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Finding The Needle in the Grain Stack.

Article Excerpt
Current Awareness with Westlaw IntraClips

I've recently been exploring current awareness tools in the new age of the World Wide Web. One of the more interesting, albeit not free of charge, is Westlaw's IntraClips. A traditional clipping service consisted of human beings pouring through a variety of newspapers and magazines and literally cutting out those articles mentioning the person, company or subject of interest to the client hiring the service. The modern clipping service merely looks for particular combinations of letters in the bit stream, isolates and copies appropriate articles and either e-mails them to the client or puts them on a hit list, for subsequent client review.

Westlaw (and Lexis and Loislaw, for that matter) have long had services which would let the user run a search at regular intervals. The West version is called "WestClips". WestClips and Intraclips appear to do very similar things, and may even use the same back office database query system. Selecting the items to be searched, dealing with the search results and billing seem to be different, however, and it is these processes that we will discuss this week.

[WestClip vs IntraClip]

According to the West FAQs (list of Frequently Asked Questions, and their answers) the major difference between WestClip and IntraClip is that the former is designed as an aid to...