First Look at WestlawNext

I finally got a first look at WestlawNext today. I think our students are going to love it because it looks and acts a lot like Google. It will probably be hard for some faculty members to make the transition to WestlawNext, and we librarians will have to do a lot of individualized hand holding and training. We couldn't figure out whether the Custom Digest feature has been incorporated, but our Westlaw rep couldn't find it. Other concerns, at least for the academics out there, include: support for standalone printing, which I assume will work at some point in the future; the Alert feature, which isn't supported at this time; and links from TWEN-- links from TWEN to westlaw.com don't work in WestlawNext and have to be put in. Another ongoing concern is the question of content. I am still annoyed that ALR International was made available to the law school market and then pulled summarily after a very short time. Thomson's answer is that we can buy it separately if we want it, and I suspect that that will be the answer as more databases are taken down from the academic market.