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AustLII Overview
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An Overview of the AustLII Project

The Australasian Legal Information Institute provides free internet access to Australian legal materials. AustLII is one of the largest sources of legal materials on the net, with over six gigabytes of raw text materials and over a million searchable documents. AustLII publishes public legal information: that is, primary legal materials (legislation, treaties and decisions of courts and tribunals); and secondary legal materials created by public bodies for purposes of public access (law reform and royal commission reports etc). AustLII's policy agenda is to convince parliaments, governments, courts, law reform bodies and other public institutions to make legal materials they control available free via the internet.

What is in the AustLII Collection ?

The AustLII collection contains full-text databases of most Australian decisions and legislation. Current databases include Commonwealth, ACT, Northern Teritory, Victorian, Western Australian, NSW and SA legislation and regulations, most federal courts (High Court, Federal Court, Family Court, AAT etc) and most state courts and tribunals. AustLII also includes a number of more specialised (subject specific) databases as well as the most comprehensive index to Australian law on the Net.

Who uses AustLII ?

AustLII is used by over 80,000 people each working day. Our usage statistics indicate that AustLII's users span the whole community, including educational institutions (about 30%), the legal profession and business (25%), community organisations (15%), government (10%), and 20% from overseas.

How is AustLII Funded ?

AustLII is operated jointly by the Faculties of Law at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW). It is funded by grants of around $.5 million per year from the Australian Research Council, the Law Foundation of New South Wales, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and other bodies.

AustLII's Technical Innovations

AustLII's approach to computerising legal materials is based on ten years of research and development. Technical innovations by AustLII researchers include:

Automated rich hypertext: There are over 20 million automatically inserted hypertext links in AustLII's one million pages, including links to statutory definitions, other sections and Acts, and cases.
Development and use of our own software: The whole AustLII database can be searched in a few seconds, using the SINO search engine, with boolean and proximity operators and relevance ranking. The LINKS software maintains and presents AustLII's indexes. Inferencing software is under development.
Integration of hypertext and text retrieval: Every section in an Act has a 'Noteup' button which causes an automatic search for cases, other legislation, or secondary materials that refer to that section.

AustLII is committed to continuing research in computerisation of law, and its researchers have received a series of Australian Research Council grants for research on text retrieval, hypertext, inferencing, indexing and litigation support.

Contacting AustLII

For more information about AustLII, send mail to feedback@austlii.edu.au

For individuals, see personnel.

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URL: http://www.austlii.edu.au/austlii/brochure.html

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