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	Secondary Materials Help
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Table of Contents

• Introduction to Secondary Materials
• Using Secondary Materials
• Printing Secondary Materials
• About the Markup
• Reproduction of Secondary Materials

Introduction to Secondary Materials

Secondary materials are commentaries on and discussions of the law. They comprise such disparate things as journal articles, explanatory statements issued with regulations, explanatory memoranda issued with Bills, case summaries and law reform materials. Others may be found in our full listing of databases.

Secondary materials are distinct from "primary materials" (such as cases and legislation) because they do not form a part of the law itself -- they only describe or discuss it. For this reason they are often extremely useful in coming to grips with an area of law, because most of the analysis has already been done by the author(s).

The AustLII Secondary Legal Materials databases include hypertext links to most relevant material. These generally include the following:

• references to cases;
• references to Acts; and
• references to sections in Acts.
• endnote references at the end of documents
• links from case and legislation tables at the end of reports to paragraphs in the report where the material is mentioned

Using Secondary Materials

Each document is preceded by a number of "links". The meaning of these links is set out below. Not all of these links will appear in all document types.

• 
  Clicking on the AustLII Logo will take you back to the AustLII home page.

• Organisation Logo
  Clicking on the Organisation Logo will take to the relevant page of the organisation's website if there is one or back to the database home page.

• ['database name' Homepage]
  This takes you to the home page for the current database. You normally do this if you want to select a different publication or find out more about the particular organisation.

• [Index]
  This takes you to the home page for the current database. You normally do this if you want to select a different publication or find out more about the particular organisation.

• [Search] or [Global Search]
  This lets you perform a text search over all AustLII databases or selected databases.

• ['database name' Search]
  This lets you search only over the materials in the particular database which you are viewing.

• [Download]
  Displays a new page which contains a menu of the formats in which to download the document as a single file. This is ideal for printing a document. Note that if the menu says that "No downloadable files are available" this means that AustLII does not have a downloadable version of the item.

• [Context]
  Clicking "Context" will take you to the first of the search terms for which you searched which occurs in the item. Note that this option only appears when you have used the AustLII search engine to find the item.

• [No Context]
  Clicking "No Context" removes the highlighted search terms from the current page so that you can print or view it without the highlighting of search terms. Note that this option only appears when you have used the AustLII search engine to find the item.

• [Help]
  Displays this page

Printing Secondary Materials

To print a page, you can either use the "Print" function of your web browser, or click [Download] to get the RTF version of the document if one exists, load it into your word processor, and print it from there.

About the Markup

Secondary materials are 'marked up' on a massively automated basis. We are constantly improving this process to add functionality. If you have suggestions, these are more than welcome. Please bear in mind that the mark up process is essentially heuristic in nature - that is, it is designed to make the occasional mistake. If you think that you can suggest a general approach to better taking into account the salient features which are inherent to most case law databases, please send us feedback.

Reproduction of Secondary Materials

All secondary materials on the AustLII site are published with the permission of the relevant copyright holder. AustLII cannot give you permission to reproduce the secondary materials on the AustLII site. To reproduce these materials beyond what is permitted by the Copyright Act 1968, you should contact the relevant copyright holder to obtain permission. Details to assist you to do this are provided on each database index page (eg see the Melbourne University Law Review database index page).

Additionally, while AustLII is proudly a "free to air" service, nonetheless our detailed markup of legislation is subject to copyright and cannot be copied. The markup is absolutely not in the public domain as far as any sort of reproduction is concerned. Please see AustLII's usage policy for full details.

Copyright permission requests in respect of the AustLII markup and other AustLII-created content should be made through AustLII Feedback.