On Trial

From now until October 1st, access the world’s largest, fully searchable, image-based government document and legal research database:

HeinOnline’s Government Politics and Law for Academics 

The Ross Pendergraft Library is hosting a trial for this comprehensive resource containing U.S. Congressional Documents, U.S. Statutory materials, more than 2,300 scholarly journals, all the world’s constitutions, all U.S. treaties, collections of classic treatises and presidential documents, and access to the full text of state and federal case law powered by Fastcase.

All ATU factuly, staff, and students can browse by database name or browse by category:

Or search by keyword, author, title, or date. Select the Citation tab to search by citations, the Catalog tab to browse publications, or the Case Law tab to quickly search case citations::

The results display allow users to quickly narrow selections by type, titles, collections, and year.  Each results includes a brief display, highlighting the words used in your search so you can assess the relevancy of each article:

screen shot of database result

Each article includes options for downloading the PDF, emailing the document to yourself, as well as generating citations.   You can also view the number of times it has been cited by other articles, a way to gauge the relative importance of an article to the scholarly community.  Sorting results by “Number of Times Cited By Articles”, can push more significant articles to the top of your search results.  Something also rather unique to HeinOnline is the ability to sort by “Number of Times Accessed (Past 12 Months)”, allowing you to see what is most popular for other users of this database:

Once inside the article, users have access to all of the tools of other databases, including the citation information:

 

Need more legal help?  Sorry—librarians can’t give legal advice.  But we can help you with finding legal resources through this database or our other legal database, LexisNexis Academic.

You have until next fall to send us also your pro’s & con’s list with this database.  Do you like it?  Hate it?  Indifferent to its existence?  Tell us at AskALibrarian.  We need your feedback to build a case for or against this database.  Should we make it apart of our permanent collection? You be the judge.