World Law / DIAL http://www.austlii.edu.au/links/ and http://www.austlii.edu.au/dial/ Quick Guide

A Quick Guide to AustLII’s World Law / DIAL

(Development of the Internet for Asian Law) - Version April 2002

Essential points

• World Law and DIAL (Development of the Internet for Asian Law) are a catalog (index) and search facility to help you find legal resources located anywhere on the Internet. DIAL is funded by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and developed and hosted by the Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII - http://www.austlii.edu.au/).
• The same interface is used for browsing the catalog of links (browse at the bottom of each page), and searching the full text of (most) sites included in the catalog (search from the top of each page).
• The scope of a search is limited by where you search from (Only World Law...). To broaden or narrow your search scope, go to a more appropriate page in the catalog.

Browsing

Catalog page structure Most catalog pages have a three part structure:

• Top division - important subcategories (including By Subject, Other Indexes, and By Country) and Stored Searches (links which run pre-defined full text searches using the search engine).
• Middle division - for other subcategories (most go here).
• Bottom division - for the links to other websites.

Navigating the hierarchy Every catalog page lists its hierarchical location in the catalog. Click on any point in the hierarchy to go back to that catalog page.

You can always get back to the start of the catalog by clicking on Categories. If you are in the Categories part of the catalog and you want to get to a particular country page (eg Viet Nam), click on Categories then Countries and then select Viet Nam.

If a heading takes you to a different part of the catalog, just use ‘Back’ (on your browser) to get back to where you came from.

Button bar At the top of each catalog page, there is the button bar:

Searching

On each page of World Law there is a choice between the following search scope options:

• All World Law (the default option), means that you search over everything in World Law from anywhere in the catalog.
• Only World Law category. You can limit the scope of a search to where you search from by selecting the specific category page you are on. To broaden or narrow the search scope, go to a more appropriate page in the catalog.
• All WorldLII. World Law users can search across the World Legal Information Institute (WorldLII). Databases currently accessible through WorldLII are: AustLII, BAILII, CanLII, HKLII and PacLII.
• Law on Google. World Law users can repeat any searches they do on World Law over the far wider body of data on the Internet made searchable by Google.

button - for the latest version of this full User Guide & Guided Tour.

Search options - The following options are available from ‘Find’.

• any of these words (default option) - equivalent to a Boolean OR between each separate word. Simply enter a few words to indicate the main concepts for which you are looking (eg ‘pollution river’ or ‘program patent’). Any Boolean search connectors are ignored.
  For inexperienced users - You can also enter text in any form (eg ‘I want laws on tax and bankruptcy’ or ‘tax taxation bankrupt bankruptcy’) and get a reasonable result.
• all of these words - a Boolean AND between each separate word.
• this phrase - words entered are treated as a literal phrase even if they contain terms which would normally be connectors (eg ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘near’). There is no need to put inverted commas around the phrase.
• this document title - only titles of Web pages are searched, not the text. This option is used rarely.
• this Boolean query - any Boolean search may be entered, using logical and proximity connectors (see below). This is the most powerful form of searching, where search results are limited because they must first match the Boolean search, and the results are only then also ranked in likely order of relevance.
  Hint - use reasonably broad searches (to aid completeness), and rely on the relevance ranking then provide more precision.

• Always use parentheses ‘( )’ if you use more than one type of connector in a search.
• Plurals - Regular plurals and singulars are searched automatically (eg ‘firearm’ finds ‘firearms’ and vice-versa; ‘treaty’ finds ‘treaties’ and vice-versa).
• Truncation - Use * for truncation eg ‘negligen*’ finds negligent, negligence, negligently etc.

Display of search results Any search will search for your search terms over both the catalog itself (Categories), and over the full text of all sites to which the World Law web spider has been sent (Documents). Only three Categories and 20 Documents are displayed on the first page. Select ‘More World Law Categories...’ to see more Categories. Select ‘ |2| ‘, ‘ |3| ‘ etc to see more Documents.

World Law users can have their search automatically transferred to a search over the databases of statutes, case law and other secondary legal materials of the WorldLII databases. Clicking on Google will automatically transfer any search to the Google Internet-wide search engine.

Relevance ranking of search results - Search results are displayed ranked by likely order of relevance of the items found (most relevant items first). The percentage ranking next to each document shows 100% for the first document if it contains all search terms, and all following documents are ranked pro-rata to that document according to number, frequency and location of search terms contained in the document.

Modifying searches - It is easy to modify searches, because the Search Results page always displays your current search (or stored search) at the top of the page, allowing it to be modified and another search run.

Search this site - Where it has been possible to send the system’s web spider to a site, the icon appears next to the catalog listing. If you click on the words ‘search site’ or the icon, then you are taken to a ‘Search Selected Site’ page which limits the scope of the search to the one site selected.

Note: If you amend a search over a ‘Search Selected Site’ and run the search again, then the search reverts to searching the whole of World Law. Go back to the page which allowed you to select the site and start a new search.