The following is a guest post by Dante Figueroa, Senior Legal Information Analyst at the Law Library of Congress.
In April it will be a year since I assumed new responsibilities as the Recommending Officer for our Italian, Roman, Vatican City, and Canon Law collections at the Law Library of Congress. During this time, it has been a real intellectual pleasure to review the new legal publications sent from Italy prior to their classification and cataloging.
It is also delightful to see how much visitors and patrons appreciate our legal collections. Our visitors come from very different backgrounds and from many parts of the United States and the world over. This week, for instance, Sabrina Hsu, supervisor of our Stack Services division, and I were happy to host distinguished MM. Giannicola Sinisi, Attaché for Justice Affairs, and Renato Miracco, Cultural Attaché, both from the Embassy of Italy.
Our guests took a tour of our Italian Law collections, and were able to admire many publications, including some dating back to the early seventeenth century. Mr. Sinisi, for example, was very pleased to see a book by Paolo Giocoli Nacci, Emeritus Professor at the Facultà di Giurisprudenza of the Università degli Studi di Bari, his former law school professor. Mr. Sinisi could not resist taking a photo of the book.
Mr. Sinisi enjoyed his trip to the Law Library so much that he sent us a thank you note in which he told us:
“I admire the Library of Congress. As a jurist, I always can find something to learn at the Law Library. When I am there, although I am Italian, I don’t feel myself as a foreigner, but fully included into the scope and the project of the Library to provide a unique source of culture for all mankind. The universalism of the Library makes me part of that. Thank you.”
Comments like this make our work tremendously enjoyable and help us renew our commitment to assist all our visitors and researchers. We hope you will also seek to explore our prestigious and immense collection of Italian Law materials and our collections from around the world.