In updating the “Legal Periodicals and Indexes” chapter of the upcoming edition of Fundamentals of Legal Research, I’ve done some digging into the details of two major indexes that will be changing platforms in the very near future: Index to Legal Periodicals and Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals.
- Index to Legal Periodicals
For many years, ILP has been managed by the H.W. Wilson Company but in 2011, Wilson merged with EBSCO Publishing.
There are three electronic ILP products: Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text; Index to Legal Periodicals & Books; and Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective.
– Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text indexes a 1,050 legal periodicals from 1982 to the present. Books are indexed beginning in 1994. Over 350 periodicals are also available in full text from 1994 to date.
– Index to Legal Periodicals & Books presents the same indexing offered in Index to Legal Periodicals Full Text, but without links to full-text articles. The same journals are covered.
– Index to Legal Periodicals Retrospective indexes almost 900 legal periodicals from 1908-1981.
Due to the merger with EBSCO, all three electronic ILP products will be moving from the WilsonWeb internet platform to the EBSCOhost platform in 2012.
In addition, EBSCO is releasing a new product called Legal Source in 2012 that will combine the ILP content with content from EBSCO’s Legal Collection, as well as new additional content. In total, the new Legal Source database will contain over 1200 full text legal journals.
Before the merger, the ILP & Books index was also available to subscribers of LexisNexis and Westlaw. It is unknown if it will continue to be available on these services after the move to EBSCOhost is complete.
It doesn’t appear that the print edition of ILP will be affected by the merger with EBSCO, although this is not certain.
For more information about the merger and new database, see this brochure. - Index to Foreign Legal Periodicals
IFLP, produced by the American Association of Law Libraries, is a multilingual index to articles and book reviews appearing in legal journals published worldwide.
IFLP was formerly available electronically via Ovid Technologies and Westlaw. As of 2012, IFLP will be available exclusively via HeinOnline (1985 to the present). Index entries will be linked to the full-text articles in HeinOnline when possible.
The print edition of IFLP, which had been published by the University of California Press, will now also be produced by William S. Hein & Co.
See the HeinOnline blog for more information.