Library Digitisation

UNIDROIT Library
UNIDROIT has one of the largest collections of legal literature in the area of international and commercial law in the world. Initially designed as a simple tool to support the Institute’s scientific and legislative activities, the Library has grown into one of the foremost legal documentation centres in Europe and beyond.

The material within the UNIDROIT Library currently consists of over 260,000 volumes and some 450 current legal periodicals from a wide range of countries, covering many areas of private and public law including but not limited to intellectual property law, public international law and economic law. It is particularly well-endowed in sources relating to the topics that have formed the subject of UNIDROIT legislative activities, both past and present. These topics cover: the unification of law (universal, regional and internal), international commercial transactions: contracts in general (e.g. the UNIDROIT Principles of International Commercial Contracts) and specific contracts (sales, factoring, leasing, franchising, agency, secured transactions etc.), transport law, tourism law, civil liability, family law, dispute settlements, cultural property law, private international law and law of international civil procedure and international capital markets. The Library also offers access to a great many international and national legal bibliographies.

The UNIDROIT Library is a depository library for United Nations official records and sales publications and also has documentation of the work conducted by several international organisations including the League of Nations, the International Labour Organisation, the International Maritime Organisation, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Organization of American States, the Nordic Council and the Hague Conference on Private International Law.

Digitisation Project
In an effort to make the material in the UNIDROIT Library available to a wider and more diverse audience, the UNIDROIT Governing Council at its 95th Session in 2016 decided to commence in-house digitisation of the all copyright free material present in the Library. It was also decided that a system would be created which would allow for privileged access to the online content for certain users.

Consequently, the staff at the UNIDROIT Library started uploading certain digital objects onto the already existing UNIDROIT Library Online Catalogue which can be found at http://udt-aleph.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com:8991/F.

Presently, 500 monographs and articles have been uploaded onto the online portal. However, with the limited resources available to UNIDROIT and its Library, this has been a slow process and cannot achieve meaningful results without additional funding. For this reason, the UNIDROIT Foundation is seeking donations to scale up this digitisation drive.

To learn more about the UNIDROIT Library visit: http://www.unidroit.org/library