Wiki on medieval legal documents garners 72,000 hits in first two months
—By Gilien Silsby
When senior USC Law librarian Hazel Lord began researching the Medieval Period up to 1535, she set out to create a bibliography of England’s vast trove of manuscripts, including court rolls, case reporters, royal charters, legislative and administrative records.
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| USC Law Librarian Hazel Lord |
That’s when she got the idea set up a wiki on the medieval period that could be continually updated and added to — by both Lord and her colleagues around the globe. Wikis, which are collaborative websites that invite users to contribute material, are becoming a growing trend in the academic world.
“The problem with a bibliography is it is set in time,” Lord said. “Once it’s published you can’t add to it or edit it. It’s no longer living or fluid. It’s a dead item frozen in time on the day it is published.”
So, after consulting with colleagues, Lord developed a database of published and online sources in the wiki English Medieval Legal Documents A.D. 600 - A.D. 1535: A Compilation of Published Sources.
Initially, she expected to find 100 or maybe 200 items, but by the time Lord finished, she ended up with almost 1,000 items in her database.
Posted in February, Lord’s wiki is growing in both size and popularity.
In the first two months alone, the wiki received more than 75,000 hits, and a number of scholarly web sites have created links to it, including the Bodleian Law Library of Oxford University and Intute.ac.uk, a peer reviewed compilation of the best web resources for education and research. Lord has also been contacted by scholars and librarians for advice on setting up their own wikis.
“I was astonished,” Lord said. “I had no idea how many people would find this valuable. In my wiki, an Old World resource meets a New World technology.”
Lord’s wiki lists hundreds of published and digitized online medieval documents, including court records, royal charters and proclamations, and the official records of the meetings of parliament.
“There are a tremendous number of legal documents from medieval times,” Lord said. “The medieval kings and their courts were incredible record keepers, and most of the documents which have survived are housed in the British National Archives in Kew Gardens, London. In addition manor houses, cities and boroughs, churches cathedrals throughout England have their own archives, often containing legal materials. Originally, you would have to go to the British National Archives or to the archival collections in the various English counties to study these sources.”
With her wiki, Lord is hoping visitors will find a complete guide to English medieval legal documents either in published or online form. Since no comprehensive bibliography of this material has been published since the 1950s, Lord’s wiki is intended to bridge this 60-year gap and give scholars a resource that lists publications to present day.
With the organization and precision librarians are known for, Lord has divided the material on her wiki into broad categories, such as court records and statutory records. Within these categories, entries are arranged by material type, plea rolls, courts reports, calendars and then chronologically by regnal year.
“What’s got me really excited now is that now we are able to link to digitized images of these original manuscripts,” Lord said. “For example, I have created a link from my wiki to an exciting joint project between the University of Houston and the National Archives in Great Britain, which is digitizing the entire plea rolls and other court records of the medieval period.”
Lord has a unique appreciation for research advancements because when she started as a librarian at USC in the 1960s, technology was minimal.
“I have seen computing in libraries develop from its infancy,” she said. “I can remember computers driven by punched cards, and online data bases where you had to dial up, and manually place a phone receiver into a coupler in order to make the link and do your searching. Interactive monitors were not even on the horizon. I remember the first marvels of the Internet in the early 90’s, the wonder of the first web browser, Mosaic, and how excited we were when Netscape arrived and more than doubled the speed of searching. And now we have already passed through Web2 technology to Web3! And they say librarianship is not an exciting career?”
Lord said she is grateful to USC Law staff who helped her launch the wiki.
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