Guide to Law Online Nations Completed!

The following is a guest post by Louis Myers and Emily Carr, senior legal reference librarians at the Law Library of Congress.

The Law Library of Congress is pleased to announce the completion of our redesigned Guide to Law Online: Nations of the World portal among our research guides.

The Guide to Law Online began in 1997 as a Law Library of Congress project, part of the Global Legal Information Network. Transferred to the Public Services Division in 1999, a team of experts (reference librarians, legal specialists, and interns) have since enhanced its content.

As with our state guides, the new redesign allows customization, from recommended bibliographic selections to highlights of the Library of Congress photos and maps collections. Our France page, for example, displays a Photochrom Print of the seven bridges of Paris.

Those of you already familiar with our states and territories pages will find that the new nations pages have a familiar design with respect to the organization and the content provided. Sub-pages of each guide include categories for constitutional, executive, judicial, and legislative resources. The nations pages also include legal guides with non-governmental sources that we found to be credible and helpful for researching each specific country. Finally, the general sources page connects researchers with resources involving laws, government information, news, and other helpful materials.

Our team of librarians and interns worked hard to identify the best government and non-government sources for each jurisdiction. However, please keep in mind that online information, especially legal information, is not as readily available globally in the same way it is in the United States. We endeavored to include the most up-to-date and reliable information we could locate, so you may notice some gaps in coverage for some jurisdictions. We also included print resources in the Law Library’s collection, which may be difficult to find in other libraries. We recommend contacting your local library for assistance with an interlibrary loan request if you are unable to visit us in Washington, D.C.

Our brilliant team of content management interns, junior fellows, and global research interns (Joanne Ferguson, with contributions from Adrian Applin, B. Braun, Jessica Craig, Claire Eldredge-Burns, Greta Heng, Natallia Karkanitsa, Rosa McGill, Mariah McGregor, Christina Marquez, Annie Naranjo, Skyelar Reel, Amanda Robb, and Lauren Shade) migrated the individual pages. Content reviews were provided by Emily and Louis, while Anna, Barbara, Beth, and Andrew offered editorial guidance. A special thanks to Jennifer González for coordinating interns and providing web redirects. Expect additional content enhancements from our legal specialists and reference librarians. Please take a look and send us your feedback!

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