Recently in Lexis Category

The new Nexis interface was introduced in the U.S. earlier this month, according to an InfoToday Newsbreak by Marydee Ojala.

I can't help but be a bit frustrated reading the features list, which includes customized content based on the user's country, an Easy Search interface with check boxes for limiting search results to news, company, industry, people, and/or countries. And, how cool is this, clustering technology that suggests other articles on similar topics. But why am I frustrated? Because legal customers, at least currently, don't have access to the Nexis platform, which, as far as I can tell from screenshots, was more intuitive and easy to use than the News section of Lexis.com, even before the facelift.

I hope I'm wrong about that, and we all get to use these improvements sometime soon!

Amazon does it. Now so does OCLC. According to Roy Tennant, as reported on the Free Range Librarian, OCLC has "released the ability for readers to write their own reviews." You can see this in action by searching Worldcat via Yahoo or Google.

That's very nice, but what I REALLY want is the ability to include comments in our online catalogs. How hard could that be? Wouldn't it be helpful to know what your resident expert on Mergers & Acquisitions thinks about the M&A books in your collection? Which ones are his favorites, which ones are useless? Oh, and one more thing. How about the ability to create a bibliography of the highest ranking books on a topic, complete with comments? These features would combine knowledge management and library research, and though relatively simple to implement, could have powerful results.

If only Amazon OR OCLC would start selling library software, maybe then we'd have a chance...

In a surprise move, at least it was a surprise to me, Interface Software announced today that it has been acquired by LexisNexis. Interface Software is the maker of Interaction, the most commonly used CRM (Client Relationship Management) tool in law firms.

Many firms choose to incorporate at least some relevant third-party content, including company news, profiles, financials, etc. into their implementation of Interaction. I would think that with this acquisition, enrichment with LexisNexis content will be faciliated. That could be a good thing, as long as it's not to the exclusion of good stuff from other sources!

Perhaps some of the Lexis software engineers have been working just a little too hard. See a SiliconValley.com article dated November 3, Programers Hold Funerals for Old Code. Does anyone know what CCI is/was?

[Thanks, JP!]

Some people firmly believe that LexisNexis has the best news coverage of the two major online legal vendors. But Westlaw could always tout the Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones content, very high value stuff not available on LexisNexis. Not for long....by March 2005, LexisNexis will be the exclusive provider of Factiva content to the legal market.

According to PC Magazine, "search has become one of the hottest technologies in the computer industry." From products designed to search data on a single PC, to those aimed at small, medium or large companies, there is an ever growing number of vendors promoting full-text search products for document management systems(DMS), litigation support, databases, email, intranets, and some that try to do it all, high-end, enterprise search engines such as Autonomy, Verity and Recommind, just to name a few.

Where does WestKM and the Lexis Total Search products fit into the mix? Lisa Kellar, Practice Automation Manager at Hunton & Williams, explains the difference between these KM products and the enterprise search engines.

Lexis and Westlaw introduced the web versions of their popular research services in 1998. The eventual phase out of the classic software was predicted and discussed on lawlib that same year. Since then law students have been trained exclusively on the web. But will we have to wait for a full generation before discarding the software? It's beginning to seem so! The results of a recent LawLibTech poll shows that 67% of law firms still offer the classic software of one or both vendors.