Welcome, Lexis-Nexis

Beginning on or about Jan.20, students will be able to search the giant Lexis-Nexis document database from the comfort and warmth of their own rooms. Gone will be the days of all-too-brief computer appointments in the library and the frustration of not having access to information at the instant it's needed. We couldn't be happier.

To many, Lexis-Nexis is the ultimate database, providing access to 1.4 billion documents from approximately 12,500 periodicals and government documents and adding more than 9.5 million documents to the collection each week. Finally, Harvard is catching up with Princeton, Stanford and Yale Universities, whose students already have access to the database via their library Web pages. Harvard's system, like those at the other schools, will request that students enter their ID number and name before use for security purposes.

We appreciate the work of the committee which was instrumental in bringing Lexis-Nexis to Harvard. We only hope the new system will be able to accommodate all the students certain to access the database from their own PCs.