A Review of Our Canada Holdings

From its beginnings, LLMC has always had a strong Canadian presence. Even in our film era, a big reason for our ability to slog on was the strong and consistent support of the Canadian academic law library community.

The support was not only monetary. Diana Priestley, one of the giants of Canadian law librarianship, and, during the period in question, Director at the University of Victor-ia Law Library, was an active bibliographic contributor. With her help LLMC built in microfiche the most complete collections ever assembled of Canada’s federal and provincial session laws, statutory revisions, and out-of-copyright case reports. Another contributor of bibliographic expertise for several projects, and a generous source of hardcopy for filming purposes, was Balfour Halevy, longtime Director at York University Law Library. Balfour’s interest was so high that he even served a term on the LLMC Board of Direc-tors.

In our digital era, Canadian libraries and governmental units comprise the second big-gest group of LLMC subscribers, comprising roughly 10% of our library members. And their patrons are no slouches. Several times a year LLMC compiles a report of usage among our library members. In every quarter since these records have been kept, Canadian libraries rank among the top ten users of LLMC-Digital. In one recent report they ranked five among ten.

Given the above, it would seem appropriate to report occasionally on what we have been able to do for our Canadian colleagues with regard to the digitization and preservation of their own legal materials.

Here are some summary statistics. In our fiche era we preserved over 16,000 volumes of Canadian materials on film. That took almost three decades. In our short digital era, nine years and counting, we already have migrated online some 422 Canadian titles on over 7,050 volumes in 4,230,632 page ima-ges. Of course, compared to our fiche totals, there’s still a way to go. But we keep chip-ping away and the trajectory is promising. As in our fiche career, our aspiration is global. We fully intend to build the most complete collection of primary Canadian legal material offered anywhere.

As always, we could use your help. The inventory of our current Canadian offerings is provided in the LLMC Titles-Offered List attached, lines 1648-2071. If your library has a Canadian title that is not yet offered, why not consider offering it for addition to the online collection? It will still be in your library, but in digital, searchable format, and we’ll take care of the paper preservation problem for you forever.