In January 1998, the Libraries began making the "complete article" available to students and faculty, from databases provided by the UMI and Lexis-Nexis companies. This enables users across campus to quickly locate, download and print articles from an extensive array of full-text news sources, general-interest and scholarly articles, dissertations, legal documents and other reference tools.
Like many other major developments, these databases present substantial challenges for the Libraries over the next few years, such as how best to provide printing services and other user support, and how to fund and evaluate them on an ongoing basis. The Libraries will very likely approach the funding challenges—and probably some of the others—through building the kinds of partnerships on campus and across the state that have brought these new services to the UW.
1. UMI Databases.
For several years the Libraries has provided some general indexing/abstracting databases from the Information Access Company, such as Expanded Academic Index(available through UWIN/Willow with restricted access), with a long-term goal of adding full-text. The five other public colleges and universities in Washington (WSU, EWU, CWU, WWU, and Evergreen) have provided similar services but have used different vendors and approaches. Last year, the schools began discussions of joint purchases of "core" database services to make their dollars go farther. A proposal sent to the Washington state legislature was not funded, but the UW and four of the five other schools decided to pool their funds and purchase a group of databases from UMI for a year as a "trial run" for future cooperative buying. Descriptions of these databases are included in the accompanying list.
As valuable as their contents are to users, the UMI databases have not been entirely trouble-free with occasional service outages and slow response. However, the experience gained from their use will position the Libraries to better evaluate new vendor proposals this spring. The six schools may choose a somewhat different collection of databases for the next few years, but it is quite likely that joint purchasing of similar services will continue.
2. Lexis-Nexis UNIVerse.
The Libraries has provided student access to Lexis-Nexis for more than ten years through the company's Educational Program which offered the database to academic institutions at a discounted rate. Students in many disciplines, especially business, communications, and international studies, relied heavily on the text from hundreds of newspapers from the US and around the world, news-wires from many countries, extensive company financial information and exceptional coverage of legal and legislative materials contained in Lexis-Nexis.
Although restrictive and awkward to manage, the program became so popular nationally that the company found it was costing too much money, and recently announced plans to eliminate it by August 1998. A new Web service, Lexis-Nexis UNIVerse, was offered instead. Although access to the database is expensive, testing indicated that this system is user-friendly and nearly comparable in scope to the traditional Lexis-Nexis system without the restrictive licensing requirements. Consequently, the Libraries has purchased a two-year subscription. Only about 25% of projected costs are funded by the Libraries, with another 30% contributed from more than eight different budgets, from those of the College of Arts and Sciences and Schools of Business and Communications to the Development Office. Additional funding was acquired from Allen Endowment funds. Reactions to these new databases have been positive so far, and suggest that the combined funds are being well spent. Lexis-Nexis UNIVerse may even prove to be a candidate for state-wide licensing, which would make it available to several schools for the first time.