I stopped by the LexisNexis booth for a demo of their new product for public libraries, called Library Express. It looks just like their Academic product, but with slightly reduced content. There are buttons for Legal (case law, statutes, codes, regulations, patents and law school directories), Business (which is Company Dossier), and News (Nexis’ full text newspapers, journals, magazines, broadcast news and wire services). At the booth, they told me they intend for Library Express to be a "long term program to introduct public libraries to LexisNexis content." In other words, it’s an attempt to push LN content at public libraries rather than ask public libraries what content they need that they don’t have now. Several librarians told me that the legal information is nice, but usually they simply send patrons with serious legal research needs down the street to the county law library. The interface is slick, but the question is whether public libraries need another aggregator of information. Since Library Express is brand new, we’ll have to wait until public librarians have a chance to test it out. 30-day free trials are available.

I had a demonstration a few hours ago on the new interface for LexisNexis Academic. The beta logo came off the page only this morning! It looks very nice, more like the new Nexis interface introduced a couple of years ago. Easy search can support advanced search strategies, ones with Boolean and proximity and segment limitations and the like, while Power search is straight Nexis. LN Academic has added some legal information, such as Shephard’s, law reviews, and Federal and state cases. Company Dossier is now there but not Industry Dossier. There’s a language limit from a dropdown menu and I learned LN has two sources from Finland! I searched for “sauna” and filled the screen with Finnish. LN Smart Indexing is refreshed every quarter, which is particularly useful for geography. For example, everything that had been indexed as “Soviet Union” is now indexed “Russia.” I probably need to look into this further, since some of the states that made up the union of soviet socialist republics probably would prefer to be indexed under their own names: Just think Poland, Latvia, or Kazakhstan.