The following is a guest post by Michael Mellifera, a digital collection specialist in the Digital Resources Division at the Law Library of Congress.
This summer, the Law Library of Congress has added four new foreign legal gazette collections to our website for the countries of the Philippines, Burkina Faso, Kenya, and Botswana. This recap continues our quarterly series from spring 2023, fall 2022, and winter 2023.
The new collection of the Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines includes 366 gazette issues in English spanning 1987 to 2022. The Law Library is pleased to expand its gazette offerings in Southeast Asia to reflect the global scale of its print collections. The Philippines gazette includes main issues as well as supplements to the gazette. All PDFs are full-text searchable so users can search across the collection to connect with issues of interest, such as searching for the Filipino term Mga Alituntunin Kagawaran in the search box of the website.
The new collection of Journal Officiel du Burkina Faso includes 473 issues in French spanning 1994-2021. The Burkina Faso gazette contains main issues as well as special editions. This Burkina Faso online collection offers English subject keywords at the issue level that reflect the legal topics covered in each issue to make it easier for users to find content of topical interest to their research.
The new collection of The Kenya Gazette has over 1,000 issues in English spanning 2010-2021. This gazette contains main issues as well as supplemental material. Like the previous gazettes mentioned, all PDFs are full-text searchable, for example see the results of this sample search for Bungasi, an administrative area in Kenya.
Finally, the new collection of the Government Gazette of Botswana has over 480 issues in English spanning 2015-2021 and two of these issues are from 1966 when the territory was a historical jurisdiction called the Bechuanaland Protectorate of the United Kingdom. The Republic of Botswana became an independent republic and democratic self-government on 30 September 1966. All PDFs are full text searchable, again, so users can search all issues for Kgalagadi, for example, a district in southwest Botswana.
Freely available gazettes from around the world in the Foreign Legal Gazette Collection include:
Northern African and Western Asia: Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, and Dubai.
Western and Central Africa: Gabon, Cabo Verde, and Burkina Faso.
Eastern and Southern Africa: Eritrea, Kenya, Niger, and Botswana.
Southeastern Asia: Philippines
Oceania: New Caledonia and Cook Islands.
The Americas: Ecuador, Suriname, Venezuela, Paraguay, Guatemala, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and the Mexican states of Coahuila de Zaragoza, Jalisco, and Colima.
Current total: 22 jurisdictions
The Law Library’s online database and webinar recording are great tools to help navigate our gazette holdings. The Digital Resources Division is grateful to all of our partners in this project, including our colleagues in the Collections Services Division, the Digital Collections Management and Services Division, and former and recent participants of our Remote Legal Gazette Volunteer/Internship program for working on these legal jurisdictions and more.
We will continue to add new foreign legal gazettes as the Law Library digitizes its physical collections, subject to copyright restrictions. Subscribe to the blog below to stay updated when we have more releases!
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