[156] in Public-Access_Computer_Systems_Forum
Lexis Summary
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Mon May 4 14:41:22 1992
Date: Mon, 4 May 1992 13:35:38 CDT
Reply-To: Public-Access Computer Systems Forum <PACS-L%UHUPVM1.BITNET@RICEVM1.RICE.EDU>
From: "Julius Ariail; Georgia Southern University;912681-5115"
To: Multiple recipients of list PACS-L <PACS-L@UHUPVM1.BITNET>
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
After posting my question about managing Lexis/Nexis access in a
general academic environment, I received seventeen responses in
six days. Five people stated that they were also about to start
Lexis, and were interested in the same questions I had posed.
Twelve people submitted suggestions, some of which are listed
below. The texts have been edited to save space and to eliminate
some names of individuals and libraries, since a few comments
were mildly critical of Mead Data Central (MDC).
I appreciate all responses and have shared them with the
librarians at Georgia Southern. We are scheduled to receive our
initial set of Lexis passwords in a few days. and I know all of
the advice we have received will help as we set up Lexis access.
PACS-L provides a good method to explore this topic!
Julius Ariail, Director of Libraries
Georgia Southern University
jariail@uscn.uscn.uga.edu
-----
We have just started using Lexis/Nexis in the College of
Business. I don't have much of an answer to your
question because I had put out a similar request on the Bus Lib
list and got nothing. A number of libraries are about to do the
same thing and most everyone is in the same boat.
-----
You might take a look at the experiment Dialog is doing at
Earlham College, with Evan Farber at the helm. They have free
Dialog access for the entire student body, and they find that
students seem to be looking for "an" answer, not "the" answer,
and so will not look further if they find something acceptable
the easiest way. Evan and his crew are working hard on
bibliographic instruction, with support from the faculty.
-----
I think any library considering providing end-user access to
online timesharing systems can get advice on instruction,
operation, etc., from articles published on end-user searching in
the past few years, beginning with Halperin and Pagell's ONLINE
article about "Do-It-Yourself Searching: What to Expect."
Think about charging a fee, even if it is a small one.
Otherwise, expect a lot of nuisance searchers who will want to
sit at the terminal everyday for 30 or more minutes, using the
system for no special reason.
In training, most users will not recall much of what you lecture
about. Students are pretty bright and tend to pick up systems
like Lexis quickly after their first search.
-----
A way to limit printing is to ask the company to change
the software that they load on their machines to allow only
screen prints (instead of allowing printing of entire documents).
A more restrictive method is to change the software to
allow only downloading to floppy disks. The company probably
won't go along with that (again, for marketing purposes; and
the customers won't like it either).
-----
We have Lexis/Nexis in a law school environment and perhaps our
experience can help you. Every one of our students has a
password and in normal cases they each have the ability to
download. Because of the problem of excessive downloading some
schools have had Lexis code it so that only the librarians'
password can be used to download or print off line. The students
can still do screen prints but that can get very tedious if you
are printing more than a little. This does take some staff time
to set up legitimate print jobs.
On the issue of training, I can't tell you much. Lexis claims to
be able to do initial training in 2 hours, but I don't think much
of it. Full text searching is really quite different from index
searching. In fact I have implemented a training system requiring
a great deal more training than most law schools. It simply
wouldn't be feasible in a large law school much less a setting
with as many students as you have. But get your reference
librarians through as much training on it as you can.
-----
Our Law Library's LEXIS policy is an continuously evolving
process. The bill is paid by the library system and not the law
school. For this reason we have always "bent" the rules to allow
non-law students and faculty to have access to the MDC databases.
MDC has recently come out with contracts for university-wide
access to their system which will finally allow us to provide
"legal" access for everyone. The biggest users are Political
Science, Business, and Journalism. Our old policy was, that if
the professor made special arrangements with us, their students
would be trained and have access to LEXIS/NEXIS. Any full-time
faculty member would be issued a password and given
communications software.
Starting in January we no longer allow non-law students to have
direct access to the databases. We found that even though
attendance was mandatory, the people who didn't show up for
training wanted to be trained individually at a later time, and
the people who had attended training needed a lot of help when
they came back to use the computer on their own.
So while we are looking into alternative university-wide
contracts, and to save our sanity we changed the policy. Now,
the student has to make an appointment with a librarian for a
mediated search. We sit down with the student, discuss their
topic, and run the search for them. Since we were essentially
doing this anyway because the training didn't seem to sink in, we
save ourselves a step.
I don't know what we are going to do once we sort out the
contract situation. The law librarians have the most experience
with the MDC databases, both searching and training, but I don't
see how we can be responsible for training the entire campus. I
know the vendors are always happy to help with training, but we
have had bad experiences in the past, and would rather do it
ourselves.
We tried something new this year with first year law student
training. We required them all to complete a software-based
offline training program before they attended their "live"
training session. It was successful as we then had time to focus
on advanced techniques as they had already covered the basics.
-----
We are just now getting into public use of Lexis/Nexis. We
played around with it in our offices for several weeks to get the
feel for it and to give us a general idea of how to proceed with
access, training, etc. for the public. What we have decided on
for the present (and this may change) is to have one machine
reserved for faculty and grad students, (we have 2 passwords) and
the other for undergraduates. The faculty and grad students may
use the database only after they have attended a workshop.
Librarians will assist undergraduates until we find something for
them to browse through. Then we give them the basics of browsing.
Faculty and grad students are on their own, more or less. It is
too soon to tell if this is going to work.
My own feeling is that most students, with a little training,
will be able to navigate quite successfully through the libraries
and files. This was proven yesterday when I assisted a young lady
in getting into a list of about 45 potential citations. After
showing her how to browse through them, I left her alone. When I
checked back about 30 min. later to see how she was doing, I
found that she was moving through libraries, files, full doc,
next doc,etc., with ease. She was able to find more material than
our original search.
Now for the matter of printers. Before we ever started using the
database, we had decided we didn't want printers, because with
full text, an inordinate amount of time would be used in printing
instead of research. We opted to try for downloading onto a
personal floppy which the patron could then use however they
wished. What we have discovered is that the downloading takes
almost as long as printing on a reasonable fast printer. We are
now starting to talk about getting a printer. But until we get
more feedback from patrons, we will not change anything.
Now for more positive comments. Even without being able to
make copies, patrons who have used it are very satisfied. They
love the idea of full text without having to search all over the
library to find material. They can't believe the immediate
access to current material, ie. yesterdays newspapers.
We feel as though we have a tiger by the tail, but we are taming
him!
-----
We are in the midst of a pilot program to bring Nexis to the
Masses. Our law school, like all law schools, has had
Nexis/Lexis access for its students for years and our School of
Management has also had access for some time now. We have
acquired--again on a pilot basis--three nexis passwords for the
rest of the University. We have worked closely with our computer
center to implement Internet access and, thus, avoid
communications costs. Students and faculty can access Nexis from
most networked computers on campus, from non-networked machines
via modem, from selected OPAC terminals in several libraries, and
via a dedicated workstation in the main library. All access,
with the exception of the dedicated workstation, is through a
multiprotocol gateway setup (MPG) which allows communications
across most platforms. Users, when logging on are prompted for
their id numbers and the first four digits of their last name.
These are matched against a file containing the id numbers and
last names of students and faculty derived from our NOTIS
circulation file. If a user qualifies for access, they are
prompted for terminal type and, if a password is available, the
user is connected to Nexis. If a password is not available, the
user is told to try again later. The dedicated workstation
connects directly to Mead, via the Internet and has a dedicated
password. In other words, if one can get onto it and the ether
is willing, one is guaranteed a connection. We are encouraging
downloads and screendumps. Our terminals permit only
screendumps. The dedicated machine is a Macintosh running Mead's
front-end software. We have yet to acquire a printer for it, so
users are limited to downloading.
-----
We have had Lexis/Nexis for 6 months now. We have one dedicated
terminal in a public area and a separate password for reference
staff to use on our reference desk computer. We got a video from
Mead (there are several available, we got the one that explains
legal research on Lexis), and we also have a tutorial which we
have loaded on 6 computers (that also can access CDs on a LAN) in
the public area.
Printing - in the public area we have disabled the print function
and patrons can only print one screen at a time using the Shift
and Print Screen keys. The terminal is attached to a laser
printer although we may change this. Reference librarians can
print full documents at the reference desk computer.
Training - we have given some classes in using Lexis to a very
select group of legal studies undergraduate classes who are using
it for assignments. If appropriate we mention it in other B.I.
classes. We encourage patrons who want to use it to watch the
video and use the tutorial. If someone just needs something
looked up quickly we do it for them, but do not train
them like we would if we were showing them how to use our OPAC or
our CDs. Right now we feel that we would spend all our time on
the desk training people in Lexis/Nexis, so by telling them to
use the training resources only serious users pursue it. We were
very worried about have only one public terminal, but
surprisingly enough it has not (yet) become a problem. We often
steer students to other appropriate sources even when the
material is on Lexis because of the amount of training needed to
use it and because we have only one terminal.
