************************************************************************* NEWS FROM AUSTLII http://www.austlii.edu.au/ Friday 27th September 1996 ************************************************************************* CONTENTS: Introduction Australian Internet Awards Welcome to Trina Cairns AustLII Conference on Law on the Net POSTPONED Supreme Court of New South Wales (1996 selected decisions) Australian Press Council Decisions (1976 - ) Residential Tenancies Tribunal of NSW Decisions (1986 - ) High Court Bulletin No.6 (as at 26 September 1996) High Court Bulletin No.5 (as at 27 August 1996) Recognition Technical Updates Statistics ------------------------------ INTRODUCTION Welcome to another long awaited 'News from AustLII'. We've been busy again, working on behind the scenes changes and the addition of some more collections. A number of you may also be aware of our continuing negotiations in relation to materials from some new sources which will be added to the AustLII collection during the coming months. The AustLII team has expanded a little in the last month with the arrival of Trina Cairns (see below) and an additional staff member is set to join us during October. Thanks to the continuing and extraordinary support of the Law Foundation of NSW we have recently purchased additional high-capacity disk storage and we are also able to fund an additional Primary Materials project officer (more on that shortly). Other than that, our collective health has improved and development continues as always ... Look out for another 'News from AustLII' early next week! Regards, Geoff ------------------------------ AUSTRALIAN INTERNET AWARDS http://www.webawards.info.au/ * Best Professional Services Site (Judges Award) * One of the Top 5 Most Popular Web Sites (Popular Vote) Well, thanks to the friends and supporters of AustLII we received a couple of accolades at the Australian Internet Awards on Tuesday evening. We won an award for the Best Professional Services Site. Finalists in the category also included the Law Foundation of NSW site 'Foundation Law' and the Gilbert & Tobin site which won an award for the Best Industry Site. We also placed among the Top 5 Most Popular Web Sites in Australia as decided by popular vote. Many thanks for your continued support. Geoff, Andrew, Graham, Philip and Trina. ------------------------------ WELCOME TO TRINA CAIRNS AustLII has a new Project Officer, Trina Cairns, a Law/Arts graduate from the University of Melbourne, with an administration and web background at the University of Sydney Faculty of Medicine. Trina will be principally responsible for AustLII's Treaties database (funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) and other related projects. Trina can be contacted via email at trina@austlii.edu.au ------------------------------ AustLII 'Law on the Net' CONFERENCE POSTPONED http://www.austlii.edu.au/austlii/conference.html AustLII wishes to apologise for the lack of information provided about the postponement of our 'Law on the Net' Conference, which was to have been held on 30 September and 1 October 1996. We regret any inconvenience that this postponment may have caused to proposed speakers or attendees. We will now be holding the Conference in 1997. Details will appear on the AustLII pages and in 'News from AustLII' when a new date is arranged. ------------------------------ SUPREME COURT OF NSW DECISIONS http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/nsw/supreme_ct/ We now have a partial database of New South Wales Supreme Court decisions since April 1996. The database is under construction and new decisions will be added in due course. The decisions are as provided by the court. Thanks to the staff of the Supreme Court of New South Wales for their assistance in the provision of the data. Special thanks to the Law Foundation of New South Wales for their continued funding of the AustLII primary legal materials and for their assistance in obtaining permission to publish these materials. ------------------------------ AUSTRALIAN PRESS COUNCIL DECISIONS http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/apc/ We now have available on AustLII a database containing approximately 900 adjudications of the Australian Press Council made since 1976. The adjudications can be searched alone or in combination with other databases. Thanks to the Australian Press Council and particularly Professor David Flint for making these materials available. ------------------------------ RESIDENTIAL TENANCIES TRIBUNAL OF NSW DECISIONS http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/nsw/rtt/ We now have available on AustLII a database containing approximately 1000 decisions of the Residential Tenancies Tribunal of NSW since 1986. Thanks to the Residential Tenancies Tribunal of NSW for making these materials available. Special thanks to Maya Kessler and the Chairperson of the Tribunal, Sally Chopping. ------------------------------ HIGH COURT BULLETIN No.6 (as at 26 September 1996) http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/hca/bulletin/hcab9606.html HIGH COURT BULLETIN No.5 (as at 27 August 1996) http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/other/hca/bulletin/hcab9605.html Early yesterday evening we made available High Court Bulletin No.6 which has been prepared by the High Court of Australia Library and is current as at the 26th of September. Apologies for the lack of notification regarding High Court Bulletin No.5. The High Court Bulletin provides catchwords and details regarding cases currently before the High Court. ------------------------------ RECOGNITION * Weekend Australian's 'Syte' multimedia section http://www.australian.aust.com/syte/sytehome.htm Thanks to the Weekend Australian's new 'Syte' section (7-8 Sep 96) for including AustLII in its 'hottest sites on the Web'. 'One of the best legal databases in the world', they said. Thanks. ------------------------------ TECHNICAL UPDATES * RAID Array With thanks to the Law Foundation of NSW, AustLII has recently taken delivery of a 32G (raw space) RAID disk array. The array will allow us to move our focus from 'making do' with available space to properly allocating space within a new high-performance framework. Although users may not notice dramatic changes to document access times, these will be much faster due to the very high I/O performance of striped disk and an optical fibre interface. * SINO and interface scripts Behind-the-scenes changes have been made to the SINO interface which should result in improved performance at times of heavy load. * WWW Server Performance We have been spending significant quantities of time investigating and improving the performance of our WWW servers. Some of you may have noticed improvements in speed and reliability over the last couple of weeks. ------------------------------ JULY AustLII STATISTICS SUMMARY 489,190 'hits' in July 38,000 'sessions' in July 1878 peak daily users 96 peak concurrent users 26,880 peak daily requests AUGUST AustLII STATISTICS SUMMARY 440,000 pages of HTML (approx.) 12,372,000 hypertext links 2,339 MB of indexed text 765,880 'hits' in August 54,448 'sessions' in August 2,405 peak daily users 113 peak concurrent users 38,797 peak daily requests ------------------------------ Please feel free to distribute 'News from AustLII' either electronically or in print form. Please try to avoid unsanctioned cross-postings to news groups or e-mail lists. To subscribe or unsubscribe to AustLII news: http://www.austlii.edu.au/news/ ------------------------------ Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII) http://www.austlii.edu.au/ PO Box 123 Broadway NSW 2007 AUSTRALIA Ph: (02) 281 2699 (intl +61 2 281 2699) Fax: (02) 281 2127 (intl +61 2 281 2127) Andrew Mowbray (Co-Director UTS) andrew@austlii.edu.au Graham Greenleaf (Co-Director UNSW) graham@austlii.edu.au Geoffrey King (Manager) geoff@austlii.edu.au Philip Chung (Project Officer, Primary Materials) philip@austlii.edu.au Trina Cairns (Project Officer) trina@austlii.edu.au ----------------------------- End of News from AustLII