Sunday 10 June 2007

Westlaw and Lexis in Pittcat


We recently purchased a collection from a cataloguing service called CassidyCat. The collection consists of catalog records for the treatise titles available in the Westlaw and Lexis databases (including the full Matthew Bender library) and monthly updates. Why did we do this? Well, Lexis and Westlaw are enormous databases with thousands and thousands of titles that are available to everyone in the law school - but none of the titles have been listed in PittCat until now. Finding a legal treatise has been a lengthy procedure because we've had to individually search PittCat, Lexis and Westlaw for titles. Now the catalog record that gets pulled up by searching PittCat will include information about availability in Lexis and Westlaw, and links into both databases.
We have run into a difficulty, though, that stems from adding these databases to PittCat. Last week a patron came to the law library because he found a treatise PittCat that was through Westlaw only, and he didn't understand that only law students and faculty are able to use these databases. Maybe we can add some language to the records to make this clearer.

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