LLMC Digital Makes Haitian Legal Collection A Priority

Below is the text of a February 2, 2010 e-mail to IALL from LLMC's Director of Content Development, Jerry Dupont:

Dear IALL Colleagues:

On the theory of everybody doing what they can, we at LLMC have decided that the most immediate contribution that we can make is to give priority to assembling a comprehensive Haiti legal collection and bringing it online as quickly as possible. So we will be giving this project priority during the first half of 2010, and hope to have the bulk of the titles becoming available later in the year.

As a start on targeting materials, we have worked with the staff of the Columbia Law Library (CLL) to survey their collection and get a handle on the available materials. CLL has 296 titles for Haiti, of which at least 177 are in the public domain. An additional 51 titles are by public-spirited organizations such as Amnesty International, and we expect a fair degree of success in receiving copyright release for most of these. This, plus some titles we expect to obtain from LC, means that we can have a very substantive collection of well over 200 law and law-related titles available as a foundation upon which the Haiti libraries can build as they engage in their recovery work.

We also hope that access to this collection on LLMC-Digital will help to educate Americans and others about their tangled history with Haiti. This may contribute to the mutual understanding that will be vital for Haitian recovery over the long haul.

Despite the combined resources of CLL and LC, there will undoubtedly be unique items held by other libraries that would be valuable additions to this emerging collection. If you think that your library has some such, please consider loaning your materials for inclusion. We would treat your materials very kindly and return them in substantially the same condition received. A tentative spreadsheet listing all of the target titles is available upon request to me at LLMC. If you are interested, you might want to wait until about mid-March before making your request, since I expect to have a more complete list compiled by then.

Best wishes,

Jerry

Jerry Dupont, Asso. Dir. for Content Development
Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC)
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