EuroDocs provides access to historical documents which “shed light on key historical happenings within the respective countries (and within the broadest sense of political, economic, social and cultural history)”. EuroDocs links to documents which have been transcribed, reproduced in facsimile, or translated. Because many of these documents are maintained by external providers, the Webmaster does not guarantee accuracy. Document collections include “Medieval and Renaissance Europe”, “Europe as a supernational region”, and documents arranged by individual country. Presumably because of its ties with NATO, modern Greece is included in the list of 23 countries, ranging in size from Germany and France to the Vatican City and Monaco. EuroDocs does not have a search engine.
Each listing of documents is chronological, with sites not limited to any single era appearing at the end of the list. Most links are accompanied by brief notes indicating whether the document is a transcription or facsimile, whether or not the document is in the original language, and the language(s) in which the document is available on EuroDocs. The date on which the document was issued often appears in the notes as well. Material is frequently added to this site. As of February 1999, all EuroDocs Web pages were updated sometime since Spring 1998, and many were updated within the past several months. New sites are marked with noticeable, yet unobtrusive graphics. Links on EuroDocs were up‐to‐date in February, 1999. When checked by a link validator, two of EuroDocs’ largest pages had only two failed links out of 75 remote links on those pages. EuroDocs provides a helpful link to instructions for citing online resources using MLA style.
EuroDocs succeeds in its purpose: collecting and arranging primary resources available over the Internet. Unlike sites such as US House of Representatives’ Internet Law Library, the Library of Congress’s Guide to Law Online (GLIN), and Yale’s Avalon Project, EuroDocs does not focus solely on legal and constitutional documents. As a result, EuroDocs generally provides more resources for each era/country than these sites. In terms of size, EuroDocs’ chief rival is the Avalon Project <http://www.yale.edu/ lawWeb/avalon/avalon.htm>, which collects documents in law, diplomacy, and history. Avalon does not focus exclusively on one geographical area or organize materials by country/region.
In contrast, EuroDocs’ chronological arrangement of materials, as opposed to the alphabetical order used in the Internet Law Library, is also helpful. EuroDocs shares the limitations inherent in any collection of links to resources. As the EuroDocs home page notes, because many of the documents referenced by EuroDocs are from remote Web sites “over which the Webmaster has no control”, the accuracy of the information is not guaranteed. Users requiring guaranteed accuracy will still need to compare the text or translation of many documents against authorized versions found in print resources or on other Web sites. For recent legal materials, users may be better served by the Library of Congress’s Guide to Law Online (GLIN) <http:// lcWeb2.loc.gov/law/GLINv1/GLIN.html>, which collects official texts of laws, regulations, and legal resources from other governments. Likewise, since so many of the documents cited in EuroDocs are made available by other providers, the availability of materials at other sites also cannot be guaranteed, although as previously mentioned, links are well maintained.
In addition, because it draws on materials from many locations, EuroDocs cannot provide a standard graphical interface, cohesive policy on providing links to outside resources, or ‐ unlike the Avalon Project ‐ provide a search engine for the documents linked to this site.
EuroDocs provides a large archive of primary historical documents from Western Europe. In comparison with similar resources, its primary limitations are that it does not guarantee the accuracy of its materials or provide a search engine. Users with an interest in legal documents from recent centuries should also monitor the progress of two sites currently under development: the Guide to Law Online, which aspires to collect authorized versions of legal and constitutional documents, and Yale’s Avalon Project, which provides a handy search feature and aspires to enhance the value of documents it contains by linking to supporting documents expressly referred to in the body of the text.
However, it certainly has advantages over related resources: unlike some of its competitors, EuroDocs allows the user to browse materials arranged geographically, retrieve more than just legal documents, view facsimiles of historical documents, and retrieve documents in their original language as well as in translation. Potential users need to be aware of the need to scrutinize documents retrieved from EuroDocs or compare them with other resources. For those with only a casual need for information, EuroDocs is a handy resource. Even those who might need to later verify information will enjoy the opportunity to explore the hyperlinks to supporting information which appear in many documents collected by EuroDocs. They will also appreciate having a preliminary version of the information as close as the nearest Internet‐capable computer.
