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	Secondary Materials Help
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Secondary materials are commentaries and discussions of the law. They comprise such things as journal articles and law reform materials.

Secondary materials are distinct from "primary materials" (such as cases and legislation because they do not form a part of the law itself -- they only describe or discuss it. For this reason they are often extremely useful in coming to grips with an area of law, because most of the analysis has already been done by the author(s).

The NZLII Secondary Legal Materials databases include hypertext links to most relevant material. These generally include the following:

• references to cases;
• endnote references at the end of documents
• links from case tables at the end of reports to paragraphs in the report where the material is mentioned

Using Secondary Materials

Each document is preceded by a number of "links". The meaning of these links is set out below. Not all of these links will appear in all document types.

• NZLII Logo clicking on the NZLII Logo will take you back to the NZLII home page.

• Organisation Logo clicking on the Organisation Logo will take you back to the home page of the current database.

• ['database name' Homepage] - takes you to the home page for the current database. You normally do this if you want to select a different publication or find out more about the particular organisation.

• [Index] - takes you to the home page for the current database. You normally do this if you want to select a different publication or find out more about the particular organisation.

• [Search] or [Global Search] - lets you perform a text search over all NZLII databases or selected databases.

• ['database name' Search] - lets you search only over the materials in that particular database

• [Download] - Displays a new page which contains a menu of the formats in which to download the document as a single file. This is ideal for printing a document. Note that if the menu says that "No downloadable files are available" this means that NZLII does not have a downloadable version of the item.

• [Help] - displays this page

Printing Secondary Materials

To print a page, you can either use the "Print" function of your web browser, or click [Download] to get the RTF version of the document if one exists, load it into your word processor, and print it from there.

Secondary materials are 'marked up' on a massively automated basis. We are constantly improving this process to add functionality. If you have suggestions, these are more than welcome. Please bear in mind that the mark up process is essentially heuristic in nature - that is, it is designed to make the occasional mistake. If you think that you can suggest a general approach to better taking into account the salient features which are inherent to most case law databases, please send us feedback.