The Law Library of Congress and GPO Collaborate on Cataloging Historical Legal Reports

The Law Library of Congress and GPO are collaborating on a multi-year project to catalog thousands of digitized and born-digital historical legal reports. The Law Library of Congress is digitizing the reports, and GPO’s Library Technical Services (LTS) is cataloging the reports that will be made available online.

The Law Library of Congress wrote these reports on foreign, comparative, and international law issues for Congress and other Federal agencies. The Law Library of Congress posted a description of the project and the reports on their blog, In Custodia Legis. On March 20, 2020, the Law Library of Congress made the first batch of 250 digitized reports available through their Publications of the Law Library of Congress collection. Future batches of historical reports will include both digitized reports as well as older born-digital reports that have not previously been made available online.

The Law Library of Congress and LTS jointly developed the cataloging plan. The Law Library of Congress creates preliminary MARC records for each report and provides them to GPO. LTS staff members complete the records in OCLC and export them to the Catalog of U.S. Government Publications (CGP). After cataloging an entire group of reports, LTS will post a file of the records on the CGP on GitHub repository.

LTS has cataloged a sample of ten records and added them to the CGP. The records may be retrieved by this search in expert mode: wlts=LCLAWLIB

If you have any questions about the project or the bibliographic records, please submit an inquiry via askGPO using the category, Federal Depository Libraries, and the sub-category, Cataloging.