Quicklaw From Australia
House of Butter had a posting on Wednesday conveying news from the University of Notre Dame Australia blog here that access to the Quicklaw database was no longer to be available to clients outside of Canada. Access to the materials was to continue to be available through LexisNexisAU and Lexis.com.
I assume the reference is to old Quicklaw.
I have been curious to know, at a relatively technical level if possible, how all of the various LexisNexises will be designed to interact with one another (if at all) and with Lexis.com (probably not). When the new Quicklaw was unveiled, it came as an unpleasant surprise to me that the “Research Link Maker” feature of lexis.com was not there. Upon investigation, I discovered that there was a comparable feature, known as “LinkDirect Plus” in the UK, and as “Intranet Tools” in Australia and New Zealand, that could be implemented with the new Rosetta platform.
I understand this is somewhere down the long list of things still to be implemented in Canada. Can’t come soon enough for me.
I had assumed that there would be a high degree of integration on the data management side, with national customization on the interface side, accessible to the curious amongst us. That’s my superficial impression of how Thomson handles North America, and I assumed Reed-Elsevier would be similar. I had reason to investigate this a couple of years ago when I gave a presentation at AALS in the U.S. on the subject of Canadian research. I wanted to show them Canadian materials on Lexis and Westlaw as they would see them, not as I would see them.
It would be great to get some clarification from people in the know concerning the long term plans.
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