Foreign Law Web Archives

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Law and government are major areas of web archiving at the Library of Congress, and feature prominently among the event and thematic collections available on loc.gov. The Law Library, which holds the largest collection of legal materials in the world, also coordinates the collection of Law websites through five significant collections: the Federal Courts Web Archive, the International Tribunals Web Archive, the Legal Blawgs Web Archive, the United States Congressional Web Archive, and the recently released Foreign Law Web Archive. These collections represent over 1,500 web archives, many of which are part of the 4,240 recently released new web archives across 43 event and thematic collections.

I spoke with Robert Brammer, Senior Legal Information Specialist at the Law Library, to learn more about the new Foreign Law Web Archive. In addition to creating web archive collections for the Law Library, Robert serves as a subject matter expert for the development of Congress.gov, built the Law Library’s Facebook Messenger chatbot, and is a member of the In Custodia Legis blog team. Robert explained that the Foreign Law Web Archive is comprised of foreign legal materials, including online gazettes and judicial websites. It is important to collect these because many foreign legal materials are now posted online, with some jurisdictions dispensing with a print publication entirely.

A screenshot of the Law.gov landing page for the Foreign Law Web Archive

A screenshot of the landing page for the Foreign Law Web Archive.

The Law Library came up with the idea for the new collection when their foreign legal specialists noted that certain jurisdictions’ legal materials are challenging to acquire or are considered at-risk of disappearing from the web. Robert worked with the experts to select jurisdictions to be collected and archived. The new collection ensures that the Law Library of Congress can continue to provide comprehensive and timely access to foreign legal materials to researchers from across the world. Indeed, the highlight of this collection isn’t any one website, but rather the spectrum of content from a diverse array of countries. Now the Library of Congress can make sure these resources will be available for future generations!

New strategy! New crowd! New team!

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Big news! We’ll launch a crowdsourcing program at the Library of Congress on October 24. We’re asking everyone to join us as we improve discovery and access across our diverse collections through transcription and tagging. The program is grounded in what we’ve learned through our previous experiences with participatory projects at the Library, including image […]

Science Blogs Web Archive

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This guest post is an interview with Lisa Massengale, Head of the Science Reference Section, with contributions by the Web Archive’s creator Jennifer Harbster, a Science Reference and Research Specialist for the Science, Technology and Business Division from Oct. 2001- Dec. 2015.  Along with her reference duties for the Library’s Science Reference Service, she created […]

Exploring Late 1800s Political Cartoons through Interactive Data Visualizations

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This is a guest blog post by Jeffrey Shen, a high-school Innovation Intern with LC Labs. Over the course of my three month internship with the LC Labs team, I developed a website/interactive data visualization which allows users to explore the late 1800s through political cartoons contained in the Cartoon Drawings collection. The main feature of […]

Piloting Digital Scholarship with the John W. Kluge Center and LC Labs

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This is a guest post from 2018 Library of Congress Labs team Junior Fellow Eileen Jakeway that discusses her work on a collaborative Digital Scholarship pilot with the John W. Kluge Center.   In her address at the 2018 Junior Fellows Program closing ceremony this August, Manuscript Division Junior Fellow Patrice Green said that she learned a […]

Inside, Inside Baseball: A Look at the Construction of the Dataset Featuring the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and the Library of Congress Digital Collections

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This is a guest blog post by visiting scholar archivist Julia Hickey who is on a professional development assignment from the Defense Media Activity to the Library of Congress Labs team. Julia has been helping us prepare for and build out a visualization of collection data for our Inside Baseball event. This post was also […]

Linking chatbots to collections for place-based storytelling

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The following is a guest post from Library of Congress Labs Innovation Intern, Charlie Moffett. In the course of crafting data-driven narratives with digital collections, he created @govislandbot and an open-source mapping tutorial. Below he shares his processes, some of the challenges he encountered, along with the code. I started my remote internship with LC Labs […]