Access to Government Publications: Australia, New Zealand, and Assorted Anglophonic Countries in Southeast Asia and the South Pacific

Abstract

Almost every country in the world publishes official documents of some kind or another. There is much in these documents of interest to law libraries because they normally include official texts of codes, laws, and subordinate legislation, official court and government reports, statistics, and official gazettes or other official publications of periodical or serial nature. The content of some of these publications can be of considerable legal importance, but their usefulness is limited unless they can also be identified and acquired with relative ease. Unfortunately, this is not true for documents of most countries. The root of the problem is that very few countries, e. g., Canada, Federal Republic of Germany, Netherlands, the United Kingdom, the United States, etc. are in the habit of regularly publishing bibliographies, catalogs or other “search aids” for their documents. In most countries such bibliographic information, if available at all, tends to be incomplete, inaccurate, and sporadic. Finding a document (or even finding out about its existence) in such circumstances becomes more a matter of luck than the result of a skillful professional search.