LAWTEL on the World Wide Web: a user guide
NIS79

1. Introduction

Case Law: provides fully indexed summaries of all the major law reports since 1980, including unreported judgments. Sources include the House of Lords, Court of Appeal, the High Court (including Divisional Courts), Privy Council, Employment Appeal and Lands tribunals.

Statutory Law: all Public General Acts passed since 1984, with links to original full text from 1987. Statutory status tables include information on commencement dates and powers, amendments and repeals.

Statutory Instruments: coverage from 1984, with links to full text where possible.

Parliamentary Bills: tracks bills through Parliament, stating the date of each reading, and includes a brief summary and the current status of the bill. Coverage from the 1997/98 session, with links to full text.

Command Papers: Coverage from 1992/93, with comprehensive coverage from 1997/98. Links to full text where available.

Articles Index: Abstracts of articles from a range of publications, including Law Society's Gazette, New Law Journal, Solicitors Journal, Estates Gazette.

Personal Injury Quantum reports: for use by the legal profession to assist in valuing compensation claims.

Practice Directions: Contains summaries of all Practice Directions in the U.K. since January 1980, with full text from 1998 of all practice directions issued by the Lord Chancellor's Department under the civil procedure rules.

Directories: Haver's directory of barristers and the Law Firm Directory are available via LAWTEL.

Daily Update: A searchable daily update of new items added to the database. An archive is available.

NB:the specialist centres listed on the main menu are not available with our subscription.

You can get detailed information on the content of the databases by clicking the customer services tab on the main menu.

2. Getting started

3. Navigating the World Wide Web

• To move backwards and forwards through search screens, hold down the right hand mouse button and highlight either Back or Forward
• Anything in blue and underlined is a hypertext link to another piece of related information. Simply click on it to view the information
• If your search is taking a long time, click on the Reload button at the top of the screen which may quicken things up, or the red Stop button if you wish to abandon your search.

4. Searching

General Searching Principles

• All the databases offer a free text search option. A more detailed focused search option is available for case law, statutory law, statutory instruments and the articles index
• LAWTEL is not case sensitive
• The LAWTEL search engine uses boolean operators to facilitate searches. The basic boolean operators are AND, OR and NOT.
  AND - finds documents that contain all search terms. LAWTEL always assumes this operator, so you don't have to include it.
  
  OR - finds documents containing any of the search terms e.g. driver OR motorist
  
  NOT - finds documents which contain the first search term and exclude the second e.g. income NOT tax
  
• Using quotation marks instructs LAWTEL to search for a specific phrase e.g. "consumer protection"
• Using an asterisk finds all derivatives of a term e.g. environment* will also locate environmental and environmentally.

5. Downloading and printing

If you still experience problems using this electronic resource, please contact Maria Mawson at Crookesmoor Library on extension 27348 or email m.b.mawson@sheffield.ac.uk. Alternatively, contact the Electronic Library Group on extension 27266 or email libweb@sheffield.ac.uk.