To make some of Georgia’s legal history more readily accessible to a wider range of visitors, Sharon Bradley, Special Collections Librarian at the Alexander Campbell King Law Library at the University of Georgia School of Law, worked to digitize the university’s collection of Historic Georgia Digests and Codes in Digital Commons @ Georgia Law.
Prior to the digitization, requests for information required someone at the library to photocopy and PDF the articles in question, and each request ran the risk that the single copy of this old, delicate material would get lost or damaged. The Law Library is considered one of the main libraries of Georgia, so it’s no surprise that the library frequently fields requests for information about the state’s rich historical background.
The collection contains every iteration of Georgia law from the time it was established through 1981. When viewers see the completeness of the collection, as well as the clean, logical organization, they often remark that the collection contains exactly what they needed. Sharon reports that the majority of people interested in this content aren’t law students or practitioners, rather, people simply interested in Georgia’s historical land transactions and property laws. Not only does digitizing the material make it more easily available to everyone who seeks it—many of whom, surprisingly, are from out of state—but it preserves and archives a copy of the material.
1926 Code- by Thomas Johnson Michie, A. Hewson Michie et al.
