SilverPlatter Guide

Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament (APAR)

Go: Back

What is Environment and Waste Plus?

Environment and Waste Plus, produced by Sheila Pantry Associates Ltd, contains SEVEN databases:

1.  The UK Government Bibliographic Environment Database is a combined database from the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Department for Transport (ODPM-DFT). It indexes and abstracts articles from a wide range of publications, reports and journals from worldwide sources.  It also includes references to appropriate legislation, Green Papers, White Papers, and publications.

2.  Full text of Acts of the UK Parliament relating to the Environment and Waste.  The text is in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) Format.

3.  Full text of the Statutory Instruments of the UK Parliament relating to the Environment and Waste.  The text is in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) Format.

4.  Full text of the legislation of the Council, Commission and Parliament of the European Communities relating to the Environment and Waste.  The text is in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) Format.

5.  Full text of the Planning Policy Guidance Series from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM).  The text is in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) Format.

6.  Full text of the Process Guidance Notes Series from the Environment Agency for England and Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the Environment and Heritage Service in Northern Ireland, referred to jointly as the Agency or Agencies and full text of the Technical Guidance Notes and Integrated Pollution Control Guidance Notes (Chief Inspector's Guidance) from HMIP.  The text is in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) Format.

7.  Full text of the Pollution Prevention Guidelines from the Environment Agency for England and Wales, the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and the Environment and Heritage Service in Northern Ireland, referred to jointly as the Agency or Agencies.  The text is in Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) Format.

For WebSPIRS users, the following link displays the Database Table of Contents:
http://www.sheilapantry.com/fulltext/default.asp?product=envp
We recommend Microsoft Internet Explorer 5+ to view these full text documents.

Note: SGML formatted full text allows the document to be displayed in a style as close to the paper original as possible.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Description of Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament

The Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament database contains current statutes (applicable to England) relating to  waterways, pollution, clean air, environmental protection, land drainage, noise, salmon and freshwater fisheries, town and country planning etc.

An Act of Parliament is legislation which, in the form of a Bill, is presented to Parliament. Once passed by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords it is given royal assent and becomes an Act of the UK Parliament.

Statutes are affected over time by other pieces of legislation or Statutory Instruments (SI's).  The footnotes within each Act specify which clause of another Act or Statutory Instrument is affecting that Act.

Go: Guide Index or Back

The Stationery Office Holdings Ltd

The Stationery Office Holdings Ltd is a private company which is a source of the UK official and regulatory information from the UK's parliaments and assemblies. It provides a range of services and products, see www.thestationeryoffice.com

Publications are available from the sources listed below.

The Stationery Office Ltd
(mail, telephone and fax orders only)
PO Box 29, Norwich, NR3 1GN
Telephone orders/General enquiries  0870 600 5522
Fax orders  0870 600 5533
Email: customer.service@theso.co.uk

The Stationery Office Bookshops

Publications can also be bought at The Stationery Office Accredited Agents (see Yellow Pages) and through good booksellers.

There are also many bookshop agencies for The Stationery Office publications throughout the world.  Contact The Stationery Office for a detailed list of names, addresses, telephone numbers and fax numbers.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Navigating around Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament

There are four main ways in which you can navigate around this database.  These are:-

1. Using the Database Table of Contents and the Record Outline;

2. Using the Search function, particularly field-specific searching;

3. Using the Index function, particularly the limit term indexes;

4. Using the Full Text Search utility, for searching within full text;

Choose WinSPIRS Help Index from the Help menu for information about how to use these functions.

See also Search Examples

Go: Guide Index or Back

Fields in Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament (APAR)

Records in Databasename (dbsn) are divided into the following fields. Highlighted fields are limit fields.

There is also a special subset of fields, Citation (CITN), which consists of the TI, PU, SE, IB and URL fields.  Use Citation to display, print, or save only these fields for a set of records.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Go: Guide Index or Back

Limit Fields

The limit fields listed below are specially indexed fields that have relatively small number of possible values.  They are useful for narrowing the scope of a search.

Accession Number  (AN)
Group  (GP)
Publication Year  (PY)
Series Codes  (SC)
Update Date  (UD)

You can search these fields with in or =.  For example, to retrieve documents originally published in 1990, type:

1990 in py  or  py=1990

In addition to in and =, the following operators may be used with the PY field:

Go: Guide Index or Back

Series Codes

The following three-letter codes are used in the Series Code (SC) field, to represent the series named opposite them.

The short codes, once known, are convenient in the Search function.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Search Examples

The following example demonstrates how to search Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament. This example is not exhaustive, but does illustrate several search techniques. It is important to note that, although all examples are given in lowercase, SPIRS is not case-sensitive; whether your search terms are entered in upper- or lower-case, the same records will be retrieved.

Example
Search for records about transport on waterways.

1. Enter the term water*. 

Use the truncation symbol (*) to search for all variations of the root term "water", "waterways", "water-way", etc. 
earching with truncation lets you retrieve records containing variations of your term.

2. Combine the results with a search for near transport*.

Beginning the search request with the near operator automatically adds it to the previous search. The resulting 
search retrieves records containing all the variations of the term water* in the same sentence as the term 
"transport".

3.  The one stage search water* near transport will achieve the same results as the two stage search above.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Stopwords in Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament

Words of little intrinsic meaning that appear too frequently to be useful in searching text are known as "stopwords".  You cannot search for the following stopwords by themselves, but you can include them within phrases:

Go: Guide Index or Back

Combining Searches

Beginning a search request with an operator (and, not, or, with, near, or in) automatically combines that request with the previous one.

For instance, if the search you just completed is water pollution searching for and chemical will give you the same results as if you search for water pollution and chemical. Similarly, the search pollution followed by the search in ti is the same as chemical in ti.

The search water near pollution will retrieve records where the terms water and pollution appear in the same field.

The search water not pollution will retrieve records containing the term water, but will not contain any occurrences of the word pollution.

The search atmospheric pollution or industrial emission? or air pollution will retrieve records containing any of the above search terms.  The retrieved records can then be combined with another word or phrase, eg.
and hazardous substance?

Note the same result will be achieved if the above search is run as one search step, using parenthesis to separate the boolean logic operators OR and AND, eg.
(atmospheric pollution or industrial emission? or air pollution) and hazardous substance?

Go: Guide Index or Back

Truncation and Wildcards

You can use the truncation symbol (*) as a substitute for any string of zero or more characters in your search term.

 For example, the search  hazard* retrieves any record containing "hazard", "hazards", "hazardous",  etc.

You can use the wildcard symbol (?) as a substitute for one character or none.  For example, the search m?cdonald retrieves records containing "McDonald" or "MacDonald".

The search hazard? will only retrieve records containing hazard or hazards.

The truncation and wildcard symbols can be used anywhere in your search term, except as the first character.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Database Table of Contents

Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament is arranged by one document group.

To view the Acts of Parliament:

For WinSPIRS users:
Display the Table of Contents screen via one of the following:
Click the Contents button on the button bar
Select the Table of Contents command on the Views menu
Press [F3]

For WebSPIRS users:
The following link displays the Database Table of Contents:
http://www.sheilapantry.com/fulltext/default.asp?db=apar
We recommend Microsoft Internet Explorer 5+ to view these full text documents.

All the Acts are arranged within the Table of Contents in alphabetical order.  To view the documents, move the cursor over the heading representing a particular Act.  The cursor changes to a hand.  Clicking then will display the documents titles.

Document titles are shown in blue text. Move the cursor to the heading or section title you want to view, the cursor changes to a hand. Click on this heading and the section you have selected appears in the Retrieved Records area.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Record Outline

The Record Outline is an overview of the structure of a document displayed in the Full Text window.  This overview shows headings and sub headings.  Click on the text in the record outline to position the document view to that particular section.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Searching within Full Text

A search in Environment and Waste Plus: Acts of Parliament will automatically find records with the search term in the full text of the document, unless a field specific search is performed.  In addition, there is the capability to search within the different elements of the full text of the documents.

The following applies to WinSPIRS users only.

Each element which may be searched has its own index. The Element Indexes available for this database are:

Contents
All the text contained in the contents section of documents.
Margin Notes
All the text contained in the margin notes of documents.

Using the Full Text Search
Use the Full Text Search...  command from the Utilities menu:

1. Enter the term you want to search in the Term: box, e.g. environ*
2. Click one of the Options buttons in the Element box. You can choose to search Any element or Selected elements, eg. text in tables
3. If you chose the Selected option you can now highlight the element(s) from the Element List.
4. Click the Search Now button to begin the search.

Viewing the results of your search

The Retrieved Records area displays the records retrieved by your search requests. The hits from a Full Text Search are in the full text of the document. To show the full text of a record, make the record the active record by clicking anywhere in the text of the record. Then click the Show Full Text button.

Use the Next Hit and Previous Hit buttons to move through the hits which are highlighted.

To view a hit in footnote text, click on the Next Hit button

See Search Examples for other sample searches.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Field-specific Searching

You can use field-specific searching to focus searches.  For example, to find documents whose titles include the words 'food' and 'environment', enter the search:

(food and environment) in ti

Note that, without the brackets, the search above would find documents which had 'food' anywhere in them and 'environment' in the title.

Other examples of field specific searching:

(land and drainage) in ti
litter act in ti
acts of parliament in se
0105101958 in ib
en0002 in an
(water or land) in pa and PY>=1975
- this example will retrieve either of the specified words within the preamble field, but only where the document in which they appear is published on or after 1975

Go: Guide Index or Back

Using Limit Term Indexes

Some database fields are limit fields, which are specially indexed fields with relatively few possible values.  They allow you to limit your searches to records of a particular characteristic, such as publication year.

The limit term indexes are available via the Index function (click the Index button on the button bar and then the Change... button), which lets you display the Available Indexes dialog box from which you can choose another Index.

The following indexes are available in this database:-

AN   Accession Number
GP   Group
PY   Publication Year
SC   Series Codes
UD   Update Date

To look up a term, type it in the Index: text entry area. As you type, the Index Terms area scrolls to the closest match to your typing.

Highlight multiple terms by holding down the [Ctrl] key and clicking on additional terms or holding down the mouse button and dragging over the terms you want to highlight.
When you click the Search button, WinSPIRS goes to the Search screen and searches for all of the terms you selected individually and then combines them with the or operator.

If you wish to enter more than one word, remember to use hyphens rather than spaces between the words.

Limiting Searches: You can also access these indexes by clicking the Limit button after a search which can then be limited or focused on a series or group, for example:
To find records published after 1972 containing the word pollutant or pollutants, type pollutant?.  Then click the Limit button to limit by publication year, PY>1972

Go: Guide Index or Back

Copyright Statement

Environment and Waste Plus
Acts of Parliament

The Acts of Parliament database contains relevant legislation to the environment and waste.

Data: Crown copyright 2005.  All Rights Reserved.

Copyright, Sheila Pantry Associates Ltd.  Environment and Waste Plus, 2005.  All Rights Reserved.

Copyright Search and Retrieval Software, 1990 to present, SilverPlatter International N.V. All rights reserved.

The SilverPlatter quarter arc logo, SilverPlatter and ERL are trademarks of SilverPlatter International N.V. registered in one or more countries. The ERL-compliant logo, SPIRS, MacSPIRS, WinSPIRS, WebSPIRS and UNIXSPIRS are trademarks of SilverPlatter International N.V.

The Subscriber may use the Database for research purposes only, and may not publish, reproduce, transmit, store in any information retrieval system, or otherwise make available or sell the disc or its contents, whether in hard copy, electronically transmitted or any other form, and whether for commercial, educational or other purposes, other than for its own internal purposes or otherwise in accordance with the Subscription and License Agreement.

Sheila Pantry Associates Ltd. uses its best efforts to ensure that the Database contains an accurate representation or interpretation of the original material from which the Database was drawn, but neither Sheila Pantry Associates Ltd nor SilverPlatter International, N.V. or its affiliates (collectively, "SilverPlatter") shall be held responsible for any damage, claim or expense incurred by a Subscriber or user as a result of its use or reliance upon the Database.

NEITHER SHEILA PANTRY ASSOCIATES LTD, NOR SILVERPLATTER MAKES ANY REPRESENTATIONS OR WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, WARRANTIES AS TO MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE IN CONNECTION WITH THE DATABASE, ERL TECHNOLOGY, THE SPIRS SOFTWARE, THE GUIDE FILES, INDEXES OR SUPPORTING FILES.  SILVERPLATTER AND SHEILA PANTRY ASSOCIATES LTD SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ALL SUCH WARRANTIES AND REPRESENTATIONS.  NEITHER SILVERPLATTER OR SHEILA PANTRY ASSOCIATES LTD SHALL BE LIABLE FOR DAMAGES OR OTHER CLAIMS AND DEMANDS ARISING OUT OF USE OF THIS PRODUCT OR THE DATA CONTAINED THEREIN.  IN NO EVENT SHALL SILVERPLATTER OR SHEILA PANTRY ASSOCIATES LTD BE LIABLE FOR SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY OR INDIRECT DAMAGES, OR FOR "LOST PROFITS", EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY THEREOF.

Go: Guide Index or Back

Guide Revised October 26, 2005

Go: Guide Index or Back