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Review from: Library Journal, March 15,
2003
Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text (ILP) is a new
version of an index that has been available for some time. It is a major
index to the legal periodical literature, covering about 840 law reviews
and bar association journals from the early 1980s and since 1993 includes
over 1200 law books per year. Geographic coverage includes the United
States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. This
new version has two significant enhancements: full text for about one
fifth of the periodic titles and SFX technology.
The full text includes 175 periodicals, with coverage beginning in the
late 1990s and a few titles going back a bit further. Most are available
in PDF, useful in a literature famous for its extensive footnotes. Note
that most of these titles are also available in LexisNexis Academic
Universe. The second enhancement is the addition of SFX technology, a
dynamic linking system based on the OpenURL standard. SFX lets users link
from the hit list to catalog records or the full text of articles
available in SFX-enabled databases owned by the library. That is, if your
library subscribes to an aggregated journal collection like ProQuest,
users could-with one click-link from a citation in this index to the exact
article in ProQuest. Alternatively, users could link directly to your
catalog record from the journal. SFX, a technology from Ex Libris, does
not work automatically. Libraries must set up and support an SFX server.
Vendors must also do some background work. Most major database platforms,
however, are becoming SFX-enabled. Libraries do not have to use Ex
Libris's integrated library system for SFX to work.
ILP itself is easy to use. The advanced search screen is set up
nicely. Field searches are available in several pull downs, making
multiple-field searching transparent. Options for sorting results,
limiting by date or document type, printing, and e-mailing are
straightforward. Truncators and operators are explained in Help.
Librarians will appreciate the excellent Journal Directory feature. The
list of journals covered is up-to-date and can be customized by many
parameters, including indexing start and end dates, full-text coverage
dates, and ISSNs. This is actually a side benefit of SFX, which requires
current, accurate content lists to function properly.
Because law review articles are increasingly interdisciplinary, and so
many researchers' topics are law-related, an index to legal periodicals
will prove useful for a variety of libraries. For libraries that can opt
for one to four simultaneous users, or have a low number of FTEs, this
resource will be worthwhile. Its one direct competitor is Gale's LegalTrac.
The two indexes are more or less equivalent, and only academic law
libraries should consider subscribing to both.
The Bottom Line: Index to Legal Periodicals and Books Full Text
is
an easy-to-use legal periodical index with breadth of coverage,
significant full text, and SFX technology. Recommended for academic and
large public libraries.
Reviewed by Deanna Barmakian,
Reference, Harvard Law School Library
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