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This program introduced the new religious law schedules (KB-KBZ) which are in various stages of development. To provide context, Lucia Diamond, Senior Reference and Collection Development Librarian of the Robbins Collection at the University of California School of Law Library, spoke first on the concept of religious law. She noted that law, theology and ethics all interact and the categories of law and religion are culturally influenced. The division of secular and religious law is partly an artificial construct. For example, the laws in colonial New Haven included references to the scripture upon which they were based. To illustrate the distinction between these two types of laws, Diamond remarked that laws on Sunday business closings promulgated by a secular body would class in the jurisdiction-based law schedules and works on Sabbath Day laws promulgated by a religious body would class in the religious law schedules. These schedules also allow the merging of theological works with legal texts which could be useful in different ways for different libraries. This flexibility might even be politically useful where the difference between the two types of law mentioned above is not recognized. Diamond illustrated this point by discussing how scholars use the Robbins Collection whose mission is to promote and sponsor historical and comparative research in the fields of civil law and religious law. Since this collection is primarily historical, the KBR (History of Canon Law) schedule will be particularly important for them. In contrast, smaller or more general law collections may have less use for this and other KB schedules.

The next speaker was Jolande Goldberg of the Library of Congress, author of the religious law schedules. She spoke mainly on KBR and KBU which will be ready in the Fall of 2000, but also illustrated what was involved in creating all of the law schedules. For a more detailed look at this topic, Jolande’s "Notes on Design and Suggested Use of the Schedules" are available on the Web at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/kbr_kbu.html, just click on the link to "Introduction by Jolande Goldberg". Her notes go into more detail than she was able to present during the program and are no doubt more useful than any summary I can provide. After discussing the development of the schedules, Jolande and Cheryl Cook, also of LC, demonstrated the draft schedules using LC’s in house software system, Minaret. This system is currently used for the maintenance of classification data and a Web interface is being developed for it. LC’s Cataloging Distribution Service plans to conduct a pilot test of this Web interface as a potential fee-based product, the advantages being that since it is LC’s working database it would be completely up to date. The religious law schedules are in English, and in Latin or the romanized original. They are working to include the vernacular into the schedules in non-romanized form using Unicode. Without the original terms many of the topics have to be expressed in descriptive phrases because there are no equivalent translations. Cheryl demonstrated some sample searches using romanized and English terms to illustrate retrieval and the parallel structure of the schedules.

This was a very meaty program and I recommend looking at the CPSO’s Web site to view the draft schedules and other notes at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/ for more information.

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