Electronic Resources Beyond Lexis and
Westlaw
Paul D. Callister, JD, MSLIS
Director of the Leon E. Bloch Law Library
& Associate Professor of Law
http://www1.law.umkc.edu/Faculty/callister/bootcamp/ppt/BeyondWexis.ppt
© 2005. Paul D. Callister
Why Go Beyond Lexis or Westlaw?
•
Coverage
– Historical Material
• Lexis (full-text journals-1982 to present)
• Westlaw (full-text journals-1994 to present)
• LegalTrac (abstracts-1980 to present for 875 journals)
• Index of Legal Periodicals (abstracts-1981 to present for 1,021 journals)
• HeinOnline (400 full-text journals from inception to present)
• Making of the Modern Law (22,000 legal treatises from 1801 to 1927)
– Specialty Publishers
• RIA (tax, accounting and financial)
• CCH (tax. labor and securities)
• BNA (tax, labor, ethics, biotech, ecommerce, securities, family law, criminal law,
U.S.Law Week)
• Congressional Universe/CIS (legislative history)
•
Abstracts
– LegalTrac
– Index to Legal Periodicals
– EBSCO Academic Search Elite
•
Indexing
– Disintermediated v. Mediated Access (Man v. Machine)
– Lexis and Westlaw generally do not copy indexes to looseleafs
– IndexMaster
•
•
Cost
Format (PDF vs. Electronic text)
Understanding Databases - What Kind of
Problem is It?
The table is based upon a similar taxonomy developed in Jean L. Sears &
Marilyn K. Moody, Using Government Information Sources: Print and
Electronic 6-9 (2nd ed., 1994).
General Rule
Research
Bookmarks are
freely available
on the web.
Subscription
Databases are
items which
are licensed for
a fee.
Library home page: htttp://www1.law.umkc.edu/library
The databases and
services are listed in
alphabetical order.
A few require passwords
and may be restricted to
law students and faculty,
but most are licensed for
“walk-in” use and may be
accessed by anyone at the
library.
Scrolling down . . .
Most of the databases may
be accessed from home
through a proxy server
requiring your university
email prefix (e.g.,
“callisterp”) and your
password.
A few of the databases will
only be accessible from
home to law students and
faculty.
Others require an
individual password.
Scrolling further . . .
Note that the University of
Missouri subscribes to
many more databases than
are listed here. A complete
list of databases is
available through the
Subject Access and
Alphabetical Listing of
UMKC Libraries Databases
links at the bottom of the
page.
From the University
Library Subject page . . .
There is a grouping of law
databases (which has not
been compiled by the law
library). Many of the subject
categories have relevant
databases such as
interdisciplinary journals,
economic, industry and
corporate information, the
Oxford English Dictionary,
Books in Print, and
encyclopedias.
A Few Examples . . .
From Copyright . . .
Is the historical origin of the conception of copyright as the
privilege of a sanctioned state monopoly? Is there evidence
that copyright was always viewed as a fundamental property
right?
A Few
Selections:
In addition to
historical
coverage of
law reviews
and journals,
Hein Online
provides
access to a
legal classics
collection, the
Federal
Register (in
its entirety)
and treaty
databases.
A Few
Selections:
LLMC Digital
Law Library
Consortium is
an ongoing
project to
digitize bout
9,000 titles.
To date,
historical
materials
from all three
branches of
the federal
government,
Canadian
law, and
military law
have been
digitized.
A Few
Selections:
Making of the
Modern Law
contains
22,000 titles
of 19th and
early 20th
century legal
treatises.
Legal
treatises from
this period
are
particularly
important –
perhaps
supplanting
reporters as
the most
important
legal texts.
A Few
Selections:
When US
Cong. Serial
Set is
complete it
will include all
of the Senate
and House
Reports from
1817 to 1980
(but currently
only to 1869).
International Broadcasting and
Censorship
You need to research the history of regulating international
broadcasting, particularly with reference to censorship.
A Few
Selections:
Hein Online
includes fulltext of about
350 journals
back to their
inception.
A Few
Selections:
Indexmaster
searches the
indexes and
tables of
contents of
contemporary
legal treatises
and
looseleafs.
A Few
Selections:
SSRN
searches
working as
well as
published
papers on
law,
economics
and other
subjects.
The End