Online Collections: Special Collections
In recent years the Harvard Law School Library has made a concerted effort to put more of its rare and important materials online. The two primary goals of these projects are to help preserve the oftentimes fragile originals by providing digital surrogates for research purposes and to facilitate access, bringing these materials to a wider audience. These efforts have resulted in a number of different projects, some still in process and others already completed. Represented here are the Library's current offerings of online collections. Other digital projects are in the planning phase and the Library has made a long-term commitment to see more of its collections presented online.
Bracton Online
One of the Library's earlier projects, Bracton Online is an example of a re-keying project in which the text of a document (in this case, a book that is considered one of the canonical works in English legal history) is re-typed using word-processing software that results in a searchable text. The online version of Bracton is presented in the original Latin as well as an English translation, both of which are searchable.
The Nuremberg Trials Project
By far, the Library's largest undertaking to date is The Nuremberg Trials Project. The Library holds over one million pages of documents related to the war crimes tribunals held after World War II. The Nuremberg Trials Project combines document imaging, document re-keying, and document analysis to create a database of information about the trials, and a Web interface that will allow searching of the documents and the trial transcripts themselves, with links to the various evidentiary documents used in the trials.
Legal Portraits Online
Legal Portraits Online contains cataloging records and images for the Library's collection of approximately 4,000 legal portrait images. These portraits include etchings, engravings, drawings, and photographs of jurists and legal scholars dating from the Middle Ages to the late twentieth century. As the most heavily used portion of the Library's visual materials, digitizing them and making them available on the Web not only greatly facilitates their access, but also significantly reduces handling of the originals, thereby helping to preserve them for the future.
The Common Law
Since its publication in 1881, The Common Law by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. has become a landmark of legal philosophy and scholarship. The work is a compilation of essays and articles first presented as a series of lectures delivered at the Lowell Institute in Boston. As with Bracton Online, the version presented here is in electronic form. It differs from Bracton, however, in that instead of having the text re-keyed it was scanned using optical character recognition (OCR) software. While fairly precise, this process does require proofreading to ensure that the text has been accurately converted.
Court of Restitution Appeals Reports
During the Nazi period, thousands of victims of religious, racial and political persecution were compelled to sell their businesses, houses, and other property under duress. In many cases, property was simply confiscated by the German Reich. After the war, the Western Allies all agreed to restitute property taken by the various methods of Nazi spoliation. Unfortunately they were unable to agree on a unified law for the three Western Zones of Occupation and for Western Berlin. As a result no fewer than four different statutes dealing with this problem were enacted. The Harvard Law School Library has digitized the twelve volumes of opinions and other documents of two of these courts. An index into these digitized materials is available here.
Scarlet Trials
The Harvard University Libraries has launched a new digital collection, Studies in Scarlet: Marriage and Sexuality in the U.S. and U.K., 1815-1914. Drawn from the Harvard Law School Library's extensive trial collections , Studies in Scarlet present images of the texts of over 420 separately published trial narratives printed in the United States or the United Kingdom from 1815 to 1914. The cases involve not only trials for murder and rape but also those for domestic violence, bigamy, seduction, breach of promise to marry, and the custody of children.
The Henry Phillips Papers, 1728-1738
In July 1728 Henry Phillips killed Benjamin Woodbridge in a duel on Boston Common. The 17 documents that make up the Phillips Papers span the years 1728-1738 and were likely assembled by Phillips’ brother Gillam for his extended lawsuit in which he tried to become sole inheritor of Henry's estate. The papers fall into three groups: legal papers that relate to Henry Phillips' duel with Benjamin Woodbridge and Phillips' subsequent flight from Boston; an inventory of Henry Phillips' estate; and legal documents and letters from Gillam Phillips' unsuccessful litigation.
Dying Speeches and Bloody Murders: Crime Broadsides
Just as programs are sold at sporting events today, broadsides -- styled at the time as "Last Dying Speeches" or "Bloody Murders" -- were sold to the audiences that gathered to witness public executions in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. The Library's collection of more than 500 broadsides is one of the largest recorded and the first to be digitized in its entirety. The examples digitized here span the years 1707 to 1891 and include accounts of executions for such crimes as arson, assault, counterfeiting, horse stealing, murder, rape, robbery, and treason.
Conservation and digitization of the broadsides was made possible in honor of Harvard Law School alumnus S. Allyn Peck by a generous grant from the Peck Stacpoole Foundation, a charitable endowment for the support of genealogical, local history, and other museum and library collections.