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April 30, 2008
English Medieval Legal Documents Wiki from USC
Senior Law Librarian, Hazel Lord at University of Southern California has created an amazing research tool, using a wiki, English Medieval Legal Documents A.D. 600 - A.D. 1535: A Compilation of Published Sources.
According to Lord the classic bibliographies of law during these time periods are at least fifty years old and since that time many important archives have been digitized and are now available online, either free or from subscription databases. Using a wiki makes this a fluid, organic document which can grow along with the knowledge in this field since it can be instantly updated. First made available in February of this year, this wiki has had 72,000 hits in its first two months. Lord envisioned a project of about 200 records but the database as grown to nearly 1,000 records.
The wiki is well designed, starting with broad categories such as case law, statutory law and administrative law but also includes sections on early legal treatises, research guides and bibliographies. Navigating around the wiki is simple with main subject category links available from every page. There is a search function which is also available from every page and which ranks search results by relevance. Where possible, OCLC record numbers are linked to items so users can easily locate materials in WorldCat. LibX makes this feature that much easier when using FireFox, since you get the MGetIt icon and link back to Mirlyn or online databases.
Posted by swortman at April 30, 2008 04:54 PM