DIGITIZATION: Hundreds of Native American Treaties Digitized for the First Time (Indigenous Treaties Explorer)

 

(image source: Smithsonian mag)

First paragraph:

For many Native American tribes, historical treaties are a fraught reminder of promises made—and broken—by the United States government over centuries of colonial expansion and exploitation. The documents are also of paramount importance today, as tribes and activists point to them as binding agreements in legal battles for land and resources.

Thanks to a newly completed digitization effort by the U.S. National Archives and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) in Santa Fe, researchers and the public now have unprecedented access to hundreds of these critical agreements.

Read further in Smithsonian Magazine.

Consult the database here. 

DIGITAL ARCHIVES: League of Nations (The Total Digital Access Project) past halfway

(image source: UNOG)

Announcement:

The Project team is proud to announce that, despite the recent challenges posed by COVID-19, we have reached an important milestone and have passed the half-way point of the scanning, with well over 7.5 million pages scanned! We want to thank our staff for their continued efforts and dedication to the project, as well as our partners and all those who have expressed their interest and encouragement! The Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD) will ensure state-of-the-art free online access and the digital and physical preservation of approximately 15 million pages, or almost three linear kilometers, the entirety of the archives of the League of Nations (1920-1946), the first global intergovernmental organization aiming to establish international peace and cooperation, and the predecessor of the United Nations. The LONTAD project is made possible through a generous donation of a private Swiss foundation. While digitization of these materials is only one part of the project, the figures above indicate our overall progress towards achieving this important step by the three main steps: preparing the documents for digitization, scanning, and indexing the materials to make them searchable. This website serves as a temporary platform to follow LONTAD’s progress, provide selections and highlights of materials from the collections, give access to related resources, and to provide technical information that may be useful to other archives professionals.

Read more here.

OPEN ACCESS RESOURCE: Bulletin officiel du Congo belge

(Source: Kaowarsom.be)

We learned that the Royal Academy for Overseas Sciences has digitized the Official Bulletin of the Belgian Congo (1885-1959). The collection can be found, free of charge, here

(source: ESCLH Blog)

WEBSITE: Kelsen Online (Digitale Akademie, Mainz)

(image source: Wikimedia Commons)

Project abstract:

Hans Kelsen (1881–1973), im k.u.k.-Österreich-Ungarn geborener und 1933 von den Nationalsozialisten aus Deutschland vertriebener Wissenschaftler jüdischer Herkunft, der im US-amerikanischen Exil seine neue Heimat fand, gehört im globalen Maßstab auch mehr als 40 Jahre nach seinem Tod zu den meistdiskutierten Rechtstheoretikern. Er zählt zu den ganz wenigen Rechtswissenschaftlern, die außerhalb ihres muttersprachlichen, nämlich deutschsprachigen Kreises weltweit Anerkennung gefunden haben und den rechtswissenschaftlichen Diskurs sowohl in Ost- als auch Südeuropa, sowohl in Ostasien als auch in Lateinamerika nachhaltig und selbst in der Anglosphere mehr als nur vernachlässigbar beeinflusst haben.

See project website.

DIGITIZED SOURCES: The French Foreign Affairs Library on Gallica

The Library and Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs count among the most famous and precious on earth. Besides the evident political or cultural information on the relationship between France and the rest of the world, many documents of an indirectly or directly relevant legal nature are kept in the Ministry's dépôts in either La Courneuve or Angers (consular archives).

In 2010 and 2011, the Ministry signed a cooperation agreement with Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France's praised and omnipresent digital library. Within this framework, 312 "livres jaunes" have been scanned, ranging from 1799 to 1947. These series contains reports on French foreign policy to parliament and French or foreign leaders.

This only adds to the importance of Gallica as a source for historians of international law. Many standard manuals on public international law, but also journals (Revue de droit étranger, Revue de droit international et de législation comparée, Revue d'histoire diplomatique) are available in fulltext, for free, from anywhere in the word. A precious resource in a time of predatory pricing for commercial databases.