Introduction to the Project

The FLAG development project ran from August 1999 to October 2002. The project aimed to

• improve access to foreign, comparative and international legal materials available within United Kingdom libraries,
• lay the foundations for the development of a collection development policy, which will ensure a full collection of the world's law, is available to researchers within the UK.

The main output of the project has been the creation of a prototype web database providing a gateway to foreign, international and comparative law collections held within UK university and national libraries. The database describes the contents of each collection and provides searching by:

• country (jurisdiction) or the name of an international organisation
• the type of legal literature
• the regional location in the UK of contributing libraries
• and provides links to the web catalogues of contributing libraries

The project lead institution is the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library , University of London (IALS).

The project partners are: the Bodleian Law Library , University of Oxford; the British Library ; the Squire Law Library , University of Cambridge; and the School of Oriental and African Studies Library , University of London.

The project has ascertained the nature and extent of the collections of the five core partner libraries. In the second stage participation was extended to all other appropriate UK university libraries and the national libraries of Scotland and Wales. Finally, further relevant libraries outside the Higher Education sector were invited to contribute. The design and content of the database has been assisted by the results of a survey carried out during Summer 2000. Academics and law librarians across the UK were asked about their research needs for foreign, comparative and international law materials. The report of the survey will be found in the Activities section of the project web site.

IALS is a partner in the development of Intute: Law (formerly the Social Science Information Gateway), supplying law content for a gateway to law on the Internet. The FLAG web guide will supplement and be associated with the Intute initiative.

The project has been financed by The Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP), which, in turn, is financed by the UK higher education funding bodies. The British Library is providing additional support, as are other academic institutions including, particularly, the core partner libraries, noted above.

FLAG is the Collaborative Collection Management Project for Foreign, Comparative and International Legal Materials and is one of twelve collaborative collection management projects in a variety of subjects supported by the RSLP.

The development of FLAG was financed by the Research Support Libraries Programme