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 winter, the Law Library of Congress celebrated a significant milestone for the foreign legal gazettes collection with over 30,000 gazette issues now available online. Additionally, we added three new foreign legal gazette collections for Argentina, Chile, and Rwanda. This recap continues our quarterly series from fall 2023, summer 2023, spring 2023, and winter 2023.
The new collection of the Official Gazette of the Argentine Republic includes 3,295 issues in Spanish spanning 1952-1979. This gazette title includes multiple secciones containing legislation and official notices, judicial notices, commercial and civil notices, and patent and trademark registrations. All PDFs in the collection have been indexed for full text searchability. For example, users can search for “farmaceuticas” in the website search box to locate relevant issues in the collection.
The new collection of the Official Journal of the Republic of Chile includes 3,115 gazette issues in Spanish spanning 1976-2011. This gazette title includes main issues, extraordinary issues, and multiple cuerpo sections. The content spans laws and regulations, judicial publications, administrative notices, presidential addresses, industrial property bulletins, special bicentennial celebration issues, and more. All pdfs in the collection have been indexed for full text searchability. For example, users can search across the gazette collection for Corte de Apelaciones de Santiago using the native Spanish language of this gazette.
Finally, the most recently released collection of the Official Gazette of the Republic of Rwanda includes 175 new issues spanning 2017-2020. This gazette includes main issues as well as special issues. As further background, this gazette is published in three parallel titles including in the native Bantu language of Rwanda called Kinyarwanda as well as in French and English. Like the previous gazettes mentioned, all PDFs in the collection have been indexed for full text searchability. For example, users can search across the gazette collection for the term Minisiteri y’Ubutaka n’Amashyamba using the native Kinyarwanda in the gazette text. Users can also search for issue enumeration in all three languages such as searching for the specific issue Umwaka wa 57, Idasanzwe No. yo ku wa 8 Ugushyingo 2018 in Kinyarwanda using the search box. The Law Library is pleased to assist our researchers with user-friendly, multi-language search ability.
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: Botswana, Eritrea, Kenya, Niger, and Rwanda.
Oceania: New Caledonia and Cook Islands.
Southeastern Asia: Philippines.
Central and South America: Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Suriname, Venezuela, Paraguay, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Grenada, and the Dominican Republic.
North America: Canadian province of Saskatchewan, and the Mexican states of Coahuila de Zaragoza, Jalisco, and Colima.
Europe: Italy.
Current total: 31 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 Law Library’s Collections Services Division, the Library of Congress Digital Collections Management and Services Division, and former and recent participants of our Remote Legal Gazette Volunteer/Internship program.
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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