Library closing days in December

The library will be closed on the following days in December and January for the Christmas holidays: Friday December 24, Monday December 27 and Friday December 31. We will be open between Christmas and New Year's on December 28, 29 and 30. In the new year, the library will open on Monday, January 3 at 1 PM. Happy holidays!

Library acquires rare first edition of Hugo Grotius

The Peace Palace Library has acquired a unique first print of the first edition of “De iure belli ac pacis libri tres” by Hugo Grotius (TMD 565.1, i.e. the number in the TerMeulenDiermanse Grotius Bibliography) at an auction in Hamburg yesterday evening. It is a very valuable addition to the famous Grotius-Collection of the Library.



Grotius wrote this book in 1625 during his exile in Paris. In this work, based on natural law, he investigated and explained his theory of “just war” (when war is justified, what are the causes of war and what are the rules of war). It is widely regarded as the “Foundation of Modern International Law”. The book was finished in great haste to be in time for the Frankfurt Bookfair. As a result there had not been enough time to correct all pages and page numbering. This print also lacks indices and a table of content. For specialists it will be most interesting to compare this print with later corrected versions.



The only other known copy of this print is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.



After 385 years Grotius’ masterpiece has come to The Hague, the “Legal Capital of the World”. The acquisition of this book by the Library will stimulate further Grotius-research and the study of modern international law.



The acquisition of this great work has been made possible with the support of:
Dorus Rijkers Fonds; Samenwerkende Maritieme Fondsen; Dr. Hendrik Muller’s Vaderlandsch Fonds; M.A.O.C. Gravin van Bylandt Stichting; BRILL Publishers; Studiefonds Rechtsgeschiedenis Mr Joseph Winkel; Van der Mandele Stichting and the Carnegie-Foundation.

Carnegie-stichting is hiring

De Carnegie-Stichting zoekt voor de Bibliotheek van het Vredespaleis een:

Juridisch-Wetenschappelijk Bibliotheekmedewerker = Coördinator Publieksdienstverlening, Hoofd Leeszaal (m/v, 0.8 fte)

De bibliotheek bezit een van de grootste collecties ter wereld op het gebied van het internationaal recht. De collectie bevat ongeveer 1.000.000 banden, ± 750 lopende tijdschriftabonnementen en een veelheid aan elektronische informatiebronnen. De bibliotheek is onontbeerlijk voor de literatuurvoorziening van internationaal-rechtelijke instellingen in en buiten Den Haag (het Internationaal Gerechtshof, het Permanente Hof van Arbitrage, de Haagse Conferentie voor Internationaal Privaatrecht e.d.) en van wetenschappelijk onderzoekers uit het buitenland, uit Nederland en van de Haagse Academie voor Internationaal Recht.

De vacature betreft een combinatie-functie. Enerzijds dient de beoogde kandidaat zich bezig te houden met onderwerpsontsluiting en anderzijds treedt de nieuwe bibliotheekmedewerker op als coördinator van de aangelegenheden die zich afspelen in de leeszaal, waarbij het gaat om beheer van de relaties met de bezoekers die onderzoek doen in de bibliotheek en om de organisatie van de dienstverlening van de bibliotheek aan die eindgebruikers van de informatiediensten. Derhalve wordt van de sollicitant juridische informatie-analyse verwacht (en verwerking daarvan in geautomatiseerde bibliotheeksystemen) en een visie op informatie-behoeften bij het publiek.

Taken:

- onderwerpsontsluiting van boeken, tijdschriftartikelen en elektronische informatie, door middel van het toekennen van classificatiecodes en trefwoorden
- samenstellen van vakspecifieke bibliografieën, verrichten van literatuuronderzoek, publiceren op de website van berichten die het gebruik van de bibliotheek stimuleren
- verzorgen van juridische ondersteuning aan het publiek, ten behoeve van de leeszaal, waarbij onder meer onderzoek in de juridische informatiebronnen van de digitale bibliotheek gedaan wordt
- coördinatie van de werkzaamheden in de leeszaal (beleid rondom het modern, efficiënt en gebruikersvriendelijk beschikbaar stellen en toegankelijk maken van juridische informatie; personeels- en administratief beheer, inroostering, (interbibliothecair) leenverkeer)
- relatiebeheer (individuele bezoekers of gebruikersgroepen, interbibliothecaire contacten), externe vertegenwoordiging van de bibliotheek

Kwalificatie-eisen:

- jurist (bijv. specialisatie internationaal publiekrecht, internationaal privaatrecht of rechtsvergelijking)
- ruime ervaring in een wetenschappelijke bibliotheek (aan de publieks- of bedrijfskant), praktische kennis van onderwerpsontsluiting
- vaardig met ICT, oog voor de digitale bibliotheek, vermogen om nieuwe ontwikkelingen te signaleren en vorm te geven
- vaardigheden: leidinggeven, coachen, instrueren; prestatiebewust, klantgericht en servicebereid; goede contactuele eigenschappen
- kennis van Engels en Frans is vereist, kennis van overige talen is dringend gewenst; Nederlands is de voertaal in de bibliotheek

Aanstelling vindt, afhankelijk van opleiding en ervaring, plaats in schaal 10 of 11, in tijdelijke dienst voor één jaar, met uitzicht op vast dienstverband. Voor uw reactie of voor nadere informatie: Jeroen Vervliet, 070 – 3024122 of jeroen.vervliet@ppl.nl, Bibliotheek van het Vredespaleis, Carnegieplein 2, 2517 KJ Den Haag. Sluitingsdatum sollicitatieperiode: 15 september 2010.

Access to Dalloz

Good news for our francophone readers: we subscribed to the Dalloz database, DALLOZ.FR! Dalloz database contains fulltext legislation (46 codes), case law including EU material, the Official Journal, 17 legal journals, 12 “Répertoires”, including the important “Répertoire International”. Searches by keyword are interconnected throughout the database. Results can be printed, sent by email and downloaded. “Actualités juridiques” keeps the researcher up to date. The Dalloz' list of journals includes: AJDA, AJDI, AJ Famille, AJFP, AJ Pénal, Constitutions, Recueil Dalloz, Recueil Lebon, Revue critique de droit international privé, Revue de droit immobilier, Revue de droit sanitaire et social, Revue de droit du travail, Revue de science criminelle, Revue des sociétés, Revue trimestrielle de droit européen, RFDA, RTD Civ., RTD Com.. The list of Répertoires includes: Encyclopédies des collectivités locales, Répertoire de contentieux administratif, Répertoire de droit civil, Répertoire de droit commercial, Répertoire de droit communautaire, Répertoire de droit immobilier, Répertoire de droit international, Répertoire de droit pénal et de procédure pénale, Répertoire de droit des sociétés, Répertoire de droit du travail, Répertoire de procédure civile, Répertoire de la responsabilité de la puissance publique.

library closing days in April and May

The library will be closed on the following days in April and May: Friday, April 2, Monday, April 5, and Friday, April 30. In May, the library will be closed on Wednesday May 5, Thursday May 13 and Monday May 24. Wishing you a happy spring - you are most welcome on the other days in the library!

change in alerting system

One of our successful services is our 'email alerting service'. Everyone can subscribe to this service by simply choosing a subject of interest and providing an email address to which the alerts should be sent. There are some 55 different subjects, ranging from “The State as Subject of International Law” to the “Grotius collection”.

When this service started in January 2003, we thought that just about 300 to 400 people would subscribe, each for 2 to 3 subjects of their choice. However, our total number of subscribers make up 850 people, and this number is slowly growing: we expect the number of subscribers to reach 900 somewhere in the first half of 2010. Each subscriber receives, on average, 2.5 emails a week.

All this leads to a rather heavy workload for our servers every Friday morning. Not only do thousands of emails have to be sent, each email also features all relevant bibliographic descriptions. So, depending on the subject, quite a few lengthy emails are sent out. All in all we are talking about a lot of emails, of which 10% are lengthy ones, and we figured we should improve on this emailing system.

We decided to rewrite the code which creates the email alerts. The script now takes all known subscriber data (subject(s) and email address) to create one simple email for all a subscriber's subscriptions. At this moment we are down to only 850 emails, a huge downfall in number, but an improvement in service. One simple email provides links to your subjects, with the number of new titles for every subject. Clicking the links to a subject in your email creates a PDF file , which will popup on your screen.

The PDF file will automatically start your PDF reader (like Acrobat Reader), so you can read all about the new titles, and click our link resolver to get more information. Creating these PDF files is also rather straining to our servers. However, at the moment we send out these email alerts, our American subscribers are still sleeping while the Japanese and Australian subscribers are going to bed. This means that the whole process of alerting (from creating emails to making PDF files) is much more balanced out.

The other advantage to you is that these PDF files with new titles on a particular subject can be stored on your computer, creating a list of files, which all contain relevant information about a certain subject. All with clickable links!

In the near future we will try to create still more advanced files - meaning more clickable links will be put in the PDF. This way, our subscribers will need only one extra mouseclick to take them to the fulltext (when available), a Google search, or relevant (secondary) databases on our servers. Check our website regularly to see where our services are taking you!

New features on our home page

Our website has several new features. One is a new 'international law news' feature right in the centre of our home page, collected and brought to you by our law librarians. The second is the use of QR codes – the weird looking black and white dotted cube at the left hand side underneath the latest library blog. This is more of an experiment than a real feature.

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Our library staff is immersed in international law news in many forms on a daily basis. We read websites, newspapers, blogs, news of international organizations and many other things. We decided to bring this international law news as a kind of extra alerting service in a new blog on international law news; of which the two latest items appear on the home page. Read it on the site or use RSS to stay up to date.

QR codes, or Quick Reponse codes, are two-dimensional bar codes containing information like phone numbers, text, URLs, or other things. These codes can be scanned by camera smartphones, like the iPhone or Android phone. Using a special scanning application, like Google’s free Barcode Scanner, you can scan the QR code to read the information hidden inside it. Your phone will automatically take you to a website or get you the library’s contact information for example, right on your phone. The QR on the left hand side of the home page will take you to a phone friendly version of our library blog, and we are exploring new ways of using these codes to take you to bibliographic information./p>

Summer time library

The courses of the Hague Academy of International law are in full swing until September 4, which means students from all over the world are using the library for their summer courses. Regular visitors are most welcome in the library, too - you have normal access in the summer months.
Only lending books is somewhat restricted: you can check out two books overnight and return them the next morning before 12 noon. Thanks for your understanding and see you in the reading room!

Access to CAIRN

From now on, our library has a subscription to CAIRN: a collection of French language periodicals in the social sciences and the humanities.

CAIRN holds over 203 titles from more than 40 publishers (like Belin, De Boeck, La Découverte and Erès), teaching institutions and learned societies. The primary subject areas covered by the collection are law, history, psychology, economics, political science and sociology.

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Journals are fulltext from 2001 to the present, gathering more than 60,000 articles. Journals include Droit et société, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, Politique étrangère, Politique européenne, Pouvoirs: Revue francaise d études constitutionnelles et politiques, Relations internationales, Revue européenne des migrations internationales, Revue francaise de droit constitutionnel, Revue internationale de droit économique, Revue internationale de droit pénal, Revue internationale et stratégique and Revue sur le droit et la politique de la concurrence.

It is possible to use one single subject or keyword to search through all journals simultaneously, which makes the CAIRN database very powerful. Inhouse use only, from July 1, 2009

COUTTS ebook library online

The Peace Palace Library is providing trial access to the large COUTTS ebook collection until August 6. The COUTTS ebook platform ‘Myilibrary’ has over 175.000 titles in the field of law, political science, history, and a range of other subjects. Their law collection alone comprises over 4200 titles, from leading publishers like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Kluwer, Springer, Elsevier, Wiley and Brill. Also, there is exclusive access to intergovernmental publications from groups such as the International Atomic Energy Agency, the WHO and the International Labour Organization.


Myilibrary’s interface is easy to use and provides fast access to the fulltext of the ebooks. Searching can not only be done in title and keyword fields, but also by publisher or by disciplines. Users can create their own accounts to save searches, make notes and add bookmarks. Access this large ebook collection through COUTTS [inhouse only until August 6]

Library is hiring

Do you like the things we do and would you like to join our staff? We'd love to have you work here! There will be a position as jurist/ informatieprofessional (reference librarian) from September, 2009. Read more here: jurist / informatieprofessional needed

Peace collection online

The Peace Palace Library has been long in the possession of a unique and important collection on peace movements from the period 1899-1940. This 'Peace Collection', with about 1500 items, consists of all kinds of materials like brochures, pamphlets, letters and photographs from pacifist organizations and people striving for world peace.

The library has started to put a selection of 100 items from this collection online by uploading the digitized images, made with help of the Metamorfoze project of the National Library of the Netherlands, to Flickr.


We’d love to have your input here! Look at it, read it, tag it, help to add comments… You can even request for further uploading of records of your interest by telling us what you’d like to see online first. You tell us and yes… we scan! Go to the Peace Collection

Closing days in April & May

The library will be closed on the following days in April and May: Friday April 10, Monday April 13 (Easter weekend) and Thursday April 30 (Queen's Day). In May, the library will be closed on Tuesday May 5 (Dutch liberation day) and Thursday May 21 (Ascension). You are most welcome on the other days in our library.

Library to courtroom: Telders Moot Court

On Thursday, April 16, and Friday April 17, the Telders Moot Court Competition will use the library's mezzanine (triangular reading room) upstairs as a court room to hear their cases. Participants of the Moot Court, welcome to the library! Of course other visitors are most welcome in our reading room, but you might hear some voices from upstairs. On both days, cases are scheduled from 10.00 - 11.15.

Conference on Afghanistan affects traffic

Tomorrow, March 31, the Afghanistan Conference 2009 will be held in the World Forum Convention Center in the Hague. The city of the Hague will either close off or restrict roads surrounding the convention center, making it hard for traffic to get through. Although the area around the Peace Palace is not affected, traveling to the library might be difficult: please use public transport. Tram 10, however, will stop running at Den Haag CS, not getting to Peace Palace library all day. Tram 1 will run the tram 17 route after the city center, which means you have to get off at the stop “Van Speijkstraat” and walk 5 to 10 minutes to the library. More information here