Canadian law libraries collect microforms of statutes and law reports, as well as legislative material. These titles were available as a result of his direction of an ongoing project to update two standard Canadian retrospective bibliographies, Boult and Sweet. The difficulty with the CIHM index was that it did not provide access to titles according to accepted legal bibliographic practices. Author, title, and subject indexes alone do not provide the best access to the wide variety of legal materials found within the bibliography. Primary law is the law itself, the enactments of legislatures and regulatory bodies, and the recorded decisions of courts and administrative boards and tribunals.
Secondary law is of two types.
One type is literature that comments on, or criticizes the law texts, treatises, reports and periodical literature. Unfortunately, subject headings are not always the best source for the correct form. Boult's categories include Bibliographies, Statutes and Statutory Instruments, Law Reports, Law Dictionaries, Forms, Digests, Periodicals, and Treatises. Jurisdiction of coverage is also an essential access point for legal researchers, particularly for law reports, digests, and citations. Jurisdiction can usually be determined by examining the place of publication or the title, or by examining the geographic subdivision assigned in the subject heading.