Library of Congress' Bicentennial Summer 2000 was set as the deadline for completion of Class K for law, the only class of the Library's classification system (LCC) not yet fully developed. The last section of Class K - KB-KBX: Religious law (see detailed outline in the Appendix) - will at its implementation close the lacunae in the LCC.

The Library of Congress recently issued new classification schedules for the law of the Roman Catholic Church and for the History of Canon Law. The schedules were developed by Dr. Jolande E. Goldberg of the Library of Congress with input from librarians and scholars from many countries. During the final months of their development, we spoke, individually and together, to several groups of librarians to introduce them to the elegant structure of these forthcoming schedules and to get reaction from librarians who had, and had not been, involved earlier in the development process. My role was to provide some context to the content of the schedules. I discussed the concept of religious law for purposes of these schedules and introduced the historical development of religious law, particularly that of the Roman Catholic Church.

Islamic and Jewish law has, for years, been the orphan of the Library of Congress classification scheme. Left without a place of its own it has been either shoehorned into the religion schedules, or set aside in homegrown organizational schemes. In either case access to these materials was often compromised, and retrieval difficult.

Fortunately, LC, in its work on the law schedules, has finally been able to generate draft versions of KBM–Jewish Law, and KBP–Islamic Law. We are fortunate that someone of Jolande Goldberg's prodigious talent and incredible energy was assigned the task of developing both of these schedules. She has overcome numerous roadblocks, and found consensus where there seemed to be none. The new schedules, as you will see, are both elegant structures in themselves, as well as constructed in such a way as to be a powerful tool for comparative research.