Recently, there have been a number of questions and comments regarding the
American Law Reports (ALR). West would like to take this opportunity to
address those questions and concerns.
The questions arose from a cite that was listed in the print index, but did
not exist in the bound volumes.
The cite the customer came across is an "e-annotation." Some e-annotations
are like advance annotations, loaded to Westlaw prior to their publication
in a volume; others are permanently electronic-only due to their size or
other factors, which if they were printed would affect the number of
annotations customers receive per print volume.
In the case of the former type of annotation, once an "e-anno" has been
printed in a volume, it gets a new print citation (vol/series/page), and if
a customer types in the former e-anno citation (year/series/ordinal number),
he or she will be automatically routed to the properly cited annotation
online.
The reason why we include cites to them in the print index is that we wanted
customers to be able to access these annotations for their research, even if
the annotations were not (or not yet) in the print set. Especially in terms
of the permanent e-annotations, we wanted to provide our print customers the
service of alerting them to available information they might need,
understanding that a majority of our print customers can also access ALR
online.
There were also some questions regarding how ALR is updated. Annotations
are kept current through different means depending on the media type:
PRINT: Annotations are updated via pocket part, or by superseding a
previous annotation with a new one (as noted previously on the listserv).
We do also continue to offer our "Later Case Service" by phone for our print
customers who are looking for additional case law that may have been added
between annual supplements. (The phone number for that is: 1-800-225-7488,
or it can be done via email: West.ALRLCS-Rochester@thomson.com.)
CD: These are updated and issued quarterly.
ONLINE: The ALR database is updated on Westlaw on a weekly basis. Note that
this does not mean that we will always find a relevant case note for a
particular annotation every week, but we will have searched for them and
added them as appropriate.
Aaron Swanson
West Customer Service
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:45:58 PST