Volume 27, Issue 1

The appearance of this issue of the International Journal of Legal Information coincides almost exactly with the 40th anniversary of the founding of the International Association of Law Libraries. In June, 1959, a group of law librarians with long established personal interests in international law librarianship met in New York, with the goal of establishing an organization that would facilitate their work and bring law librarians around the world in closer contact. Professor William R. Roalfe of Northwestern University Law School in Chicago was elected the first President of the new Association, and Mr. K. Howard Drake of the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, the Vice President. A report summarizing the organizational meeting was prepared by Adolf Sprudzs of the University of Chicago Law Library, who subsequently devoted much of his career to international law librarianship and particularly to the work of the Association, including serving two terms as its President (see appendix). For a recent history of the Association, please see the article by Mr. Sprudzs in The Law Librarian , volume 26 at page 321, 1995.

During a panel organized by the American Society of International Law entitled Global Networks, New Technologies and International Law , Roberta Balstad Miller, of the Consortium for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN), spoke of the “anarchic” internet. It has no priorities. It makes no judgments. It treats every piece of information like any other. As a result, systems for managing electronic information are required that will permit users to search for (and find) materials relevant to their needs. However, the very flexibility of the Internet, and in particular the Web, that allows individuals and organizations to share electronic materials easily also creates, in turn, new problems for users. They must be able to: identify online materials that originate in a broad variety of organizations; depend on their being available over time; and evaluate the quality of the materials and organization that produce them.

The following bibliography continues, in an expanded and updated version, the one with the same title published earlier in these pages. The purpose remains the same: to give the non-Scandinavian language speaker an opportunity to follow the legal developments within the last decade in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The work primarily includes books, essays, reports and articles published between 1989 and 1998, but it also wants to point the reader to general works such as comparative treatises, encyclopedias and looseleaf works, where legal information about the Nordic countries also can be found. The bibliography reflects what has been received at the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law during this period, and makes no claim to be comprehensive.