In this lesson, we will briefly discuss the legal research tools available to you on the Internet and the main means of accessing them. Computerised legal databases are not new, however the increasing popularity of the Internet has made them more accessible to lawyers, students and lay people alike. AustLII is a facility run jointly by the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of New South Wales. Governments and courts make their materials available to AustLII for free distribution over the Internet. You can read more about AustLII on the About AustLII Page .
Text retrieval is the more traditional way for lawyers to use computers to find information.
The user specifies which combinations of words, if found in a document, are likely to make that document relevant. Browsing AustLII Select AustLII Databases to see AustLII's main contents page. Click on some of these to get a feel for how browsing works. Each link you select will take you deeper into the database hierarchy, getting more specific. Return to the top-level Databases .