As a part of the professional development of our MAEUS students, the European Union Center offers students the opportunity for a trip to Washington D.C. in the Spring semester. This year's trip happened from March 21 to the 25. This article is Part Four of a series of posts written by different MAEUS students. In this article, Rafael Rodriguez discusses the trip to the Library of Congress. Previous entries in the series can be found here. Entries on previous DC trips can be found here.
As described in my statement of purpose to attend the trip, it is important to take full advantage of all the opportunities to create networks and establish new points of reference whether for academic or professional purposes. The trip to Washington D.C. opened a new opportunity for the students of the European Union Center to connect even better with each other and the faculty participating in the trip. Beyond that, we all had the chance to connect with very interesting people with professional paths that serve as an example for our future professional paths.
On the third day of our visit and as the last meeting of the day, we visited the Law Library of Congress. We were received by Dr. Jenny W. Gesley, Foreign Law Specialist; Luis Acosta, Chief of the Foreign, Comparative, and International Law Division; and Dante Figueroa, also Foreign Law Specialist. After the proper introductions, Mr. Acosta took some time to kindly present the way in which the website has been shaped to provide easy access for the public to the files in the library. As the largest law library in the world with a collection of about 5 million items, they told us about the type of relevant requests that they sometimes receive from different nation states, that, due to internal conflicts, have their files destroyed. The presentation was a systematic orientation on how to properly use the search engine of the website and even to request research assistance on US, foreign, international, and comparative law.
We found it very interesting that the services provided by the library go beyond a simple book keeping process. The Law Library of Congress offers, as mentioned, research assistance, but also in-classroom and virtual orientations, courses, and information sessions regarding legal research. They also provide constant connection with their public through email newsletters, social networks like Facebook and Twitter, the bulletin of their Global Legal Monitor, the development of a mobile application, and programs and events organized annually to strengthen the understanding of global legal issues. One of those technological aspects that I found very relevant for today’s society, is their blog titled “In Custodia Legis”, in which several articles are posted regarding global legal matters, congress developments, and legal history with different international perspectives.
To conclude our visit to the library, Mr. Clifton Brown, an employee at the library for more than 30 years, gave us a tour of the basement of the library where most of the archives are. We could look at books more than 2 centuries old, and we saw the incredible level of organization that the library has gone through to keep records and easy access to the files. In summary, this was one of the most interesting meetings since we got to understand better the relevance of the Library of the Congress and some of the specifics of why it is currently the biggest law library in the world.
For more information on the different services offered by the library: www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/law_library_congress/llc_services_for_aba.authcheckdam.pdf
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