I have asked Jolande Goldberg to help us figure out where to class international claims. This has stumped many of us. International claims used to class in JX5483 under remedies which was under international responsibility. In KZ, there is a number for responsibility of the state, 4080, and government liability is referred to K967. K967 is for government torts and has an including note for the Calvo doctrine. The best description of the topic I have found is in The Changing Law of International Claims by F. V. Garcia-Amador. International claims is the area of international responsibility that deals with state responsibility for injuries caused to the person or property of aliens. It is sometimes called diplomatic protection of citizens abroad. The Calvo doctrine is a Latin American example of diplomatic protection in which aliens are accorded no more protection than nationals. Encyclopaedic Dictionary of International Law by Parry and others gives definitions of diplomatic protection and the Calvo doctrine. These definitions lead me to believe K967 is the area for international claims but I may be completely wrong. I hope Jolande can solve this issue by the next column.

This is the 25th anniversary issue of the Law Cataloger/Technical Services Law Librarian. Yes, I remember when. At that time we had two K schedules— KF written by Werner Ellinger and KD written by John Fischer. At the Library of Congress, John Fischer was working on K, Ann Rae on KE and Jolande Goldberg on KK. The first issue dated August 1975 had 2 classification questions and answers. These were questions posed by Cecilia Kwan to the Library of Congress. There is a LC disclaimer and I quote: “Readers should be alerted to the fact that such policies are subject to change, and they should always supplement their knowledge with personal observations as gleaned from LC proofslips and other sources.” The answers were LC policy statements. The first question dealt with classing law reports issued in the form of periodicals containing both decisions and articles and LC said that if a work was predominantly law reports, it should class with law reports. The second question dealt with British works with American annotations. The answer is that British treatises with American annotations class in KF while British law reports, abridgements and digests with American annotations should class in KD. Guess what – the answers are both correct for today’s materials. The questions from Cecilia, who did the classification columns so ably for many years, were sent to the Office of Principle Cataloger in the Subject Cataloging Division which forwarded them to the Law Team headed by Joe Feldman to answer.