To: law-lib@ucdavis.edu Inet
Again, I wish to thank all of those who so generously took their
time to respond to this important question (i.e., which is the
better CD product -- BNA or ENFLEX?). As I reported to some
people already, I did receive a call from a U.S. EPA law librarian
who is currently using the BNA ELCD but plans to cancel and
subscribe to ENFLEX. In addition, following are most of the other
responses I received:
"We evaluated BNA's CD against LEXIS' Enflex product on-line and
went with LEXIS. The attorney who evaluated it found it be be
more up to date, more comprehensive, and we are happy not to have
to pay up front for databases we might not use. In addition we
get LEXIS' search features, such as "Focus" that makes searching a
great deal more efficient. In addition, any time attorneys can
avoid learning new search engines, the are happy as well."
"While I have never used Enfle, it would be hard to believe it
could be worse than the BNA Environment Library on CD. We use
Lexis because the environmental codes and regs for all the states
are on both systems with the advantage of using the same search in
the cases. My attorneys will not use those CDs at al so we did
not renew. It is a shame that this set was the first exposure
some of them had to CDs, leaving them with a negative attitude
towards the format. My West Government Contracts CD users think
they are great and are ready to try others."
"We are subscribers to BNA's cd-rom service after a tough battle
between BNA and Enflex for our business. BNA has been fine for us
but the Enflex rep wants us to reconsider and go with them. She
promises to check in with me in the Spring when our annual sub
with BNA will be under review. One service Enflex provides that
BNA doesn't is particularly interesting to our environmental dept.
Enflex, since it's basically a consultant and not a publisher,
provides a Notes-based compliance manual updating service which
would update our company's compliance manual automatically with
the new regs. That sounds good to us. Seems like there's some
other inhouse consultant products they offer as well. My BNA rep.
says Enflex was just bought out by IHS and casts some doubt about
how long Enflex will be around. That might just be rep-wars. He
also said their Federal laws area is not as current as it should
be and not all 50 state regs. are up and only a few of the states'
env'l laws are available."
"The Enflex stuff is on Lexis and Westlaw."
" We have gone through just this process with the BNA, Enflex,
and Clark Boardman environmental products. We started off with
the BNA product, DOS version, and due to to the number of
complaints from our environmental group about it we decided to
evaluate the CBC and Enflex products. Neither has the state
statutes loaded. CBC is starting to load them. The Enflex seems
to be a little more comprehensive on the state regs than CBC, but
they are not committing to loading the state statutes and they do
*not* have cases. One of our attorneys put it this way: "We
don't like the BNA format despite the good content, and ERM is not
primarily a publisher -- it shows in their product." We opted to
go for the CBC product, but it is only available in the Windows
version. This may or may not be a problem for you. I think
Enflex isn't a bad product but it's not really geared to the
requirements of a law practice."
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