Prior to joining Temple, she served as Associate Director for Collections and Operations at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School’s Biddle Law Library, where she was responsible for overseeing the collection and archives, facilitating library operations, selecting international and foreign law materials, providing international law reference services, and teaching specialized seminars on foreign and international legal research. Her contributions to the profession include a chapter in SOURCES OF STATE PRACTICE IN INTERNATIONAL LAW (2d ed. 2014); editing the Mexico and Chile sections of Foreign Law Guide; preparing research guides on topics including rule of law, international women’s rights, and League of Nations research; chairing committees of the American Association of Law Libraries’ Foreign, Comparative and International Law special interest section; and serving as Secretary/Treasurer for the American Society of International Law’s International Legal Research interest group.