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State Collections Being Relocated and Where to Find Them

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The following is a guest post by Margaret Wood, Legal Reference Specialist in our Public Services Directorate.

Here in the Law Library Reading Room we are continuing our work to relocate certain collections in preparation for the Reading Room Remodeling.  The purpose of this post is to give everyone an update about the collections currently being removed and also to provide information about various other sources for the equivalent information.

We have begun to remove the U.S. statutory codes and the state administrative codes for most of the 50 states from the Reading Room.  There is a list of those state codes which we are retaining at the bottom of this post.  We have just begun this work and have so far only removed the statutory codes for Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas and Arizona.

The statutory codes are subject compilations of the laws passed by state legislatures, while the state administrative codes are regulations issued by state agencies.  Current state statutory and administrative codes can be found online through the Law Library’s Guide to Law Online.  The free online versions of state codes can be found under the relevant state – the link for the statutory code will usually be the first item under the Legislative section heading while state administrative codes can be found under the Executive section of a state’s page.  The LexisNexis Library Express database also provides access to state statutory and administrative codes.  However, as this is a legal subscription database it can only be accessed by patrons who visit our Reading Room in person.

The Law Library of Congress also has an extensive collection of superseded state statutory codes available in microfiche.  This collection dates back to the early 1900s and comes forward through 2009.  The Law Library’s Microform Reading Room is part of the Law Library Reading Room and provides access to a large variety of materials in microfiche and microfilm.  The Law Library also has microform readers which allow users to scan microform material and create digital copies of materials which they can email to themselves or download to a flashdrive.

Finally, as we mentioned in an earlier post about the relocation of other collections, patrons who are visiting the Law Library can always order copies of materials which have been relocated either in-person or through the Automated Call Slip (ACS) System.

State Codes Remaining in the Reading Room

  • California
  • Delaware
  • District of Columbia
  • Florida
  • Maryland
  • Massachusetts
  • New Jersey
  • New York
  • Pennsylvania
  • Texas
  • Virginia
  • West Virginia

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