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 spring, the Law Library of Congress added two new foreign legal gazette collections to our website, namely Panama and Czechia, and also released a new Bite-Sized Legal Research Tutorial featuring guidance to researchers on how to use the Foreign Legal Gazettes Guide. This recap continues our quarterly series from spring 2023, summer 2023, fall 2023, and winter 2024.
The new collection of the Official Gazette of the Republic of Panama includes 4,814 issues in Spanish spanning the years 1977-2005. This new release of reformatted microfilm issues represents a sizable contribution to the collection, and Panama is now the largest jurisdiction by issue count on our public website. All PDFs in the collection have been indexed for full text searchability. For example, users can search across the gazette collection for the Spanish search terms quinientos balboas, which is one of the official currencies of the Republic of Panama, called the Panamanian balboa (PAB), that circulates alongside the U.S. dollar.
The new collection of the Collection of Laws of the Czech Republic (now Czechia) includes 633 issues spanning the years 2019-2022. This gazette title includes main issues and annual indexes. All PDFs have been indexed for full text searchability in the native language, so users can search across the gazette collection for Czech search terms such as registrovaných léčivých to discover issues relevant to prescription medication laws for example. Users can view the image gallery of issues to consult the Czech text found on each page. The Law Library is pleased to expand its public offerings into Eastern Europe and to support diacritic searching capabilities in the native Czech language of the title.
Finally, the Law Library released a brand new Bite-Sized Legal Research Tutorial in May 2024 that provides an overview of the gazette collection and instructs users on how to use the Foreign Legal Gazettes Guide. The guide is an interactive, geographic index of the digital and physical gazette collections owned by the Law Library of Congress and provides a simplified way for users to explore catalog records from our gazette collections (including catalog records for gazettes available in the public collection). Each catalog record in the guide directs users to additional information on access, format, and comprehensive holdings/coverage. We are excited to announce that you can now watch the tutorial online.
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: Bechuanaland Protectorate, Botswana, Eritrea, Kenya, Niger, and Rwanda.
Oceania: New Caledonia and Cook Islands.
Southeastern Asia: Philippines.
Central and South America: Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Suriname, Venezuela,
Panama, 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.
Current total: 33 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 Public 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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