It’s my first full week of full-time research, and I’ve been spending some grueling hours coalescing with my laptop, a web-based citation manager, and the NEOS Library Consortium’s catalogue. The University of Alberta Libraries, a part of the NEOS Consortium, hold what are very possibly the world’s largest archives of community and public legal education (PLE) materials. My task, for this week and the next couple to come, is combing through the catalogue records of these materials, at once separating wheat from chaff and sorting the wheat into various bins.

To use the NEOS Catalogue you have to know how to spell, which put me at a disadvantage right at the start. If you are looking for items donated to the libraries’ collections by the University of Alberta’s Legal Resource Centre, you cannot search for “Legal Resource Center.” The merciless catalogue does not know or care that you’re an American with no hope of getting a spelling system that even natives can’t master. It took the Fulbright Fellow more than a day to realize (realise?) this, and when he did his search results grew a hundredfold.

That left me with just shy of 5000 records to scan and sort. This is a mechanical process: I’ve gone year by year starting in the mid-1960s, loading each year’s group of records into the citation manager software, then looking at each record and clicking it into one or more folders (e.g., research on designing PLE programs, needs assessments, program evaluations, and program materials themselves). This work, it’s true, is a tedious necessity—but it’s more than that. As the day goes by, the years go by, and the records go by, and you start to see trends. You see mini-explosions in the number of materials on a particular topic: lots of liberty and freedom materials from the U.S. around 1976 and then the rise of similar materials in Canada leading up the introduction of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. There’s also the gradual decline during the 1970s of radical and subversive materials, like those on police confrontation, alternatives to traditional housing, and “Talking Back to Government” (a 1981 Vancouver People’s Law School videocassette perhaps in the rear guard of this genre). And you get sense of the staples of public legal education—immigration, welfare, family law, and wills, wills, wills, and wills.

It’s also been interesting to wait and watch for the debuts of the stars of North American PLE and law-related education. Folks like Lois Gander, Diane Rhyason, Rick Craig, Gordon Hardy, Gail Dykstra, Carolyn Pereira, Lee Arbetman, and Mabel McKinney-Browning all eventually show up in the author field, and you wonder just what they thought of their first published effort, and whether they imagined they’d come to be leaders of their field. More will come as I plod on, as will the end of the 5000-odd records I’ve got to tame. I will be decanting some Canadian rye at about that time.