One of the most important and useful law-and-governance titles for a Civil Law jurisdiction like Haiti is its official gazette or journal. The official gazette for a civil law country is the principal vehicle for promulgating its laws, subsidiary legislation, and other governmental enactments. Therefore, from the onset of its special, post-earthquake, collection building project for Haiti, LLMC has been chipping away at aggregating a full online run of this essential title.
It has not been easy. As our colleagues who specialize in foreign and comparative law know well, few libraries have access to the official gazettes of any of the civil law countries. Moreover, those few that do have some of these titles often hold only partial runs. So we knew from the start that assembling a full, online run of the gazette for a poor country like Haiti would be a challenge. The formal title for Haiti’s official gazette is Le Moniteur; Journal Officiel de la Republique D’Haiti. It started publication in 1844. This means that our target run spans 169 years.
Over the past four years LLMC has acquired access to portions of the title from four law libraries: Columbia, LC, Michigan, and Tulane. By merging their incomplete runs we were able to assemble full volumes for 34 years and partial volumes for another 9. This is a worthy start to be sure. But, at only 22% of goal, it’s woefully short of a full run. It was starting to look like this project was going to involve a very long and tedious trek.
Then, in late August of last year, things took a remarkable turn for the better when a wonderful opportunity surfaced. It was then that we got our first inkling that the U.S. Embassy in Port au Prince was downsizing its library and was prepared to donate a very substantial run of Le Moniteur to a “responsible public repository.” We could hardly believe our good luck. The embassy’s run is complete from 1 Jan. 1900 to 31 Dec. 1999; 100 years covering close to half of Haiti’s history as an independent nation.
Of course, actually making the donation happen took a tad of bureaucratic maneuvering.1 The U.S. State Department had its own idea of what constituted a “responsible public repository.” It passed on several early institutional candidates. The scheme that eventually passed muster will work out as follows. The full 100-year run of Le Moniteur will be donated via a property grant from the State Department Office of Public Diplomacy to the Tulane University’s Law Library.2 Tulane has committed to guaranteeing the paper’s permanent preservation, its perpetual access to scholars, and the loan of all needed volumes to LLMC for scanning purposes. This latter will ensure that the full run can be offered to the world online via LLMC-Digital and the Digital Library of the Caribbean.
It is anticipated that the embassy books will be shipped directly to Tulane Law Library in the next few months. After receipt and processing, the necessary gap-filler volumes will be shipped to LLMC in Hawaii for careful step-and-repeat scanning. Judging from the quality of the paper in the volumes that we received from the four libraries that helped us assemble our current partial run, we anticipate that the full scanning project will go slowly and will last at least through 2014, and perhaps into the following year.
In conclusion, and on behalf of all the LLMC member libraries, we would like to express our sincere thanks to the many people, only some of whom we could mention above, who made this wonderful opportunity materialize and come to fruition.
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