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Weekly News Digest
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September 11, 2000 — In addition to this week's NewsBreaks article and the monthly NewsLink Spotlight, Information Today, Inc. (ITI) offers Weekly News Digests that feature recent product news and company announcements. Watch for additional coverage to appear in the next print issue of Information Today.
CLICK HERE to view more Weekly News Digest items.
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The Long-Anticipated nexis.com Debuts! LEXIS-NEXIS Acquires Press Access, Inc.
Today, LEXIS-NEXIS formally unveiled its nexis.com site with its new Web-based interface. The company recently sent a letter to all LEXIS-NEXIS Universe customers with the news that nexis.com was replacing Universe, and would provide an easier-to-use product with broader search capabilities and searching available from the home page. Universe users don't need a new ID or password. The new site is being promoted as the company's "new flagship product for news and business." Legal customers have been using the lexis.com site for the past year, and business searchers have been looking forward to the launch of the upgraded service for NEXIS.According to the letter from Bill Pardue, president of NEXIS, the new search site provides all the content and functionality that Universe did with the addition of some customer-requested features. Accessible directly from the nexis.com home page, Search lets users find information with a single search using standard-language words or phrases. With the Subject Directory, users can select from 34 subjects and more than 1,200 topics and can search across different types of content. Users can use Boolean logic and add Index Terms to searches conducted through Power Search. A new Web sources database allows users to search Web sites mentioned in news sources. The nexis.com service also provides access to a more robust Company Dossier, accessible directly from the home page and offering information on 500,000 companies. Watch for a NewsBreak next week that will cover the nexis.com news in greater detail. A company representative indicated that customized task-based applications for specific professions (specifically, insurance, competitive intelligence, and finance) were an important component of the new nexis.com implementation. This is similar to the specific practice pages available in lexis.com. He indicated that this was also an important factor in the just-announced decision to purchase Press Access, Inc. (http://www.pressaccess.com), a privately held company founded in 1992 that provides proprietary content about media and journalists and media relationship management (MRM) solutions for public relations and marketing professionals. The acquisition of the small but fast-growing and profitable company will enable LEXIS-NEXIS to integrate its content with Press Access products, resulting in new features, such as one-click access to recent articles by a selected journalist, guided forms to research topics, analysis of topical coverage by journalists, leveraging indexing, and metadata to identify patterns. Rich Barno, founder and president of Press Access, was previously the president of MediaMap (from 1989-1992), the major competitor to Press Access. A year ago, MediaMap announced a strategic relationship with Dow Jones-Reuters (now Factiva) that links from MediaMap to Dow Jones articles—a deal that was obviously studied by LEXIS-NEXIS. Source: LEXIS-NEXIS
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Brandi Scardilli
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