The purposes of the United Nations are: … 3. To achieve international cooperation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural or humanitarian character … Charter of the United Nations, Ch. I, Art. 1 (1964).

It shall be the aim of the Community … to promote throughout the Community a harmonious development of economic activities … Treaty Establishing the European Economic Community, Act. 2 (1957).

One of the major projects discussed by the IALL Board of Directors at its 1975 meeting in Oslo, was the preparation of material on regional law library directories or guides.

A Short Historical Review of the German Judicial System

The history of a unified German judiciary structure emphasizes two major characteristics. It tells a story of a judicial system which is as discontinuous as it is old. The first truly imperial court, known as the “Reichskammergericht”, was created in 1495. Its significant features were a permanent seat and an independence of the judges. Their decisions were final and conclusive, and were binding on the emperors. This court remained in existence until the demise of the old German Empire in 1806. Thereafter, due to a rapid political fragmentation of the territory formerly constituting the empire, the individual German states were bound together in a loose confederation only, known as the “Deutscher Bund”. Enjoying complete sovereignty, the states passed their own and widely differing laws. Endeavors to bring about some semblance of uniformity in such laws were doomed to failure, except in some areas of commercial law. Equally, in spite of repeated attempts, the formation of a unified appellate court of last resort encountered insurmountable difficulties. This state of affairs continued until cessation of the confederation when Austria was compelled to withdraw from it in 1866 and a new North German Confederation was formed under the leadership of Prussia. A few years later, in 1871, the North German Confederation was united with the southern German states and the new union became known as the German Empire.

The overriding principle behind cataloguing library books is to be able to describe them in such a way that each book is unique and can be easily identified on the library shelves. This identity is further enhanced by the call-mark assigned to a particular book during the classification process by cataloguers. This operation is one of the highly technical professional duties in the library world. Libraries, therefore place much premium on their cataloguing sections and in some libraries professional librarians who are cataloguers are better remunerated than their colleagues working in other sections.

It was with some trepidation that I agreed to participate in this workshop by speaking on British government documents, for the subject is very complex and I do not profess to be an authority on it. To cover the topic with any degree of thoroughness would require a course of 30 hours or so, and today I have little more than half an hour. So all I can do is give you an introduction and suggest some reading for those of you who are interested in further study of the subject.

Almost every country in the world publishes official documents of some kind or another. There is much in these documents of interest to law libraries because they normally include official texts of codes, laws, and subordinate legislation, official court and government reports, statistics, and official gazettes or other official publications of periodical or serial nature. The content of some of these publications can be of considerable legal importance, but their usefulness is limited unless they can also be identified and acquired with relative ease. Unfortunately, this is not true for documents of most countries. The root of the problem is that very few countries, e. g., Canada, Federal Republic of Germany, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc. are in the habit of regularly publishing bibliographies, catalogs or other “search aids” for their documents. In most countries such bibliographic information, if available at all, tends to be incomplete, inaccurate, and sporadic. Finding a document (or even finding out about its existence) in such circumstances becomes more a matter of luck than the result of a skillful professional search.

Here is a list of the government printing offices in South Africa. Many government departments also publish items and these documents are often only available from the department concerned. Publishing addresses for the new Southern African states and the semi-autonomous “Homelands” are not included, as it is very difficult to obtain materials from them and ascertain what has been published. The addresses of the main commercial publishers of South African statutory material including some commercial publishers who reproduce legislation under the South African Government Printer's copyright authority are listed and some examples of the type of material published by them are given in order to indicate their coverage.

The recent ratification and entering into force of the Consular Convention between the United States of America and the People's Republic of Bulgaria opened a new page of great significance in the history of diplomatic and political relations between these two countries. To illustrate this point, the following brief survey of these relations since the reestablishment of Bulgaria as an independent state in 1878 until the present time seems pertinent.