Those undertaking Indonesian law research face the major hurdle of sourcing relevant legal material. Indonesian legal information is not widely available through print or online media, although recent improvements in the latter are making significant progress to the benefit of researchers. The main print media are the Government Gazette and its sister publications. The problem is that these publications are often behind schedule. The Government Printing Office (Pusat Penerbitan PNRI) also publishes individual legislation on a case-by-case basis. Although these are useful and relatively inexpensive, they are not entirely error-free.

The other print media providing legal materials are books, journals and other publications. Most are in the Indonesian language and their standards of presentation and analysis vary. Many of these publications are available only in Indonesia or in specialist Indonesian collections in overseas libraries.

Online media promises to be a useful means to make Indonesian legal material more readily available to the public. Certain Indonesian government departments are beginning to make available on their websites key legislation in their respective fields of interest. For a listing of government departments with websites, see the section on Useful Links, below. The best free website currently available for law seems to be the site maintained by Hukumonline, a partially USAID-funded project operated by a local non-profit group based in Jakarta. Hukumonline provides most of the past and current legislation which can be viewed onsite. Operating since 2001, this website is updated regularly and contains useful legal information.

One major limitation of Indonesian legal materials from most print and online sources is that they are presented in a non-consolidated form. For example, a statute like the Banking Law 1992 is available as it was first enacted in 1992. Its major revision, the Banking Amendment Law 1998, is available as a separate statute. Most publishers do not make the effort of consolidating the amendments, with the result that researchers have to undertake their own “cut-and-paste” effort to create a consolidated legislation. Another obvious limitation with many Indonesian print and online sources is that they publish their material almost entirely in the Indonesian language. This creates a major stumbling-block for foreign researchers who are not familiar or fluent with the language.