LexisNexis Enters PL Market

Jumping into the public and school library markets, at ALA LexisNexis debuted Library Express, a scaled-down version of LN Academic that LN's Tim Fusco describes as “comparable” on the news and business (but not the legal) side, with 600 newspapers from the United States and around the world and transcripts of news shows. The interface, too, is streamlined.

“We want to expose more of our content to a broader market,” said Fusco. Along with news coverage, the product features business materials such as Company Dossier, giving entrepreneurs and other public library business users access to company news and financial information.

Marketed directly to public libraries, Library Express could potentially cut into existing sales at certain institutions, but company reps were quick to note that the product is the result of requests from a number of public librarians and also has potential for high school libraries as well as smaller two- and four-year colleges that do not necessarily have the need for more comprehensive LexisNexis products.

LexisNexis at the same time announced the widespread release of its Statistical DataSets, making “1.5 billion data points accessible with a single interface.” The product is aimed at undergraduates and business schools. It enables the easy manipulation of combined data sets with both numerical as well as visual access methods, giving interactive access to data trends down to the county or block level with supported data in “population, crime, employment, construction, voting patterns, cancer incidence,” and other statistics. The product radically simplifies comparative data analysis and aggregates dozens of publicly available data sets along with many more privately licensed resources.—Josh Hadro