5. Flat File Import for Legal Materials

These instructions provide specific advice on how to add legal materials such as cases and legislation as Readings into eReserve Plus.

Legal Materials are imported as Readings or Reading Requests and use the Journal genre within eReserve Plus.

Each Reading displayed by eReserve plus is a combination of a citation and bibliography. The citation is shown as the title of the reading and when clicked the bibliographic reference is displayed. This is an important distinction because citations and bibliographies contain very different information when using the Australian Guide to Legal Citation (AGLC) style. For example, pinpoint referencing (a reference to a specific place in the cited text) is only provided in the citation and not the bibliography.

Please note, ‘Unreported Decisions’ (s2.8) from AGLC Third Edition are not supported by eReserve Plus.

There are a number of additional fields to be populated for Legal Materials:

Jurisdiction

Jurisdiction typically used for Bills and Legislative readings can be provided by simply populating the jurisdiction field. Once in that field it will be used in the Citations, where applicable.

Number

This field is populated when a serial publication is published by year. In some cases there can be multiple releases during one year and if this is the case, the number of the release needs to be placed in the number field. Specifically this is outlined in AGLC Third Edition 2.2 ‘…If more than one volume is produced in a single year, the volume number should be included between the year and the report series abbreviation…’ So, for the 2nd volume of “Rowe v McCartney” the resulting citation would be created Rowe v McCartney [1976] 2 NSWLR 72.

Section

The section field is used to record the pinpoint reference.

To provide pinpoint references in the section field you must prefix the reference with appropriate abbreviation. For example,

Cases - Where there needs to be a reference to Section 7, enter s 7 in the section field.

Legislative Materials - Where there needs to be a pinpoint reference to a section of the document, prefix the section detail with s then the section as per the AGLC rules, s 3 (as per 3.1) and reg 3 (as per 3.3). Combinations can be provided e.g. s 7 para 4 for section 7 paragraph 4.

For more specific details on the appropriate abbreviations, please see the following sections of the AGLC Third Edition:

General: 1.15 & 1.16
Legislate: 3.1.4, 3.1.5 & 3.3.2
Cases: 2.5
Journals: 4.7
Books: 5.4

5.1 Mandatory Data - Cases

The translation of AGLC terms into the appropriate field in eReserve Plus is provided below:

The is used in conjunction with [count_kind: P*](flatfile-import-ch5.html#511-count_kind--pages).

5.2 Mandatory Data - Legislative Materials

The translation of AGLC terms for Statutes, Legislation and Bills into the appropriate field in eReserve Plus is provided below: