An official gazette is the legal newspaper of a country, or of an administrative part of a country, which publishes the text of new laws, decrees, regulations, treaties, legal notices, and court decisions. The laws published in official gazettes are primary law in the official source; publication in the gazette, in many cases, initiates jurisdiction. The text published is the authoritative version, and commonly, the only published version.

FOG Database

The Foreign Official Gazette database (FOG) contains records for approximately 650 official gazette titles from countries outside the United States. It serves as a “union list” of holdings within the major collections residing in North America, encompassing both CRL holdings as well as the holdings of five other major libraries. More information can be found in the FAQ.

Browse Database [2]

Click here to view the more information [3] about the FOG program and database.

Digitized Official Gazettes

In 2014, CRL was awarded a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York to to preserve and make available on the open web endangered government documentation from ten African and Persian Gulf nations where the integrity of the public record is at risk (see original announcement [4]). CRL has worked with partners such as LLMC, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, LA Law Library, New York Public Library, and Princeton University to source content for scanning.

Digitized content is presented via a specialized Digital Collections page (Official Gazettes & Civil Society Documentation [5]), which enables issue-level browsing and text searching within each item. LLMC will share access to the digital files to enhance discoverability and enable cross-searchability with other international legal content in LLMC-Digital [6].