Commonwealth Law Library Project

A project to catalogue the Commonwealth Law Library was completed successfully in 1998. The Commonwealth Law Library was the unique collection of Commonwealth legislation amassed by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and its predecessor departments. The collection was transferred to the Institute Library under trust deed in 1992. It complements the strong Commonwealth law holdings of the Institute.

The combination of collections, now known together as the Commonwealth Law Library, is an unrivalled treasure house of materials both historical and contemporary. A few random examples will give a flavour. There are signed copies of early legislation bearing the governor's seal from several jurisdictions. There is legislation from the early provincial councils of New Zealand: Auckland, Canterbury, Nelson, New Munster, Southland, Taranaki (New Plymouth), Wellington. There are rare copies of legislation from Heligoland (or Helgoland), the North Sea island which formed part of the subject matter of the Heligoland-Zanzibar Treaty of 1890 between Britain and Germany. There is even a set of correspondence on judicial dress throughout colonial territories in the 1950s. In all nearly ten thousand volumes, some of which contained five or ten or more years of legislation.

The collection was initially uncatalogued and placed alongside the Institute materials; it was of value but extremely difficult to use effectively. It was beyond the means of the Library to record all the volumes and bring the collections together into a single research resource. However, in 1995, a grant was obtained under a new funding scheme for specialised research collections of national importance operated by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils. Although the funding scheme was limited to the humanities, the awards committee was convinced of the historical importance of the collection. The Institute is most grateful for the funding which has allowed us to make this unique collection properly available to researchers. We are also grateful to those academic lawyers who lent their vital support to the project, in particular Dr. Robert Stevens, Master of Pembroke College Oxford, who wrote as a referee on our behalf.

The objectives of the project were to catalogue the collection to allow researchers to discover the holdings online and to integrate the collection both in the catalogues and on the shelf with the existing strong complementary Institute Commonwealth collection.

All the materials in the collection of Commonwealth law transferred from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are now catalogued. The library installed a new online catalogue in 1995, which is now available on the world wide web at http://library.sas.ac.uk. Over a thousand complex bibliographic records, representing thousands of volumes, were created for the online catalogue. The material is almost all in serial form and there is often an extensive run of volumes for each record. Detailed volume by volume records were entered into library registers, which are a valuable resource at the Institute Library for detailed research. These registers are arranged by jurisdiction, then by type of legislation and then chronologically.

The collection has been fully assimilated and integrated with our own collections on the shelves using our law classification scheme. Older material of considerable value has now been removed to our on-site reserve collection. The collection itself is much easier to use. Duplicate sequences have been merged and the material has full location marks.

Many volumes were in the form of loose gazetted legislation and the FCO had already bound many others from loose pieces of legislation. In many cases we have been able to ascertain the degree of completeness of volumes by comparison with our own holdings, with those of other libraries, or by research of printed sources.

In some cases we have compiled complete volumes from several sources. For example, the Library has built up close relations with the Max-Planck-Institut für ausländisches und internationales Privatrecht who have supplied some missing material and in turn taken some duplicate material for their collection. The Institute Library has invested heavily in binding these volumes over the past year.

Nigel Boeg worked as the cataloguer on the project under the supervision of June Tomlinson, Head of the Cataloguing Section of the Library. He worked almost throughout the project from 1995 to 1998 with one interval while he worked at the Prague office of the Organisation for Co-operation and Security in Europe. He gained valuable expertise which, we have learned, is not generally available in this specialist area.

The Institute already operates as a national research collection well known and respected by academic lawyers in the UK and worldwide. The Library is available to all university staff and postgraduate research students from any university without charge and is committed to providing a national service and maintaining its specialist collections. Researchers of Commonwealth law already use the collection in considerable numbers.

The collection has attracted both additional UK use and the international attention of scholars and librarians. In the USA, the Institute is involved in a Consortium of Research Libraries task force on foreign official gazettes. The Institute Library is also participating in a microfilming project run by the Law Library Microfilm Consortium which also involves the libraries of Columbia, Harvard and Yale law schools, Los Angeles County Law Library and sevral others. As another example, arising from a recent enquiry about the collection, we have been able to assist a law revision project in Anguilla. We hope to be able to assist many more researchers in future.

The online catalogue contains everything added to the Library since 1981 and considerable amounts of earlier acquisitions. Under this grant hitherto uncatalogued materials were added to the online catalogue. However, the Institute Library still has much research material, some unique and some not available elsewhere in Europe, which appears only in the card catalogues. It is a matter of regret that law in general was not eligible for funds for retrospective cataloguing in the original round of funding. A further bid will be made to the Funding Councils to enable us to complete our online catalogue in the near future.