Legal Resource Centre main archive sorting is complete

Last week, slightly ahead of schedule, I finished sorting catalog records of over thirty years of PLE materials, originally collected by the Legal Resource Centre (LRC) and now held by the University of Alberta Libraries. In all, I’ve organized over 5,100 records, representing PLE and PLE-related materials from between 1924 to 2006 (though the great majority of the materials are from between 1965 to 1997). I still have to sort records from additional collections held by the Legal Studies Program (LSP) (LRC’s successor) outside of the U of A libraries’ catalog, and the post-1997 materials at LSP that remain uncataloged.The value of this sorting is that I can now work from a database of PLE materials that is organized into helpful categories beyond author, title, and date. Specifically, I’ve grouped the LRC PLE archive into the following categories, which roughly follow the organization of the Theory & Practice of PLE in Canada website:

• Sole-purpose PLE Organizations
  • Canada
    • Organizational documents (annual reports, constitutions, etc.) [125]
    • Organizational evaluations [24]
  • USA [8]
  • International [6]
• PLE Programming
  • Canada
    • Program materials and descriptions (pamphlets, videos, audio materials, etc.)
      • From sole-purpose PLE organizations
        • 1960s [1]
        • 1970s [135]
        • 1980s [696]
        • 1990s [276]
        • 2000s [13]
      • From government entities [513]
      • From Self-Counsel Press [110]
      • From other organizations [1040]
    • Program inventories and directories [119]
    • Program evaluations [69]
  • USA [671]
  • International [110]
• PLE Research and How-To
  • Canada
    • General PLE research
      • Studies and reports [191]
      • Bibliographies [57]
      • Histories [5]
    • PLE organization management
      • Financial management [1]
      • Funding [47]
      • Handbooks and manuals (training, charity legal issues, etc.) [70]
      • Marketing and publicity [11]
      • Organizational structure [5]
      • Personnel [9]
      • Strategic planning [12]
    • PLE programming
      • Needs assessment [115]
      • Design [18]
      • Development [6]
      • Delivery [65]
      • Evaluation [70]
    • PLE theory
      • Citizenship theory [6]
      • Educational theory [14]
      • Legal theory [4]
    • Research on research [5]
  • USA [172]
  • International [35]

Although I’ve provided [in brackets] the record counts for each bottom-level category, it is important to note that these count statistics do not necessarily reflect tendencies in the real-world PLE field. This is because large portions of the LRC collection were donated to places other than the U of A libraries; places which may have taken the bulk of certain categories of materials. Indeed, the 5,000 or so materials from the LRC collection held at the U of A represent only about 20% of the pre-1997 LRC library.

If you are interested in examining this records database, please don’t hesitate to email me. The database was created and is currently managed using RefWorks, which permits export to a variety of formats, including EndNote, ProCite, BibTeX, XML, and plain text citation lists. Eventually, many of the records in the database will be incorporated as references on the Theory & Practice of PLE in Canada website. But note, of course, that access to the materials recorded in the database can be had only in Edmonton or through an Inter-Library Loan service.