Karen Okamoto
Example publication available through LLMC
The Law Library Microform Consortium (LLMC) is a non-profit cooperative of libraries that preserves and makes accessible legal titles and government documents from around the world. Through its online subscription service, LLMC Digital, the Consortium makes available legal titles that are at risk due to age or other factors, converting print and microform titles to current media. LLMC Digital includes over 12,000 titles and over 74 million images. Some of this content is freely available through its open access site.
The breadth of the collection is impressive: you’ll find historical American legal documents, periodicals, and reference titles, as well as gazettes from the British Empire Studies collection and historical legal documents from around the world. New items are added to the collection on a monthly basis. For example, in January, LLMC added a number of civil, penal, and procedural codes from the 20th century for their Mexican collection as well as historical German legal treatises.
There are different ways to search the collection. You can use the browse feature to peruse titles by country or what they call Special Focus Collections, such as Roman Law. You can also search the site by the title of a volume or document. The Advanced Search allows you to narrow your keyword search by country and document type. Once you open a document from your search, you can perform another keyword search within the document (see screenshot at top).
LLMC includes a brief video on how to search their database (click Tutorial).