As a glance at his bibliography shows, Dr. Sipkov, as well as a law librarian, was a publicist in the original sense of the term — a scholar of public, in particular public international, law. It is therefore fitting that our comment deals with a basic issue that arises at the intersection of international law and librarianship. We would like to evoke the problem of defining and then finding the “material sources” of customary international law. That means understanding, then locating, the concrete, usually documentary, materials that must be used to confirm the existence of a state practice. The consistent, generalized, though not necessarily universal, practice of states forms the objective element of a customary rule. This basic problem of international legal research is not new, but as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the United Nations International Law Commission, it makes sense to examine it again. Developments over the last half century should help in understanding how we try currently to solve the difficulties and will do so in the future.

This empirical study starts from the newest medium, the internet, and explains briefly what researchers can expect to find there in terms of legal information, and how to find the needed information. It focuses on U.S. legal information, but also touches on foreign and international law. It includes comparisons with other legal research platforms and raises a few issues.

Let me first introduce myself: I am the librarian of the Institute of East European Law and Russian Studies at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands since 1980.

Legal databases in Austria go back to two different sources. In the public sector decisions of the three major (or high) courts, the Constitutional Court, the Administrative Court and the Supreme Court, have been stored in local databases. In the private sector the major legal publisher MANZ created a limited company in 1982, RDB (Rechtsdatenbank), with the participation of representatives of the legal profession and a big bank. The legal publisher ORAC and EDP professionals joined the team. Most of the journals in RDB are available in full text starting in 1978, but the Hohenecker-Index goes back to 1947.

A prominent jurist once described the law as a “seamless web.” This description of linked knowledge actually applies to all fields of scholarship and investigation, and it is not only lawyers who experience the need to move through the library constantly, each open text citing another or suggesting another avenue of inquiry. The pile of open books on the library table, and the constant recourse to catalogue and stacks, epitomize the image and the process of textual research, both for the advanced scholar and for the school-child writing her first essay. Computers clearly have the capacity to enhance the quality of our lives, but in my opinion their contribution to library reference work lies chiefly in this: to liberate us from the “up-and-down-and-fetch” mode of research as well as the “scissors-and-paste” method of text revision. This liberation is promised today in the hypertext features of all Windows-based or icon-clicking applications in use now, particularly with the incorporation of graphics and images, be they decorative or illustrative, from Netscape creatures to art, archaeology, or architecture.