>> Barbara Bavis:
Hello everyone.
My name is Barbara Bavis,
and I'm the Bibliographic and
Research Instruction Librarian
here at the Law Library
of Congress.
I want to talk to you today about
the Law Library of Congress's
legal research guides.
In late 2018 early 2019, the
Library of Congress launched
guides.loc.gov, a new repository
for the library's research guides.
This was part of an attempt
to provide a consistent
user interface for all research
guides throughout the library.
The Law Library has been
a leader in this effort.
We currently have over
300 guides on different topics
and we're creating
new guides all the time.
These are curated and organized
collections of resources on a
given topic, also
called subject guides.
As a librarian, I use research
guides every day to help answer
patrons questions.
For example, I might refer
a patron to the following
research guides on our website.
How to find free
case law online?
If they're at home and
they need to find federal
and or state
case law on a topic.
Federal Statutes:
A Beginner's Guide,
if they want more information
about the laws passed by Congress.
Compiling a Federal Legislative
History: A Beginner's Guide,
if they want to delve deeper
into the committee materials
and floor debate created during
the passage of a federal statute.
And Public International
Law: A Beginner's Guide,
if they want to find more
information about treaties,
international governmental
organizations
like the United Nations or
international customary law.
Research guides are a big time
saver when researching
a new topic, because helpful
resources are consolidated
and you don't have to spend time
going through hundreds of
different resources.
Here's a screen capture
of the front page
for the Law Library's
Research Guides collection.
The URL is in the upper left
hand corner of the slide.
As mentioned before, all Library
of Congress research guides
are available at
guides.loc.gov.
If at any time, you want to
backtrack to see all of the
guides produced throughout
the Library of Congress, you can
simply click on the Research
Guides breadcrumb link in the
top left hand side of each
Research Guides page.
You can search the Law Library
research guides in multiple ways.
You can browse all of the guides
by their subject headings.
Simply click on By Subject
and then click on the
plus symbol next to any subject
of interest to open up an
alphabetical list of links
to guides on that subject.
For example, we have opened up
the American Law menu to see
a list of all the guides that
have American law
as one of their main topics.
If I were to click on the
All Guides link instead of the
By Subject link, I could see an
alphabetical list of all of the
Law Library's over 300 guides.
Or you can do a keyword search
that will search within
the Law Library's
collection of guides.
Let's see what that looks like.
Here, I performed a search for
the phrase 'legislative history'
using the keyword search
on the Law Library
Research Guides home page.
This performs a search of
each page in each guide
in the Law Library's collection.
So it makes sense that our top
three results, sorted by
relevancy, would be
from the compiling of
Federal Legislative History:
A Beginner's Guide guide.
If I were interested in any
result in this list, I could
click on either the page title
to be taken directly to that
page in the guide, or the
guide title to be taken to the
landing page for that guide.
If I had too many results and I
wanted to narrow them down,
all I would have to do is select
guide subject headings
and or tags to focus my results.
Here I have clicked on the
first page result in the list.
The Locating a Compiled Federal
Legislative History page
in the compiling of
Federal Legislative History:
A Beginner's Guide guide.
Notice that you can see a
clickable table of contents
on the left hand side of each
guide page, with links to the
different pages
included in the guide.
In addition, most guides will
provide information about how to
find helpful resources in
print, in free online resources,
and in subscription resources,
among other options.
A quick note here,
if you are interested
in a subscription resource
but are not in one of the Library
of Congress buildings,
you will likely not be
able to access it from home.
We suggest contacting your
local library to see
if they have access
to the resource.
One of our most popular
guide collections
is the Guide to Law Online.
This is a portal with over
9000 links to legal resources.
Think of it as a bibliography
of legal resources
organized by
jurisdiction or region.
Although the Library of
Congress is part of
the federal government, it
doesn't have only federal law.
As you can see, the Guide to
Law Online includes collections
of links for legal materials
regarding foreign
nations and territories,
as well as legal resources for
U.S. states and territories.
You can access the Guide
to Law online collections,
either through the subject
headings on the Law Library
Research Guides by Subject
page, or by visiting the
Law Library's website, law.gov.
Selecting researcher resources
from the top menu and then
Guide to Law online from
the side menu that appears.
We have also included
the direct URL
for this page on
the screen as well.
Clicking either of
the links on this page to
Nations of the World
or United States
will take you to
an alphabetical list
of links to guides
in these collections.
Here is a sample state page.
Now I use state generally because
I'm using Virginia as an example.
And I know Virginia
is a commonwealth.
But here is the Guide to
Law Online page for
Virginia Resources. Generally,
state governments are organized
like the federal government
with executive, legislative,
and judicial branches.
Along with information from
different government branches,
the Guide to Law Online
also lists legal guides.
Legal guides or
resources generally
created by law school libraries
or legal scholars to give an
overview of doing legal research
in a specific state
or jurisdiction.
Each of these categories of
information is found in the
table of contents of the guide on
the left hand side of the screen.
If you were to select a
Guide to Law Online page
from the Nations of the World
collection, the organization
will largely be the same with
pages for the Constitution or
constitutional law, the
executive, judicial and
legislative branches,
legal guides and general sources
about the nation of interest.
Thank you for your interest
in the Law Library of
Congress's research guides.
If you have any further
questions about this collection
or any other collection
that you see on law.gov,
please do not hesitate to ask us
via the Ask a Librarian link
on your screen. Thank you.