The World Treaty Index (WTI), first published in print form in 1974, has been a mainstay of treaty research for over a quarter of a century. A second edition was published in 1983 and a reprint of that edition appeared in 1997. Both editions of the print multi-volume set can be found in almost all major law libraries and in research institutes with an interest in international relations, area studies and globalization. The WTI lives on in electronic form and remains to this day the largest collection of treaty citations in the world, with well over 60,000 entries to date. Over the last decade, interdisciplinary scholarly research interests have increasingly focused on the kinds of information that can be extracted from The World Treaty Index.

The founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution had an abiding faith in the power that knowledge bestows. The notion that “knowledge is power” dates back to the teachings of philosophers (from Bacon to Nietzsche), and was understood and practiced long before that by statesmen, scoundrels, and spies of all ages. The ancient Chinese ruled for millennia by maintaining a monopoly on knowledge and education.

“The world is a global village.” With the advent of the Internet and increased commercial global transactions, these words ring truer today than when they were first exclaimed by Marshall McLuhan in the late 1960's. Foreign business deals are now a commonplace activity. International commercial law, which used to be a specialty, has quickly become an integral element of the practice of a transactional lawyer.

I. Introduction

We seem, yet again, to be at one of those moments in time, so common in the last quarter of the 20th century, and likely to be continuous in the 21st, when the future appears as a melting pot of possibilities for law libraries, particularly university law libraries. This time the uncertainty is largely driven by the potential advent of Web-based learning, and the as yet largely undeveloped nature of the law school response to the possibilities of education outside of the traditional classroom model. Uncertainty is also due to the growing awareness that IT literacy is increasing rapidly among our user community, and that students in particular now prefer electronic sources of information over print – sources which, increasingly, they can access from places other than the physical law library.