By Katie Carter
Welcome back to all those who went away for the vacation and Happy New Year to everyone.
I will be covering the Legal Research Librarian role for Kate Jackson over the next six months, so if you have any questions about the databases or want any training, please do contact me at katie.carter@bodleian.ox.ac.uk. And now, just get you in the mood, a few new things for the new year:
Last autumn Lexis had a bit of a facelift, and now that I’ve learnt to like the new look, I thought I’d share just a few hints and tips.
1. A small yellow speech bubble. This appears on the legislation screen, and may be easily missed, but if you click on it a handy side-by-side view of Halsbury’s Annotations will present itself on screen.
2. Where’s my contents list? If your research looks like mine, you’ll dive into a book chapter or legislation section… only to realise that you need a previous/subsequent/nearby section. While the browsable contents list seems to have vanished in order to give more screen space to the text it is still available: click on the little gray tab on the left of your screen and the table of contents will slide back out.
3. But I want more screen space! In that case, the ‘change view’ buttons on the right are for you: click on the box with a diamond shape to make the headings, margins, further information boxes and all other clutter disappear (only on the screen, I’m afraid, any clutter on your desk you’ll need to clear yourself).
Another (relatively) recent tweak comes from Westlaw, which has introduced filters for your results list, including topic, date and jurisdiction:
You may find the date filter particularly useful for any journal searches, as it allows you to collect results from a much wider range of dates (such as ‘last 12 months’, or even ‘betweeen date x and date y’) than the advanced search screen (which only offers ‘Year of Publication’).