Yale University Library Collection Development Council

News Sources Working Group

Report on Clarinet, Lexis-Nexis, and Dow Jones Coverage

ClariNews, Dow Jones News Retrieval and Lexis-Nexis are three sources of domestic and international news at Yale. They each seem designed to meet the needs of users for distinctly different purposes. ClariNews is a current awareness service that draws primarily on the wire services of United Press International (UPI) and Reuters. Articles are organized into dozens of browsable categories designed to assist users following a current issue. Stories are not archived and the coverage is limited to the past two weeks. Lexis-Nexis is an enormous online database that draws from thousands of newspapers, wires services, television & radio broadcasts, and magazines internationally. The Nexis portion of the databases contains more than 13,800 individual news sources. Articles are archived in some cases for more than 20 years, and separate sources may be searched individually. Searching options are sophisticated and in most instances require some user training.

Dow Jones News Retrieval is a financial oriented news and data service that provides full-text coverage of the Wall Street Journal, its regional equivalents, and over 5.000 other financially oriented sources, including news wires, newspapers, magazines, trade publications, television transcripts, and more than 1,000 international sources. It also offers company information and financial data from services such as Standard & Poors, Dun & Bradstreet, and many others. Coverage in some instances dates back ten years or more. The full text of the Wall Street Journal is available from 1984.

Interface

ClariNews is a web-based product that lists stories in reverse chronological order by category. It is not searchable and does not lend itself to serious research. Dow Jones is an online service with a user-friendly, graphical interface that allows searching by individual news source, keyword, company, and industry. Users can browse current and historical news articles by industry-specific subjects assigned by Dow Jones editors, or search the entire database by keyword, author, headline, lead paragraph, or full-text of the article.

Lexis-Nexis currently exists in three formats: the command driven database available campus-wide, the dedicated Windows version on SSL machine #4, and the Nexis Universe product. The DOS and Windows based versions offer a powerful matrix of search options, including segment searching, limiting by date and length of the article, searching by individual publication or groups of files, as well as many other features. The Nexis Universe version offers a user-friendly but less powerful interface, with limited, pre-formatted subject categories. Many foreign newspapers, company directories, and other specialized databases and reference tools are absent from the new version.

Access and Statistics

There is only one dedicated Dow Jones machine for library users, located at Finance Workstation #1 in the Social Science Library. There are currently no statistics available on its usage. Access to ClariNews is via IP recognition, with no limits on the number of users. Access to the traditional version of Nexis is via a telnet connection and is limited to 14 simultaneous users. Access to Nexis Universe is web-based via IP recognition, without any user limits.

Usage of ClariNews has increased dramatically in the past three months, with a total of 3884 hits in November of 1997, rising to 51,884 in December and 62,764 in January. These statistics have been investigated and apparently are correct. Figures reflect the total number of accesses, including repeat users, and are also broken down by individual news categories. Detailed statistics are available at http://www.yale.edu/news

Nexis figures are not reported on the web but are available for the traditional version of Nexis. No statistics for the Nexis Universe product have yet been reported. Usage figures for the Nexis portion of the database indicate 13,813 searches in October, 15,214 in November, and 14,297 in December of 1997. Figures are also available for the total connect time, with 1451 hours logged in October, 1874 in November, and 1555 in December of 1997.