Acuiring a Unique Part of Cuba Gazette
One of the major donors of print materials to LLMC for scanning purposes is the New York Law Institute (NYLI). That great library is prudently preparing for an impending future under much less favorable lease terms in the high-rent Wall Street district. Their principal strategy is to seriously downsize their print holdings in deference to digital. Naturally, LLMC has been a willing partner in the NYLI conversion efforts. To date this partnership has resulted in over 32,000 vols. of high-value law and governance content being made available to the patrons of LLMC-Digital.3 Quite apart from the quantity of books involved, the NYLI gifts have been of especially high value to the LLMC-Digital project because all of them were eligible for disbinding and economical high-speed scanning. Thus, through this partnership, LLMC has been able to provide its members with much greater return for their dues than it would have been able to had these thousands of books been loans. 4
Recently, while an LLMC staff member was touring the NYLI library premises to negotiate the next tranch of donations for scanning, he came across a title that had never been cataloged. Apparently mis-shelved in the Polish collection were nine folio volumes of the Gazeta de la Habana covering the years 1899-1902. The Gazeta is the official gazette for Cuba. The span 1899-1902 exactly covers the period of U.S. occupation of Cuba subsequent to Spanish colonial rule; from the end of the Spanish-American War to Cuban independence. These valuable journals chronicle the birth of Cuba as a nation. Due to NYLI’s generosity, they will soon be offered as one of the crown jewels in the emerging LLMC-Digital Cuba Collection.
__________________________________
3 The bulk of the book donations have been bread-and-butter U.S. federal and state primary materials. In addition, however, LLMC’s foreign and com-parative law holdings have been significantly en-hanced through the gift of many volumes of primary law for other countries and the full NYLI collection of the Foreign Relations Papers of the United States.
4 Of course, all of the NYLI books go to LLMC’s dark-archive storage facilities in the Hutchinson, KS, salt mines. Some potential donors may find it useful to know that, for all of these NYLI volumes, LLMC is legally only a bailee. NYLI retains formal ownership in their print materials, with the explicit legal right to reclaim them at will. While that option is not likely to be acted upon anytime soon, it did solve some internal political problems for NYLI. Other potential donors should know that LLMC willingly and routinely enters into this sort of arrangement whenever it may be useful for the donating library.
4