ABSTRACT
The Library of Congress Subject Headings originated in 1898 when the Library adopted the List of Subject Headings for Use in Dictionary Catalogs as a basis for its own scheme. Until 1980 the Index to Legal Periodicals was the only comprehensive guide to legal periodicals. When the American Association of Law Libraries published the first volume in 1908, it covered only forty journals. The Association broadened its coverage, however, and produced retrospective volumes back to 1898, linking the Index with the earlier Jones Chipman Index, which had provided coverage beginning in 1888. Prior to the development of the West Digest System, there was no comprehensive or uniform indexing of state and federal cases. As a result, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century lawyers and legal scholars encountered a great deal of difficulty as they struggled with the unwieldy body of American law.
