Current Collecting Practices
The information resources of the Harvard Law School Library exist primarily to serve the research and instructional needs of the faculty and students of the Harvard Law School and Harvard University. The Library also serves as a resource for the international community of scholars and for the legal profession of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States.
The Library provides access in a variety of ways to the information resources that are required by its current faculty and students or that it believes may reasonably be required in the future. In many cases this access is assured by purchasing materials and adding them to the Library's collections of books, serials, or microforms. In other cases, access is provided by means of a contract to search an external database such as Lexis or Westlaw. In still other cases, the Library provides access by entering into licensing agreements for information available over the Internet. And finally, the Library has established consortial and resource sharing arrangements with other libraries, to ensure access to materials it does not own in exchange for reciprocal access to its own collections. The Library is a member of the Research Libraries Group, which includes the country's leading legal research collections and which has in place arrangements to share responsibility for collecting foreign legal materials. The Library is also a member of the New England Law Library Consortium, through which it has access to Internet resources as well as inter-library borrowing privileges.
- United States Law
- International Law
- Foreign Law
- Special Collections: Modern Manuscripts, Red Set, Visual Materials
Collection Services Staff
The staff of the Collection Services Division is responsible for building, organizing, and maintaining the collections of the Harvard Law School Library.