The Law Library used to have vlex for Spanish law, but we are now trying their global service, which offers legal material from over 90 countries, the EU, the Andean Community, IJC and WIPO decisions. 
However although the UK and USA are among the bigger collections on this database, the usefulness of vlex to Oxford users will primarily be in the coverage of the Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries – (no fewer than 8 new titles were added to the Spanish Books and Journals collection in the last week) – and for accessing works in Spanish on other jurisdictions and topics. Typically vlex offers official gazettes, law codes, legislation, law reports. Where the coverage is wider then there are books and journals,”Forms and Contracts” (which can be downloaded in RTF so that they can be filled in, adapted and used), “Collective Agreements” and “Legal News” (which for Spain includes the online versions of El Pais and El Mundo). Whatever is made available is always full text.
Spain: vlex
The resource called My Documents is a reminder that users can not only save successful search results for future sessions (with their own tags and commentary), but also upload their own documents (in word, pdf or rft) into Vlex where they are searchable resources alongside those supplied by the database. (Read more about this facility on vlex – but remember whatever is uploaded will be “private” within the Oxford University community – not private in the sense of accessible only to the uploader.) Search results can be also be printed, emailed or downloaded. (There is a pdf option for those cases, eg Official Journals, where an exact replica of the original format might be important.) The facility to copy and paste direct from the results may be a worry in this world of plagiarism – but Oxford reminds users that referencing sources is an essential part of true scholarship.
The Help Center (grr!) offers guides (in a range of languages see drop down menu options top right)
but fortunately there is little that is peculiar.
Search Help
One oddity (at least for people used to searching for titles in SOLO / OLIS) when using the Browse by Source Name facility is that definite/indefinite articles count as the first word of titles eg the book La filosofia del derecho contemporanea is listed under L. It is a relief, however, to read that vlex does not worry about accents – or the lack of them – in your search terms!
Very usefully, on every results page there is an option to create an alert (so that you are emailed whenever new material matching those search terms is uploaded). Indeed, it is also possible to set up an alert or alerts unrelated to previous searches via the Alerts tab on the top of each page.
Alerts Tab
