Thank you to Diane for sharing handouts from a recent Lexis Nexis legal searching webinar. I've created a new folder in the Reference drive called "Legal Research" and saved these two documents as well as a few others in that folder for everyone to access. The folder includes

• Lexis Nexis commands at a glance
• Legal Concepts and Definitions
• Melanie Morris' "Brick and Mortar" research assignment for the online Legal Research & Writing course
• Maria DeFilipis' assignment for Role of the Paralegal
• The Legal Research @ RVCC guide that we used during our legal research training session a few semesters ago

Interior Design Resources in LexisNexis

I believe we acquired some Interior Design courses through the vo-tech, and I found this email from LexisNexis about new content in that database which might be useful. I don't know how many of these students will be looking for information, but if so, they might want to try LN.

Furniture Today http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?383012
Home Accents Today  http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?383016
Casual Living  http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?383020
Home Textiles Today http://w3.nexis.com/sources/scripts/info.pl?383026
   
The links above take you to a source information page, which has a link to search just within that source.

Paralegal Student Passwords

From Diana:

Recently I had two students ask questions about their paralegal student passwords for Lexis Nexis. The passwords were distributed on thin strips of paper with 3 columns and without any headings. The first entry (on left) is the student name; the second entry (middle) is the username; the third entry (on right) is the password. These students were using the name as the username and the username as the password. I hope this helps if you get the question.

Enhancements to Lexis Nexis Academic

Lexis Nexis Academic will be releasing enhancements on August 15, 2009. The enhancements primarily impact the Easy Search form and navigation menus and (as they always say) are designed to make the database less confusing. There is an FAQ about the enhancements here. You can test the Alpha release here. I strongly recommend trying it out soon, because it looks like the main search page has changed significantly!

I particularly like the way all of the search forms are available on the homepage. The tabs to get to specific functions were often missed by students, which led me to pull out the separate search forms on our database page. Good to know the folks at LN are listening to their users!

One thing I noticed is that the Navigation menu is lost when you are taken to a specific search form, like Shepards Citations. The current search forms maintain the tabs at the top of the page, which makes it easier to jump from one search form to another.

Finding Marketing Plans

I feel like this is the kind of thing that comes up now and then: students needing sample Marketing plans. There is a guide on the Lexis Nexis wiki that describes how magazine articles from the database can be used to piece together the information that would be contained in a proprietary marketing plan for a specific company.

There's also some other great guides to Lexis Nexis created by users on the wiki.