# Debuting the Internal Legal Report Archive: Historical Legal Reports from the Law Library of Congress

For nearly a century, the Law Library of Congress has produced thousands of research reports on a wide range of legal topics, with particular emphasis on foreign, comparative, and international law. Prior to the Legal Report Archive project, this trove of historical research and analysis was not easily accessible to users. Many paper reports lay hidden on shelves, while digital reports were buried in an internal shared drive, with no standard file naming convention, very little metadata enrichment, and existed in outdated file formats. In late 2019, the Law Library began a multi-year effort to inventory, archive, and share many legal reports (both paper and born-digital) with researchers and other members of the public, resulting in significant growth of the Publications of the Law Library of Congress collection to over 1,600 reports, and the ongoing success of a crowdsourcing transcription campaign with By the People. During this fellowship, Michael Mellifera focused on developing an internal content management system to make non-public legal reports more discoverable so that foreign legal specialists could consult this institutional knowledge. As of July 2021, Mellifera has added 2,000 born-digital reports to Confluence, an internal collaboration workspace, and created new supplementary navigation systems and functionalities to boost accessibility.

- Kind: Talk
- Year: 2021
- By: Library Of Congress
- Genres: History
- Archive: [Library of Congress](https://www.loc.gov/item/2024697558/)
- Licence or status: Rights statement at the Library of Congress (as the archive states it)
- Credit: Library of Congress
- Who can watch: Tweens profiles and older (the archive gives no rating; placed by Invisible Network from its collection and subjects)

[Watch now](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/watch/archive/loc/2024697558?play=1)