The Law Library has added the above CD to its collection. The single disk contains all of the above indexes, as well as a list of journals indexed with over 600 titles. The disk is updated three times a year.
The coverage for the Legal Journal Index is from January 1986 onwards. This database contains three sub-databases, covering various periods. The Daily Law Reports coverage is January 1988 onwards for abstracts of law reports appearing in British daily newspapers, eg. The Times (London). The Financial Journals Index covers January 1992 onwards for Insurance Journals Index, Pensions Journals Index and Banking Journals Index.
The databases run on Idealist which is a Windows-based program.
Click on OK. The Legal Information Resource icon appears, double-click on it.
In the new screen, there are two important lines at the top. The first line is the menu bar with the options File, Edit, Search, etc. Each menu option produces a pull-down menu with additional choices. The second line is the button bar. To see a description of what each button does, use the mouse to point at the button, hold down the mouse button, move the mouse away into any white space in the screen and release the button. The information appears at the bottom of the screen.
The buttons for the databases appear in the button bar. Click on one or more buttons to open them. You can also click on the ALL button to open all the databases. However, you can search only one database at a time, ie. the one which appears on top. If the database you want to search is not on top, click anywhere within the relevant window boundary to bring it to the top. To tidy up your screen, click on the Cascade button.
Please note if you click the Legal Journal Index button, three windows will open for the three different time periods. If you want to search all three time periods, you have to repeat the search three times.
You can also truncate a word, eg. bankrupt* retrieves bankrupts, bankruptcy, bankruptcies as well as bankrupt. You cannot truncate a phrase, eg. you have to type 'fixed & asset*' not 'fixed asset*'.
You can do Boolean searching by putting square brackets round AND, OR, NOT. '&' is equivalent to AND, but remember to leave a space before and after '&', eg. 'income & tax' is correct, 'income&tax' is wrong. Replace punctuation marks like . , /, \, - with a space.
To specify the field to search in, click on the 'Field=' box, scroll through the list of fields and click on the appropriate field. Examples of fields in Daily Law Reports Index are case, legislation, court. Please refer to page 26 of the manual for the fields available in each database. If you search the legislation field, start with a number as it is faster. Eg. Type '1 & Justice & 1991' instead of 'Criminal Justice Act 1991 S. 1'.
You can also narrow or widen your search. Eg. Search for bankrupt*, then click on Search, followed by Narrow, and choose 'Author' from the 'Field=' box. Type in a specific author, to narrow the search to his/her works.
A good search technique is to switch on the Thesaurus as it makes automatic expansion possible. Eg. Type in 'East Africa', the system will automatically search for Kenya, Tanzania, etc. To switch the Thesaurus on, select Search, Preferences and at the 'Synonyms' box, choose 'Regular'. To look at the terms inside the thesaurus, select Search, Modify Synonyms. The narrower terms are displayed on the right. A quick way to scroll through to the R's is to click on the term list and type 'R'. Click on the Cancel box to close the thesarus window.
To view a long hit list, click on the Overview button, then choose a field, eg. click on title to see only the titles of the records, click on case to see the case names only. [Empty] means the record is not a case. The default is keywords.