Comparing costs of WestlawNext and Westlaw Classic

Wow! Emily Marcum, at Lightfoot, Franklin, White, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama, has just published a really interesting and useful paper. I am sorry that it must be paid for, since it's behind a paywall at Taylor and Francis. It costs $37 to buy the article.  However, it's a great piece of research.   Good for you, Emily!   She compares the cost to the client of research on both platforms. Here is the abstract which appears for free at the site, and summarizes both her methods and her conclusions:

The cost to the client of Westlaw versus WestlawNext was assessed using two research methodologies. One methodology reflected realworld questions over time across categories. The other methodology had artificially generated questions broken down by category and evenly numbered across platforms. In both experiments, WestlawNext cost the client roughly double the cost of Westlaw Classic. Simplified pricing plans were cheaper for primary law and expert materials but were more expensive for other categories.

Thank you, Emily for doing the work to test out the costs.  I am sure West folks will have comments, and perhaps other folks might have other comments as well. But it is research like this, which is useful to librarians in the field and tests based on real-world research scenarios that I am so glad to see.

Lexis Shoots Itself in the Foot

I learned yesterday that when students extend their Lexis accounts for the summer this year, they will only get access to Lexis Advance, not to lexis.com. If a student needs access to materials beyond what is available on Lexis Advance, e.g., international law, then we will need to contact our academic representatives to get the student access to lexis.com. If all or most lexis.com content had been migrated over to Lexis Advance, this decision might make sense, at least from the corporate point of view. I can understand Lexis wanting to push students over to the new platform, but I'm not sure this is the best way to do it. Not all content has been migrated, and this is going to create a serious disincentive to use Lexis Advance this summer. For instance, we have a Land Use Law Center here at Pace Law School that hires many student interns to work over the summer; municipal regulations on which they depend are not on Westlaw and they are not yet on Lexis Advance. I already mentioned international materials and municipal regulations, but Lexis Advance is also missing some news sources and secondary legal materials. I can't help but think that this is a wrongheaded decision that will ultimately push students to use WestlawNext. It's also going to create administrative headaches for the reps, who will have to intervene to get lexis.com access for those students who need it. This policy is almost as annoying as the decision to require a new password for Lexis Advance in the first place!

Printing from WestlawNext Enabled

This is not an April Fool's Day joke--I tried to print this morning from WestlawNext to our standalone printers, and it worked. Hallelujah! I can't wait to let our students know. I had heard through the grapevine that April 1 was to be the big day, but didn't believe it until I tried it myself. I still don't understand why it took until so late in the academic year to get the printing going, but I'm grateful all the same. My school was an early adopter of WestlawNext. We taught it to our first-year students last fall, and haven't regretted our choice at all. Students have taken to it very well, but were put off by the inability to print to the standalone printers. We publicized workarounds, but it was annoying all the same. With more content migrated to WestlawNext, having the standalone printing in place will be all the more valuable.

WestlawNext Printing--April Fools?

We were early adopters of WestlawNext at Pace Law School, and I have only one real quibble. The students have taken to it without a lot of training, and the quality of their searches seems to have improved. I wish the content migration would go more quickly, but materials are available on traditional Westlaw and it's not a huge inconvenience to be directed back to the old platform occasionally.

My quibble is about the printing. Students view free printing to the standalone printers provided by the two database vendors as a right and not a privilege. We could discuss whether that attitude is justified, but in the end, free printing is one way that the vendors get the students "hooked" on online research; it is in the vendors' interest to support free printing. When we chose to adopt WestlawNext, we knew that it could not yet print to the standalone printer, but we were assured that printing would work by early January and we communicated this to the students, who were not happy. We devised some workarounds which worked fairly well, and advised the students to be patient. It is now early January, printing to the standalone Westlaw printer from WestlawNext has not yet been enabled, and we have learned unofficially that printing won't be available until about the first of April. What do we tell students now?

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.