Hello,
Are any other New York librarians struggling with West's new "unofficial" version of the NYCRR? Westlaw database NY-ADC (aka NYCRR) now takes us to a more up-to-date, unofficial version of the NYCRR. My West rep tells me that because it takes the state several months to issue their updates, and their customers were clamoring for something more current, they decided to create their own database using West editors. They take the updates from the New York State Register and add them into the NY Administrative Code online in NY-ADC/NYCRR much more quickly. They replaced the official database with their new database and kept the identifiers the same.
The official version from the state is still online in the newly named NY-CRR database (the difference is in the dash!), which lags several months behind the unofficial version. My concerns are:
1) We have found at least two major errors with the new "unofficial version" in the past few months. In the most recent case the official version was updated while the unofficial was not.
2) It is difficult for the attorneys to find the official version online. There is not a table of contents to it and there is not a link to it from the unofficial version (although there is a small note about it there). In many cases the attorneys don't even remember that what they are getting is the unofficial version.
While we applaud West's effort to give us a more quickly updated administrative code, we think that this is a very confusing way to do it. I would love to hear other thoughts on this. Is this happening with any other state's admin codes yet? Maybe we are just too nit-picky over here.
Warm regards,
Susan
Susan Flint
Library Manager
Whiteman Osterman & Hanna LLP
One Commerce Plaza
Albany, NY 12260
518.487.7632
518.487.7777 (fax)
sflint@woh.com<mailto:sflint@woh.com>
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