UNIVERSITY OF ULSTER LIBRARY JUSTIS LAW REPORTS DIGEST - A USER GUIDE COVERAGE The Law Reports Digest is a useful quick-reference tool that contains details of all of the cases contained in The Law Reports and The Weekly Law Reports, but in a condensed form. It contains the key fields from each case and a summary of the proceedings, complete with links to the full services if subscribed. Coverage dates range from 1865 - for The Law Reports and 1952- for The Weekly Law Reports. The Digest is updated at the same time as the full versions of the other databases. Records have the same starting page number as the full case report, but other pages are likely to be different. It is not possible to select one of the Law Reports Digest databases at the same time as the corresponding full database. ACCESSING JUSTIS LAW REPORTS DIGEST This database is available on or off-campus and uses Athens authentication. All UU students and staff should already be registered for an Athens username and password. If you do not know your Athens username and password, contact Library staff for details, or check your details on Studentweb at: http://studentweb.ulst.ac.uk If you find you do not have a password, you can self-register for one at:http://www.ulst.ac.uk/library/electronic/athens.htm Go to the Library's homepage, and click on Electronic Information Services http://www.ulst.ac.uk/library/electronic and select Justis Law Reports Digest from the A-Z list. Enter your Athens username and password when prompted. Click on Case Law and choose The Law Reports (Digest) by ticking the relevant box, followed by GO! Searching You can search under Parties, Court, Date, Judge, Catchwords, Headnote, Neutral Citation and Year. Selecting the Reference Tab at the top of the screen enables you to search by citation, if you know it, or choose Contents to browse through a chronological list of the Law Reports. If you are not sure what words to search for in a particular field, click the adjacent Word Index button: This allows you to select a search term from an index of all the words in a particular field. There is also a Word Index for Free Text, which contains all of the words from all of the fields. You can use search operators to connect different search terms. You can toggle from 'AND' to 'OR' and then to 'NOT' by clicking the connector box. Using wildcards to help you search * = Characters at the end of a word, e.g. liab* finds liability, liabilities, liable, etc.? = A single character anywhere in the word, e.g. Compl?ment finds compliment and complement. - = A space, no space or a hyphen, e.g. Data-base finds, database, data base and data-base.
When you have typed in all of the terms for which you wish to search, click the "Go!" button near the bottom of the window. Results If your search finds more than one document, a list of documents is displayed on this tab. Click one of the underlined document names to display the record on the Document screen. Navigating a Document Screen To the left of the document you will see the outline; this allows you to navigate through the document by clicking one of the field names. Remember this will be a summary of the case.
Navigation bar Near the bottom of the window, you will see a row of buttons: The Document button allows you to browse through the records retrieved in your search. Click on the < > buttons to move from one document to the previous or next. The Page button allows you to browse through the displayed record one page at a time. Click the < > buttons to move from one page to the previous or next. The Term button allows you to browse through the occurrences of the search terms used in your search. The Database button near the bottom left of the window, shows the name of the database to which the document belongs. Click the name of the database to see the User Guide for it. Linking to other documents and J-Link Hypertext links to other documents or to other pages in the current document are indicated by blue underlined text; click on the blue text to jump to the other page or document (where available). If you see a publication reference for another document that you would like to see, (and it is not a hypertext link) select it by dragging over the reference with your mouse, and then click the "J-Link" button on the toolbar. Justis.com will attempt to find the document and display it for you, even if it is in a database that you have not selected. Cross Reference and Trail The Cross Reference link is on the toolbar at the top of the screen. If available, it shows you lists of relevant previous or subsequent documents and allows you to display any of them. The Trail button shows you a list of all the documents you have viewed in the current session, and allows you to go back to any of them; it is not displayed until you have viewed. Downloading Justis.com allows you to download (i.e. save to your computer s hard disk or floppy disk) documents from any screens that have lists of documents. From the Document screen, you can download only the displayed document. From the Results screen, you can choose one or more documents to download by clicking to put a tick in the appropriate check boxes. You need to choose the file type you require. RTF is suitable for word processors and HTML is suitable for Web pages or word processors
Container: The Justis.com document files that you want to download can be compressed and combined into a single container file so that they will download faster. Some documents on Justis.com are very large, and may take a long time to download without a container. Windows users whose network security does not allow program files to be downloaded should choose the None or Zip options. Downloading without a container file After making your selection of file type and "None" for Container, click the "Go!" button. The following message box will appear: The menu item for downloading (saving) files has different names in other Web browsers, for example "Save Link As..." or "Download Link to Disk". Emailing Documents To display the Email Documents form, click the "email" button in the toolbar at the top of the Justis.com window. Fill in the details, click the "Go" button at bottom of the form, and the document(s) will be emailed to your chosen recipient(s). As a minimum, you must enter an email address in the "To:" box, but can complete the other boxes as desired. File type: You can choose either RTF (Rich Text Format, suitable for word processors) or HTML (HyperText Markup Language, suitable for Web browsers or word processors). Printing from the Document Screen Clicking the "print" button on the toolbar at the Document Screen, gives you the choice of printing the whole summary, or selected fields. Make your selection, and then click the "Go!" button to start printing your document. You may need to click "Next" or "OK" in another dialog box to start printing. If you click "Selected Fields", you will see the following table of fields. Click in a check box to put a tick against the fields that you wish to print.
Printing from the Results screen When you are viewing a list of documents on the Results screen, clicking the "print" button on the toolbar gives you the choice of either printing lists of documents or printing the range of document summaries. Make your selection, and then click the "Go!" button to start printing. You may need to click "Next" or click "OK" or press the Ctrl+P key combination to start printing. Help Click on the HELP option on the toolbar at the top of the screen. Logging off. Click on the Log Off button on the toolbar at the top of the screen. Last updated 23 rd December 2004