Meeting Your Organization's Current Awareness Needs (11/06)
By Carol Barra
That’s a tall order and one you face as a librarian every day. Thankfully LexisNexis® has some outstanding solutions from which to choose. My mission is to provide an overview of these solutions.
Solution number one: LexisNexis® Alert:
I know everyone is familiar with LexisNexis Alert (formerly Eclipse). What you may not be aware of is that Alerts can be scheduled for delivery one, two, or three times per day. You can also choose business day, weekly or monthly delivery schedules with your choice of day and the time you want the Alerts delivered. LexisNexis Alerts can be set up in News & Business sources, Legal Sources, etc. LexisNexis Alerts can be delivered online, to email or to your BlackBerry.
Solution number two: LexisNexis Continuous Alerts:
LexisNexis Continuous Alerts powered by Factiva is our newest solution and delivers breaking news impacting your organization and your clients within five minutes of a story hitting the newswires. Continuous Alerts have been made possible as a result of the LexisNexis and Factiva alliance. This alliance has enabled LexisNexis to create a custom application for law firms. Continuous Alerts provide the right news at the right time via email updates. Each alert result provides a link to the full text of the story.
Continuous Alerts will enable your attorneys to respond quickly to breaking news to either mitigate risks or to quickly call a client to offer assistance and advice. Let’s face it, an attorney never wants to hear about a client that has been the subject of a press release from the client. They much prefer to be on top of any information concerning their major clients. This is where Continuous Alerts will help your attorneys stay up to the minute on news concerning their clients.
Since LexisNexis Continuous Alerts are set up via a gateway to Factiva, searches are run against Factiva’s 10,000+ sources, including the Wall Street Journal and the Dow Jones Newswire. Searches are formulated using Factiva search strategies including Factiva indexing and include the ability to de-dupe republished stories and filter out specific types of content, such as obituaries. Help screens are available to assist you in using the Factiva format if you are unfamiliar with the differences from lexis.com. Your Librarian Relations Consultant can also offer assistance.
Continuous Alerts are accessed from the Alert Tab on lexis.com and it is located to the right of the lexis.com Alert. The use of the Continuous Alert feature is available to all lexis.com users and does not require that Factiva be part of your subscription. LexisNexis Continuous Alerts can be delivered to email or to your BlackBerry.
Solution number three: LexisNexis Total Alerts:
LexisNexis Total Alerts powered by Ozmosys provides an enterprise-wide solution that enables, you, the librarian, to manage alerts from LexisNexis, CourtLink, wsj.com, the web, as well as electronically delivered newsletters from Mealey’s and other publishers like BNA. Total Alerts is an electronic distribution system for all of the various alerts that are now delivered via individual emails since it will aggregate all of these email alerts and deliver them in a single, consolidated, and personalized email. Total Alerts can be scheduled for once or twice a day delivery.
Email can be overwhelming and consolidating numerous email alerts and newsletters into one email can result in saving time and making it easier to find information delivered on any given day. Plus, LexisNexis Total Alerts are customizable to each individual end user. LexisNexis Total Alerts can be delivered to email or to your BlackBerry.
Solution number four: LexisNexis Legal Industry Monitor:
LexisNexis Legal Industry Monitor provides daily on-point articles of interest on the legal industry and the top law firms from around the country and the world. It provides links to full text results of searches of legal news podcasts, Mealey’s News Briefs, wsj.com law blog, web articles discussing the top 100 law firms, news from selected LexisNexis sources covering client development, attorney’s fees, law firms, web articles from legal publications and the American Bar Association, and Martindale-Hubbell legal articles.
Legal Industry Monitor is a free newsletter available via registration at www.lexisnexis.com/legalmonitor to anyone with an active Lexis ID. Each individual who wishes to receive this free newsletter must register and accept the terms for use.
The feedback has been very positive. Several of the librarians I work with said it is the best and most thorough free newsletter that they have found.
Solution number five: LexisNexis Publisher:
LexisNexis Publisher is an enterprise-wide solution for delivering current information to your entire organization via email, intranet, Portal, Internet and BlackBerry. LN Publisher is a current awareness tool that empowers Librarians and Marketing Departments to deliver results of searches of 20,000+ news and business sources, including Factiva, and legal information on a daily or intra-day (up to hourly) schedule. Organizations are using LN Publisher to monitor individual clients, industries in which their clients operate, business trends, prospective clients and their industry, competitors, the firm, and much more.
LN Publishers offers total control and a great deal of flexibility, allowing the administrator to formulate searches, make changes as desired, add comments, pictures and links to the published results. LexisNexis Publisher also offers a searchable archive of the content that has been published or pushed out to the end users email or the intranet as a result of the searches set up under each Topic.
We as librarians are uniquely qualified to provide our organizations with the information required to meet their current awareness needs. By providing current awareness results via some or all of the solutions I have reviewed, you are able to make an impact on and assist in your organization’s ability to grow their business, gain a strategic advantage over the competition, and help your attorneys and management make better informed business decisions.
