The year is 2045, and my grandchildren (as yet unborn) are exploring the attic of my house (as yet unbought). They find a letter dated 1995 and a CD-ROM (compact disk). The letter claims that the disk contains a document that provides the key to obtaining my fortune (as yet unearned). My grandchildren are understandably excited, but they have never seen a CD before—except in old movies—and even if they can somehow find a suitable disk drive, how will they run the software necessary to interpret the information on the disk? How can they read my obsolete digital document?

In November of 1997, the Canadian Association of Law Libraries/Association canadienne des bibliothèques de droit, and the Legal Research Network staged a symposium titled The Official Version. The purpose of the symposium was to address some of the problems and challenges related to legal documentation in digital form. Most of us in the profession in Canada refer to it as “the summit”, an allusion to the rather arrogant sub-title: “A National Summit to Solve the Problems of Authenticating, Preserving and Citing Legal Information in Digital Form”.

The effects of international law on the domestic legal order of the various countries of the world are manifold and so are the issues covered in this bibliography. In some countries, some international treaties or treaty provisions can be invoked before and applied by national judges. These are the so-called self-executing treaties or treaty provisions. Whether treaties are self-executing is a domestic legal question for national judges to decide on an ad hoc basis. In other countries, no treaty can be applied by a national judge unless it has been transformed into national legislation by an act of the national legislature. The concept of self-executing treaties has much less significance in these countries. This difference relates to two theories of international law known as monism and dualism. Under these theories, the international and domestic legal order are considered as one indivisible hierarchy or as two separate hierarchies respectively.

Perhaps the greatest reward for many of us who have participated in the activities of the International Association of Law Libraries over the past decades has been the opportunity to meet colleagues in our profession who work in so many different parts of the world. Unfortunately, there are so many of our members who have not been able to attend our meetings for one reason or another and have not had the opportunity to exchange thoughts on our often surprisingly shared common concerns in our professional work or to develop the friendships which transcend the distances which separate our daily lives.