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AALT Website to Expand Holdings
Posted: August 22, 2007
The Anglo-American Legal Tradition—AALT, an important website co-sponsored by the University of Houston History Department and the UH Law Center. Robert C. Palmer, Cullen Professor History and Law has worked for almost fifteen years on an agreement with National Archives of the United Kingdom and on the creation of the site. The website is run through the O'Quinn Law Library. It currently digitizes and displays, free of charge, UK National Archives documents from 1272 to 1650. As of August 2007, it reached a new milestone that will expand its holdings.
The starting date of 1272 was selected because the UK National Archives, the Selden Society, Harvard University were trying to start a similar site for National Archives documents from 1217 to 1272. All parties to that partnership have now indicated that a single website would be desirable, and that that website should be the UH site. The National Archives has indicated that it is delivering an official extension of the AALT license to include documents dating back to 1217. The Selden Society has already delivered to Dr. Palmer scanned images of documents from the 1250s that it had acquired. These will appear on the AALT site free of charge.
The University of Houston has thus amicably emerged as the dominant free-of-charge provider of UK National Archives documents from the high middle ages through 1650: a coverage of five centuries of legal and governmental material central to most areas of English history. Given the rapid progress the AALT site is making in providing the documents from each of those centuries, it is unlikely that a rival will emerge.
More images from the National Archives and from historical documents of other court systems in the Anglo-American legal world will be added. We encourage History Department site visitors to visit this most welcome new historical resource at http://aalt.law.uh.edu.
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