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	Secondary Materials Help
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Secondary materials are commentaries and discussions of the law. They 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. Because of this 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 other 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 "buttons". The meaning of these is as follows:

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

• Organisation Logo clicking on the Organisation Logo will take you back to the home page of the current database.

• ['database name' Homepage] - jumps 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.

• [Global Search] lets you perform a free text search over the entire AustLII database or parts of it.

• ['database name' Search] - lets you search only over the materials of that particular database

• [Help] - gives you this page

Dates in Secondary Materials

When searching in Boolean Mode you can use the date operator to limit search results by date (or a date range -- see Search Help, esp Boolean Operators Chart).

Most secondary materials do not contain dates and so cannot be limited by date range.

Printing Secondary Materials

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

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.