Access to Foreign and International Law Journals: Indexing, Scanning – Some Suggestions for the Harvard Collection

Abstract

As a result of my work on the Australasian Legal Literature Index (ALLI) at Monash University, Melbourne, I was invited to the Harvard Law Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to assess their foreign and international law journal collection and to set up a system to index the journals in the collection that were not indexed elsewhere. The primary purpose of my study was to identify the problems and to attempt to provide solutions. The project metamorphosed into evaluating the basic current awareness needs of the Harvard Law School Faculty and finding a solution for providing access to the journal collection. An indication of the enormity of the task is to compare the holdings of the Harvard foreign and international law collection, (some 4,000 journals), to the some 500 publications indexed by the Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals, the major U.S. index to foreign materials.