Windows on the World: Foreign Official Gazettes from CRL

What Are Official Gazettes?

To cite the definition posted at the Center for Research Libraries (CRL):

“An official gazette is the legal newspaper of a country, or of an administrative part of a country, which publishes the text of new laws, decrees, regulations, treaties, legal notices, and court decisions. The laws published in official gazettes are primary law in the official source; publication in the gazette, in many cases, initiates jurisdiction. The text published is the authoritative version, and commonly, the only published version.” (https://www.crl.edu/collections/topics/official-gazettes)

Gazettes can be extremely useful primary sources to students in history, political science, international relations, sociology, economics, law, and beyond. As key documents of civil society, official gazettes contain the texts of new laws, regulations, treaties and other legal notices— in some cases providing the only published versions of a nation’s primary law.

Digitized Foreign Official Gazettes

CRL has targeted gazettes from ten African and Persian Gulf countries (Algeria, Republic of Congo, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, and Zimbabwe) to be included in an open web repository, through a project sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The first batch of these gazettes was recently released—approximately 59,000 pages of content! This first segment features publications from Republic of Congo, Sudan, and Libya:

CRL’s FOG Database

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL) collects official gazettes for hundreds of countries outside of the United States.Their FOG (Foreign Official Gazette) database contains records for approximately 650 gazette titles and provides detailed information such as the name of country at time of publication; any and all name changes for that country; the exact title at time of publication; and years held. The FOG database includes records for important collections outside of CRL, allowing you to identify extant documents in a number of libraries:

Harvard University, Law School Library
Los Angeles County Law Library
The Library of Congress, Law Library
The New York Public Library
University of Michigan, Law Library

More About CRL

CRL is a “library’s library,” collecting and preserving obscure and international materials for the use of scholars at member libraries. CRL holds more than 5 million items with particular emphasis on geographical regions:

and on difficult-to-find publication types

foreign dissertations
foreign journals and periodicals, with an emphasis on scientific and technical literature
foreign and U.S. newspapers
government documents, censuses, and official gazettes

Because the University Libraries have membership in CRL, University of Arkansas students, faculty, and staff may borrow these collections through the ILLiad Interlibrary Loan service. While some materials are loaned to the Libraries long-term, requests are increasingly filled by digitization on demand. You can search all CRL materials through their online catalog or browse their topic guides for inspiration.