Publications removed from LexisNexis

An email today from the L-N Academic Discussion list announced the removal of all Time Inc. publications from the database:

Previously, LexisNexis Academic was restricted to rolling coverage of the most recent 2 years for the title shown below. As of this morning, they have been removed entirely. The source directory in the LexisNexis Academic product has been automatically updated. Time Inc. titles still show up in the A-Z list posted at http://www.amdev.net/rpt_std_content.php , but will be removed from the A-Z List with the next update, due out in two weeks.

The titles removed:

People |Fortune |Time |Entertainment Weekly |Sports Illustrated|In Style |Money| Business 2.0 |Field & Stream
Time Inc. – Last 2 Years |Time Publications

Globe no longer in Lexis-Nexis

The Boston Globe had dropped out of LexisNexis. It no longer appears in the source list (under Boston or The--a common glitch).

Steve has suggested Factiva as an alternate source, and indeed it is there:

Most Recent Issue: 26 January 2010 First Issue: 1 January 1987 Weekend Update Schedule: The weekend editions are loaded on Factiva during a 1-3 day period after date of publication. Coverage History: Selected coverage from 1 January 1987 to 29 August 2001

Boston.com has recent material at no cost, and can serve as a handy index of "pay-per-view" articles which might be otherwise retrieved for free in Factiva.


The Boston Herald is in LexisNexis.

New on Google Scholar: Legal Opinions

You'll see this yourselves before too long, but as of this week, Google Scholar now contains legal materials.

Read all about it: Finding the Laws that Govern Us. And here's the coverage note:

Currently, Google Scholar allows you to search and read opinions for US state appellate and supreme court cases since 1950, US federal district, appellate, tax and bankruptcy courts since 1923 and US Supreme Court cases since 1791 (please check back periodically for updates to coverage information). In addition, it includes citations for cases cited by indexed opinions or journal articles which allows you to find influential cases (usually older or international) which are not yet online or publicly available. Legal opinions in Google Scholar are provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied on as a substitute for legal advice from a licensed lawyer. Google does not warrant that the information is complete or accurate.

Reviews from the legal community, including assessments of how Westlaw and LexisNexis might be affected, are linked to the post.

News from the Law School

Just a heads up: in past years, we've had students (and faculty members) who've come to the desk asking for access to Westlaw and the "full" version of Lexis-Nexis.

I learned today that the Law School has acquired one Westlaw terminal that will allow "public" (i.e. Harvard affiliates) searching. The librarians are not doing massive advertising of that fact since some mediation (i.e., training) is required and at the moment, they're swamped with 1Ls learning the ropes of legal research. However, since we've had at least one recent question that requires a search of case law, it's good to know that something more powerful than the LexisNexis Academic legal module is available.

LexisNexis White Paper Collection: another training aid

LexisNexis has a "Wiki for Higher Education" that's chock full of information and has a growing collection of user created guides to content.

It also has several "White Papers" that the L-N teams have produced for each of the main databases (Congressional, Statistical, etc.). Look for under under the "Product Pages" tab on the LN wiki home page.

These will be great introductions and overviews for those of us who are apprentices -- and, of course, are another kind of material

Meantime: here's the current white paper list for Congressional:

• An Insider's View of the U.S. Serial Set
• CRDC Collection [covers committee prints and CRS reports]
• Hearings and the L-N Digital Hearings Collections
• What is the Congressional Record?
  

Judicial review of executive lawmaking

In the past few weeks, we've had students looking for presidential memoranda or presidential determinations and (of course) executive orders. But they're also tasked with finding out which of these memoranda, determinations, executive orders (etc.) would have been challenged in federal courts.

We have strategies for finding the presidential materials, in CFR Title 3, FR's Weekly [and now, Daily] Compilation of Presidential Documents, Public Papers of the President, and US Code Congressional and Administrative News. We can learn which  Executive Orders are still in effect by consulting the Disposition Tables maintained by NARA. 

But for gray zone materials -- like determinations and memoranda -- figuring out which occasioned judicial review can be harder. CRS Reports, Law Reviews, case law are options. 

Our friends in the Law School Library suggest Shepard's Code of Federal Regulations Citations as well. Except for the current issues, past volumes need to be requested from the Depository. Online searching can be done on the full version of LexisNexis and on Westlaw. Because undergraduates have limited options for accessing these resources, however,  we may want to recommend a consult with a Law librarian. 

If the bound volumes of the citator don't suffice, the Kennedy School Library may be the place to send them for their LexisNexis full version searching. LexisNexis Academic only seems to permit shepardizing of state and federal case law and law review articles.  

Hat tip to Terri Gallagher O'Rourke (Law) for this information.  

Indexes for the NAACP Papers on Microfilm

We have the Papers of the NAACP on microfilm, but we don't have printed indexes for all the parts and supplements of the collection. If a patron needs one of these indexes we don't have, you can find them online in Lexis-Nexis Primary Sources in U.S. History or at University Publications of America .

Lexis-Nexis Direct Export to RefWorks

The new Lexis-Nexis interface allows you to export article citations directly to RefWorks. However, only Lexis-Nexis Academic has the new interface. From all other Lexis-Nexis Products (Congressional, Statistical, State Capital, Primary Sources, Government Periodicals), citations must be entered manually. See the instructions on the Citation Tools iSite.

LexisNexis Wiki: New features to know about

LexisNexis is now offering a "Tip of the Week," via its wiki. The current tip, useful to a lot of students, no doubt, describes ways to track down RNC convention transcripts on Academic.

Another feature is an "Image of the Week." The current one, on the wiki front page, comes from the Serial Set (via LexisNexis Congressional).

If you're interested, you can have the tips delivered to you via RSS feeds.

Searching for newspapers by country in LexisNexis

Posted to the LN-Academic listserv in October, after the new interface was launched.  Beware, however, that results seem to vary depending on the search route you take; "barack obama" in newspapers of "africa" from the "previous 2 years" demonstrates this inconsistency. 

A. You can use the Sources tab to impose geographic restrictions.

1. Click on Sources to open the Browse Sources form
2. At the top of the form, make sure that Publication Type is selected
3. Use the Filter By dropdown to pick Europe (or a specific country)
4. Click on the News folders in the bottom portion of the screen
5. You will now see that a new drop down box appears at the top, allowing you to choose "Multiple/Single Sources." If you choose "Multiple" it will give you a nice selection of the big group files for Europe such as "Toute la Presse - Français"
6. Choose the source(s) you want and click OK - Continue to run your search

B. You can search international news sources on the News tab.

1. Click on the News tab
2. Select a broad source such as "All News, English" or "Major World Newspapers"
3. Run your search
4. In the results set, switch the clustering from Publication Type to Geography

C. You can search international news sources via Power Search.

1. From the General search screen (not our system default), click on the Power Search tab.
2. Select one broad news sources from the dropdown box, such as "All News (English)" or "Major World Publications (Non-English)"
3. Use the Add keywords option below the search box to pop up our taxonomy selector tool
4. Use the dropdown box to switch to the geographic taxonomy and browse to the country or region you want
5. Add the index terms to your search
6. Run the search
7. In the results set, switch the clustering to Geography

SFX (Citation Linker) glitch

This week and last, several of us have noticed that Citation Linker searching isn't always turning up a truly complete list of online access options for serials.

Yesterday,  Vida encountered this problem with the Philadelphia Inquirer:  Citation Linker didn't identify the availability of full-text via Factiva, so it looked as though the  online version ended at 1922. 

Days before, a student looking for the LA Times for the late 1980s and 1990s couldn't imagine (in this instance, wisely) that we'd be missing 20 some odd years and wrote me an email .  Citation Linker listed only LexisNexis holdings (6 mos.), ProQuest Historical Newspapers (to 1985) and a HOLLIS link.  Factiva -- absent from this SFX results list -- had the time period the student needed to search. 

I notified OIS of the problem via the Comments line and was told that after a recent update, the SFX software was not parsing Factiva links properly.   The good news is that they're aware of the problem and addressing it; I don't know how soon the fix will happen, however.  As of this writing, the Citation Linker list for the LA Times  is still incorrect.

Until the problem is resolved -- or  just whenever you have the feeling that your Citation Linker  results are not quite right, Factiva is another place for you to try.

Roper Center Polls: alternative access to LexisNexis

LexisNexis has announced that Roper Center materials will no longer be part of its collection and that access them will end on December 31, 2007.

Don't forget that we have direct access to the Roper Center directly via E-Resources. According to Meghan, Roper makes even more available than LexisNexis, since both summary and micro-level data are there.

Users (i.e., Harvard affiliates)will have to enter an email; I suppose that non-Harvard affiliates would require our mediation.

Terms and Connectors is the key!

As anticipated (see this previous post), the new LexisNexis interface is now live.

If you are initially disoriented by what you see, here's a tip: move from "General" to "News." Then: change the radio button from "natural language" to "terms and connectors" and you'll see a screen that has the standard (and probably more powerful) search functions with which we are familiar.

COERS is taking up the issue of the LexisNexis redesign tomorrow, and as I've learned from Laureen, there's to be discussion about what default screens to set. I don't anticipate much resistance to a request for a default change, but I'll be writing up a short statement for COERS this evening.

This new L-N has many, many nice features, so don't be put off! It's now a 21st-century resource!

A helpful description of the new Smart Indexing Technology is available, too.

Who's Who in Lexis-Nexis

The Beta version of Lexis-Nexis has a "People" tab for searching for biographical information. The search results will include a person's entry in the latest Marquis Who's Who. As we know, Who's Who is also one of the sources in Gale's Biography Resource Center. But it appears that the version of Who's Who in Lexis-Nexis is more up to date than that in the BRC. I've done a couple of biographical searches in both databases, and in both cases the Who's Who entry in Lexis-Nexis had more recent information (not just a more recent release date).

LexisNexis redesign

In case this is also news to you -- as it was to me (and to our e-resource stewards) -- LexisNexis is (finally?) updating its interface. The redesign, which has been in beta testing since January is set to roll out this month, according to the LexisNexis announcement.

This page links to several tutorials that explain the changes and new features. Be warned, though: pace is excruciatingly slow.

The Letter (and Page Number) of the Law

A woman called to see if we had The Economist in hard copy, because she needed page numbers for an article she'd gotten through Lexis-Nexis. I offered to search in Lexis-Nexis and tell her the page numbers in the citation. She said, "Oh no, this is the Law School -- we have to check every citation against the physical source. You should have seen me looking up articles from the New York Times on microfilm, just to see if the page numbers matched what I had gotten online." (Note: Sue informs me that checking electronic citations against the original source is a general principle of legal research.)

Westlaw and "full" LexisNexis access for undergraduates

Occasionally, as happened yesterday in an instruction session, I've had students ask me if Harvard has Westlaw access (or the "full" version of LexisNexis). Here's what to know:

1. While the Law School Library does subscribe to Westlaw, it does so only for its population. On site Reference questions are sometimes answered with Westlaw, but Law Librarians do not offer any kind of mediated searching for patrons and undergraduates shouldn't be sent there with that expectation.

2. At the Law School Library, the same policies apply for LexisNexis.

3. The KSG Library does have a terminal from which patrons can use the more robust version of LexisNexis. Librarians will help a student get started (since the dot commands take some getting used to), but there is no mediated searching offered.

The KSG terminal dedicated to LexisNexis is not attached to a printer, incidentally, so patrons you direct there should be prepared to email or should bring a memory stick with them.