I haven't posted a rant to Law-Lib in a long time. Maybe it's my calming herb elixir that I've been taking. But this one just makes my blood pressure spike, and I'm unable to restrain myself. I recently spent a LOT of time using the new editing features for the Westlaw interface (thank you West for that), organizing and putting together new tabbed interfaces for all our attorneys, making sure that only databases within our subscription were included on each page. Before doing that I had asked West if they would still be stealthily "updating" the new pages with their choice of databases, as had been the practice in the past. I have aggressively campaigned against this practice and have been told multiple times in the past three years that the project to eliminate stealth updating was "being worked on." I was told by West that they "weren't sure" if the updating practice would continue after the launch of the new editable interface. Well, surprise, surprise the stealth updating continues. I noticed this morning that 13 new databases have been added to my Federal tabbed page. They at least do now star (*) the new databases, so that I can remove them. But in order to do that for each of my attorneys, I would need to go around to each of their computers and take care of that task, the same way I had to do the original updating of each one (emailing the pages to each attorney did not work). I can't see any reason for West to be adding the new databases to our pages except as a sales technique or to get unwary customers who don't have unsubscribed databases blocked, to use the databases and incur extra expense. If they can program their software to place an asterisk by newly added databases, they can program it to add the databases only to those subscribers who would want it to be added. I can only surmise that it's not in the best interest of West to do so.
Dru Edrington
Librarian
Public Utility Commission
PO Box 13326
1701 N. Congress Ave.
Austin, TX 78711-3326
512-936-7075
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