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National Resources Committee 



size and expanding the scope of its collections which 

 are being built up to meet practical as well as theo- 

 retical requirements. Including the accessions for 

 1937 which represent an addition of 19,396 volumes, 

 the Law Library' collections number 375,466 volumes^ 

 exclusive of the collections covering the fields of public 

 law, constitutional law, public and private interna- 

 tional law, primitive law, and a number of special re- 

 lated subjects such as commercial law, criminology, 

 medical jurisprudence, marriage and divorce, etc., clas- 

 sified in the general collections of the Library. 



The full title of this department of the Library is 

 the Law Library of Congress, and of its chief officer, 

 the Law Librarian of Congress. Its headquarters and 

 principal collections are housed in the main building 

 of the Library of Congress, where also is concen- 

 trated the greater part of its reference service for 

 Congress and the different governmental agencies. In 

 addition, however, it retains responsibility for the 

 service maintained in the Capitol Building, where a 

 working collection of approximately 20,000 volumes 

 is located for the purposes of emergency reference serv- 

 ice. Originally this collection, together with the judi- 

 cial conference library, served also the Supreme Couit. 

 However, since the Court moved to the new building. 

 a collection of approximately 50.000 volumes has been 

 transferred there from the Law Library for the exclu- 

 sive use of the justices and members of the bar. 



The collections of the Law Library contain more 

 than 70 per cent of the English yearbooks, a consider- 

 able number of trials, a large collection of session laws 

 of the American colonies, a practically complete col- 

 lection of all American court reports, session laws, 

 statutes, and codes, a set of the printed records and 

 briefs of the United States Supreme Court. 



In the field of foreign law, the collection relating 

 to the British Empire is the most complete. However, 

 the Law Library is rapidly developing representative 

 collections of all foreign countries covering legislative 

 enactments, administrative measures, codes, judicial 

 decisions, and commentaries. 



In building up its collections, beginning in 1866 

 ■M'ith the acquisition of the James L. Petigru collec- 

 tion, the Law Library acquired as gifts or through pur- 

 chase a number of specialized private libraries. In 1904, 

 336 volumes from the Von Maurer collection, relating 

 to jurisprudence, were acquired; in 1905, the early 

 English law collection of William V. Kellen; in 1921, 

 4,691 volumes from the library of Professor Paul 

 Kruger, consisting primarily of monographs on the 

 Koman law; in 1925, 862 volumes of Kecords and 

 Briefs of the United States Supreme Court from the 

 Melville W. Fuller collection; the library of the late 



Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, about 13,000 volumes 

 in which there are a large number of law titles. 



The Law Library has a catalogue of its own collec- 

 tions, and closely related subjects are classified in the 

 general librarj', arranged by author, title, and subject. 

 This catalogue includes much material not rcgidarly 

 catalogued and, therefore, not entered in the main 

 catalogue of the Library of Congress. 



As the repository of legal literature, the Law 

 Library covers a vast field, how-ever, outside of the 

 legal Amei'icana, the collection of which is being made 

 as complete as possible, the acquisitions in the other 

 fields are restricted to items of intrinsic value in rela- 

 tion to the different requirements of legal practice and 

 the various aspects of legal scholarship. 



From the practical point of view, the Law Library 

 maintains up-to-date collections of the laws in force 

 in tlie different countries of the world. This material 

 is usually supplemented with commentaries, mono- 

 graphs, and treatises covering the interpretation of 

 whole systems or important aspects of legal regulation. 

 In addition, it maintains reference works and a bibli- 

 ographical apparatus facilitating the speedy and ade- 

 quate use of the collections. 



For the purposes of scholarship, the Law Library 

 is building up collections covering the fields of primi- 

 tive, ancient, medieval, and modern law in all their 

 asi^ects (historical, sj'stematic, sociological, etc). In 

 connection with the development of legal doctrine, the 

 Law Library is accumulating a collection on juris- 

 prudence consisting of the works of outstanding jurists 

 of the different periods and schools, supplemented by 

 the contributions of world scholarship in the field. 



The Division of Aeronautics 



In 1930, through the munificence of Mr. Harry F. 

 Guggenheim, there was established the Daniel Guggen- 

 heim Fund for Aeronautics in the Library of Congress. 

 This fund enabled the purchase of a number of world- 

 renowned collections of aeronautic literature which a 

 happy concatenation of events made available wnthin 

 a short time. Among these were the collections of 

 Gaston Tissandier (1,800 items), Hermann Hoernes 

 (783 items), and Victor Silberer (895 items). At the 

 same time there were deposited by the National Aero- 

 nautic Association its collection of more than 200 vol- 

 umes and pamphlets, and by the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution the Langley Aeronautical Library of 2,115 items. 

 Somewhat later the Alfred Hildebrandt collection (5.000 

 items) was secured. All these, added to the original 

 holdings, and augmented by current purchases, gifts, 

 and copyright deposits, have made the collections of 

 the Division the largest and most comprehensive of 



