Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard Law School is arguably the most prestigious law school in the world and is home to the world’s largest academic law library. The school’s faculty consists of more than 100 full-time professors and more than 150 visiting professors, educating students and delivering research on traditional and emerging legal fields.

The Harvard Library has consolidated approximately 15 million records describing documents from multiple sources surrounding Islamic policy, law and history. Access to this data is very limited with no user-friendly way of viewing it, depriving researchers of valuable information that could be beneficial to their research efforts.

Harvard Law School wants to facilitate universal access to this data in order to preserve a significant part of our shared world heritage, as well as promote new and data-centric research.

Our StackLife 2.0: Library Search and Display Tool consolidates the data for these resources and allows researchers to access it in an easy-to-use web application.

Our system allows researchers to filter records based on multiple search parameters in order to find the resources that are most relevant to them. It also enables users that are registered with the system to save search parameters to their profile and then build their own custom collection of resources.

Once a user finds a desired resource, our application provides the relevant data about that resource, including where the user can retrieve it. Our system also provides data visualization capabilities to enable researchers to plot data.

Our application is built using the Flask web microframework for Python with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Bootstrap. The data is stored inside of a relational database system using MySQL 8.0 that is hosted using Amazon Web Services.