Much online information is not available through search engines or subject directories. Giant databases of wonderfully aggregated and organized information is unavailable -- except for a price.

These fee-based databases go by many names -- professional online services, gated sites, commercial vendors.

Examples include Dialog, LEXIS-NEXIS and Dow Jones Interactive, also known as Factiva.

These services can be tremendously expensive, charging hundreds of dollars an hour during a search. But many services provide discounts to universities. The services want students to know and use their products so they'll ask their employers for them in the future.

1) To better understand databases, please read a brief presentation:

5-Databases

Please send me an email detailing what you found.

2) Lehigh has accounts with many of these databases. I would like you to become familiar with perhaps the most popular and important fee-based database: Lexis-Nexis.

As the name implies, the database actually has two sides. Lexis offers a huge trove of legal information, comparable only to Westlaw. If you have any thoughts of law school, you will know Lexis and Westlaw.

Nexis provides access to hundreds of newspapers, magazines, business journals and other publications. You don't just search and get abstracts. You can often search and get the full text of articles right on your desktop.

I would like you to become skilled with Lexis-Nexis, if you are not already. Lehigh receives a version called "Academic Universe."

You should know how to find this database. From Lehigh's home page for Current Faculty, Students and Staff, you can find and click "Computing and Libraries" along the top menu bars. On the next page, click on Library Services. Then, under Electronic Resources, you can take the link to Databases and find the many excellent resources available to Lehigh. Browse down to Lexis-Nexis Academic. To the right, click on whether you are on campus or off campus.

If you are off campus, you may have to log-in to set up an off-campus "proxy" to use the databases.

a) At Lexis-Nexis, look over the Site Map and the How Do I sections on the top menu. Look particularly at "Researching: The Basics." Please answer these questions, from "How do I:"

1. Find out whether a publication is included in LexisNexis™ Academic? If it is included, where can I find a description of the publication, and how can I search for articles within it?
2. Find a specific newspaper article?
3. Find articles from a non-U.S. perspective?
4. Find the transcript of a news report I saw on television recently?

b) I would then like you to do a search using Nexis.

• Pick a news category: general news;
• Choose a source: major papers,
• Put your topic in quotation marks: "Lehigh University"and search headlines and lead paragraphs.
• For date range, select previous year.

Look through the first 20 or so results. Send me an email detailing what you found. Have you used Nexis before? What for? How might it be useful to you?

3) Our readings confront a phenomenon with which you may be quite familiar: Facebook. Created by a Harvard University student, Facebook has become exceedingly popular, especially on college campuses.

Many Lehigh students use Facebook. But not many know its history and how it works. The New Yorker magazine ran a lengthy article on Facebook in May 2006. Please read the New Yorker piece and send me an email of 3-4 paragraphs that summarizes the interesting origins and success of Facebook.

4) Once you read and have thought about Facebook, please go to our online discussion area at http://bb.lehigh.edu and talk about it all. Do you use Facebook? Why or why not? What positive things come out of Facebook? Do you know of any negative consequences of Facebook? Let's talk about it.

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