The following is a guest post by Shameema Rahman, Legal Reference Specialist in our Public Services Directorate.
The Law Library’s Multinational Collections Database is now the Global Legal Information Catalog (GLIC). GLIC is a research tool for the Library of Congress Collections that interfaces with our library catalog.
Why do you need to use it? Say you are looking for the law of a particular country and you had searched the library’s catalog. If you type the jurisdiction and subject as the key terms, your search will only retrieve materials exclusively written on that jurisdiction. However, there are publications on comparative law and publications that include the laws of multiple jurisdictions available at the Law Library. Just using a library catalog search will not retrieve those items.
A benefit of GLIC is that you no longer need to open a book to find the list of jurisdictions included. Do you want to know about publications that cover Canadian law? Just click on Canada. Interested in a different jurisdiction? You can then select the jurisdiction of interest. You can also browse by all subjects available. Remember, you can limit your search by subject and/or, author/authors. You can search multiple subjects and multiple jurisdictions at the same time.
Currently, most of the publications in the GLIC database are written in the English language but we are in the process of adding items published in other languages. The database includes a couple of hundred legal publications. Identifying the titles, selecting those for the database, and finally, adding them to the database takes time. I, along with my co-workers, have been working very hard to identify publications for the database, consulting our over 2.56 million item collection. We are hoping to add at least 4,000 items to the database as soon as possible. To learn more about the size of our collection, read Did You Say Bigger Than A Football Field?
Publications listed in this database are held at the Law Library of Congress. The LC classification number and the location in the library where the publications are housed are provided in each listing, as well as the library catalog record. Simply select the control number to see the Library’s catalog record.
If you would like to be alerted when new books are added to GLIC, subscribe to one of the many RSS feeds. In addition to the main GLIC RSS feed, there are feeds for each subject and jurisdiction so you can be alerted to exactly what interests you.
Comments (5)
This is an invaluable service. Thank you!
Awesome. Definitely will be sharing at work!