The LexisNexis Wiki for Higher Education

Jennifer Matheny, Academic Product Lead, LexisNexis Academic, shares some background about the development of the LexisNexis Wiki for Higher Education in this article. I am excited about this wiki and the opportunity it provides for collaboration and exchange of knowledge related to LexisNexis Academic. This article was originally published in the 2008 Best Practices for Government Librarians: Web 2.0 in the Workplace and Beyond. The 2008 edition includes 70 articles and other submissions provided by more than 40 contributors from libraries in government agencies, courts, and the military, as well as from professional association leaders, LexisNexis Consultants, and more.

Read on...

Last year, my boss, Alistair Morrison, and I were having a discussion about our customers’ needs. Our product, LexisNexis Academic, had just been completely redesigned and we felt the need to converse with our customers. We have a website and it serves its purpose. We have a listserv and it serves its purpose. What we needed was a place where those two were integrated - a space for collaboration. Alistair suggested a wiki.

The LexisNexis Wiki for Higher Education stemmed from Alistair’s idea at that meeting. Originally, the wiki was only supposed to compliment LexisNexis Academic, but has since grown into an information source for all Academic and Library products. However, for the conversation aspect of the wiki to really come through, the product managers and I agreed that we had to be more than just an extended user guide. We wanted to provide information about our products and guides on how to use them, and in return, for our customers to give us examples of how they actually incorporate our products into their everyday research needs.

The purpose of our wiki kept evolving and being reinvented as the product managers and I added content. As it is now, the wiki is divided into two parts: product pages and research help. The product pages each contain a section for overview, frequently asked questions, and respective links for each Academic and Library product. In some cases, user guides are also available. This area of the wiki is for librarians and students, but written by LexisNexis staff. These are the only articles on the wiki, besides the main page, where the content is locked and cannot be edited by registered users. The research help area of the wiki contains articles by topic. Some examples of articles are “Education Law” and “Environmental Science Research Help.” Pages may include such sections as: Researching this topic in LexisNexis Academic, Researching this topic in LexisNexis Statistical, Common Assignments, and Best Sources to use. Here, registered users (librarians, teaching faculty, and LexisNexis staff) contribute their best research practices for each topic. They can also include links to their own websites containing content they’ve already written on the subject.

The idea is that, if every year, the same professor approaches their institution’s librarian to instruct this semester’s students on how to use a LexisNexis product to complete a certain assignment, then the librarian will post this lesson plan on the wiki. The wiki article would save the professor time, the librarian time and effort, and it would allow the students to access this information from any computer, anywhere, for semesters to come.

The wiki is really a tool to make everyone’s life easier. It is a perfect time saver. A great example is the difference the wiki has made on our approach to user guides. For a few months, I was writing new user guides based on each search form of LexisNexis Academic. I would write at least a paragraph based on each bit of functionality on every search form. All information stuffed into one guide. On the other hand, our customers wanted something short and to the point that they could show their students without making them feel overwhelmed. The problem was that these user guides took so long to produce and print that it wasn’t very efficient to make smaller ones that didn’t cover everything. Now, our customers are in complete control. I started a user guide section on the wiki called the “Academic Binder Series.” It is a collection of small task-based guides that, when combined, are a comprehensive guide to functionality in Academic. These small user guides each take under 15 minutes to post and I have even custom made them based on customer requests. The response has been very positive.

That said, moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 isn’t as easy as installing something and restarting your computer. It’s a labor of love. You have to get through the hard times and pay your dues, just like anything else worth writing home about. The LexisNexis Wiki for Higher Education was launched in January of 2008. By August, we hope to have enough contributions by our staff and customers to make a truly relevant and widely-used internet resource. The ideas and commitment are both present, so I’m positive that this new conversation and collaboration will be ongoing.