Working Group on Collaborative Collection Development of Foreign Legal Materials

WORKING GROUP ON COLLABORATIVE COLLECTION DEVELOPMENT OF FOREIGN LEGAL MATERIALS

Thursday 12th October 2000, 14.00-16.30 Maps Seminar Room, British Library St Pancras Building

Present: Jules Winterton (JW), Lesley Young (LY) and Jennifer Jones (JJ), Institute of Advanced Legal Studies Library; Andrew Smith (AS), Jennie Grimshaw (JG) and Janet Zmroczek (JZ), British Library.

1 IALS Collection Policy.

JW explained that the IALS selection policy was very focused. The collection defined by form of publication includes: primary and secondary legislation, official gazettes (legal sections only retained for common law jurisdictions), law reports, digests, academic and practitioner journals, legal codes and commentaries on them, research level monographs, judicial and criminal statistics, law reform commissions’ reports, and inter-governmental organisations’ publications (selectively). IALS also has significant collections of historical materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and purchases legal history monographs. The unique Foreign and Commonwealth Office collection of Commonwealth legislation is held on deposit.

The following subject/form categories are excluded: Parliamentary debates, draft legislation, social aspects of crime and political material, especially works relating to party politics.

All University of London colleges have some specialist collections in addition to their undergraduate provision. By long-standing agreements within the University of London, other colleges have responsibility for the following aspects/jurisdictions:

University College London – legal philosophy; Roman law University College London (having taken over from BLPES) – formerly collected material on socialist legal systems of central and eastern Europe in the vernacular. UCL still collects Russian law, but has de facto dropped the other countries. IALS has recently begun to collect more legal materials from some eastern and central Europe countries and the Baltic States in translation. SOAS – religious and customary systems of law, eg Islamic law; legal materials from non-Commonwealth African and Asian countries.

Other specialist collections include Intellectual Property and some other aspects of international commercial law at Queen Mary College and social and political material related to law at BLPES. BLPES and Queen Mary are European Documentation Centres and BLPES is a depository library for a variety of international organisations and the USGPO.

2 British Library Collection Policy JG explained that responsibility for the collection of foreign legal materials for the London reference collections resided with the Language Departments. Curators were expert in the language and culture of the countries for which they were responsible, but were not law librarians. The extent to which legal materials were collected varied widely, with some sections being more active than others. The completeness of the collection had been adversely affected by: 1) the breakdown of exchange agreements in the late 1980s; 2) mass cancellation of serial subscriptions due to financial constraints throughout the 1990s; and 3) supply problems due to political and economic turmoil in some countries.

AS explained that collecting for the Document Supply Centre was de facto demand-led and defined by medium, with different departments selecting serials, monographs and special materials. The latter included government documents and report literature. The collection had also been adversely affected by financial constraints, which had led to the mass cancellation of low-use serials. Holdings were patchy and inconsistent, with many broken serial runs. The DSC collection was not, and had never been intended to be, a balanced research collection. BLDSC does not generally attempt to cover primary legal materials e.g. legislation and law reports.

3 IALS Inter-Library Loan Scheme

JW explained that IALS was not a back-up library for the BL Document Supply Centre. It accepted BLDSC forms but also ran its own schemes. These were available at differential rates for subscribers and occasional users from non-subscribing practitioners, and individual academics . The premium service offered to subscribing law firms generated significant income. Demand from requests on BLDSC forms and from academics had fallen and IALS was in a position to handle more business and could offer expertise in sorting out inaccurate citations. Although the services offered by BLDSC and IALS were to a certain extent complementary, AS felt that the potential for co- operation between IALS and the DSC was limited:

 DSC could offer a referral service for failed requests but would charge for it  Access to the DSC ZETOC service might enable IALS to cancel some non-core serial titles.

3 Access Arrangements

JW explained that access to the IALS Library was free to academics and post- graduate research students worldwide. Undergraduates were not admitted. Business people and private individuals were charged for access at a daily rate. Subscribing law firms purchased access rights for their members. He felt that automatic admission for BL passholders was undesirable as some existing customers might use this as a means of evading charges, thus reducing IALS’ income. It might be more feasible for IALS to supply documents for consultation in the St Pancras reading rooms on request. Preliminary discussions had already taken place between IALS, Bodleian and Squire libraries regarding document supply by Ariel for material subject to collaborative purchase agreements.

4 Future Work

It was agreed that the following future work should be undertaken:

 The feasibility of collaboration in the collection of official gazettes should be further explored. It was proposed that the BL should acquire gazettes for European countries comprehensively to allow IALS to drop them, or co-ordinate its purchases with IALS, and that participation in the CRL strategy for official gazettes should be explored. Action: JW will supply JG with a title list and bibliographic details of European gazettes. JG will then check BL holdings for currency and completeness. To facilitate the filling of gaps in the BL holdings, JW will supply to JG more information about the on-going CRL programme for microfilming official gazettes in the US, specifically a catalogue of what is available for sale.

 The feasibility of collaboration in the coverage of legal materials from central and eastern Europe should be explored. BL could collect material in the vernacular while IALS would concentrate on translations. For the collaboration to work the BL would need 1) institutional commitment to continued funding and 2) detailed guidance on what to buy, which might come from websites (eg llrx.com), from exchange partners and from advice by IALS staff. It was agreed that BL staff would not be expected to translate legal documents, but would refer enquirers to professional translators. Action: JW will produce an outline description of work required for each jurisdiction to establish master lists of publications.

 The overlap between DSC and IALS law serial titles should be examined to see if duplication could be reduced. Action: AS will supply JW with a list of legal serials ranked by use for his consideration and comment.

 Formal methods of filtering ILL requests from DSC to IALS should be investigated. Action: AS/JW

 The scope for development through BIALL of joint BL/IALS training courses in central and east European law should be considered. Training would be free to BL/IALS staff and offered on a charged basis to other institutions. Action: JG/JW to develop a brief proposal for BIALL

Next Meeting The group will meet again in late January 2001. JG will canvas dates when the minutes are circulated.