Digitization of the Brooker Collection Hits New Milestone

The Robert E. Brooker III Collection of Early American Legal and Land Use Documents is gradually making its way into cyberspace. Over 500 documents, about one-sixth of the total, are now scanned and searchable online in Boston College's Digital Collections. One of the great things about this project is that is has called upon the skills and resources of many people at two libraries - the Law Library and the O'Neill Library - and none of us could have accomplished it without the others. Stay tuned for updates . . . we anticipate reaching 1,000 documents before too long!

New Exhibit: Books and Their Covers

Please visit the Rare Book Room to view our latest exhibit: Books and Their Covers: Decorative Bindings, Beautiful Books. Unlike most of our exhibits, this one focuses not on the intellectual content of the books in our collection, but rather on what they look like. One often thinks of law books in utilitarian terms, but this exhibit proves they can be objects of delight and desire as well.

To whet your appetite, here are a few highlights from the exhibit. A handout describing the entire exhibit is available here.

The exhibit will be on view through May 2010. We hope to see you in the Rare Book Room soon!

Announcing a Major Gift of Roman Law Books

As we said farewell to 2009, we received a generous gift of Roman law books from Michael H. Hoeflich, Kane Professor of Law at the University of Kansas. Professor Hoeflich is a well-known scholar in many areas of law and legal bibliography, including legal history, comparative law, ethics, contracts, and the history of law book publishing.

Numbering nearly 300 antiquarian and modern titles, the Hoeflich Collection contains multiple editions of seminal Roman law works in Latin, German, and French, as well as lesser-known works. The gift extends and enriches our strong antiquarian collection of Anglo-American law books, many of which we have received through the generosity of Daniel R. Coquillette, the late Kathryn "Kitty" Preyer, Robert E. Brooker III, and other friends. Professor Hoeflich's collection is both broad and deep, and reflects his knowledge of and passion for Roman law, as well as for book collecting.

We are still processing and learning about this magnificent collection, and we'll blog about it as we learn more. We plan to exhibit a selection of the works in the spring of 2011. Meanwhile, we extend a sincere and hearty thanks to Mike Hoeflich for his most generous gift.