Hein Online
...a premier online legal history database...
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| Producer | William S. Hein & Co. (United States) |
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| History | 2000-present |
| Access | |
| Cost | Subscription |
| Coverage | |
| Disciplines | Law, legal history |
| Format coverage | Journals, gazettes, books, articles, case law |
| Links | |
HeinOnline (HOL) is an internet database service launched in 2000 by William S. Hein & Co., Inc. (WSH Co), a Buffalo, New York publisher specializing in legal materials. The company began in Buffalo, New York, in 1961 and is currently based in nearby Getzville, NY. In 2013 WSH Co. was the 33rd largest private company in western New York, with revenues of around $33 million and more than seventy employees.
HeinOnline is a source for traditional legal materials (reported cases, statutes, government regulations, academic law reviews, commercially produced law journals and magazines, and classic treatises), historical, governmental, and political documents, legislative debates, legislative and executive branch reports, world constitutions, international treaties, and reports and other documents of international organizations. The database includes more than 100 million pages of materials “in an online, fully searchable, image-based format.”
In 2001 HeinOnline received the coveted “New Product Award,” from the American Association of Law Libraries. Since then HOL has received this award two more times in recognition of new content libraries added to its constantly expanding database. In 2002 HOL was named as a “Best Commercial Website” by the International Association of Law Libraries. In 2007 EContent Magazine listed HOL among the hundred “companies that matter most in the digital content industry.” The list “represents the best and the brightest digital content companies.” More recently HOL’s World’s Constitutions Illustrated was named by Choice Magazine as an “Outstanding Title” for 2010. A little more than a decade after HOL went live, a publication of the American Association of Law Libraries referred to it as a “groundbreaking product” and as “a leader in online legal literature.”
In 2013 a survey of domestic and international law librarians ranked HeinOnline as one of the three most popular “subscription databases” among law libraries throughout the world. This survey ranked HOL just behind the much larger and more highly capitalized Westlaw and Lexis. According to this survey, conducted by a London-based law librarian, “These top three easily dominated the subscription database market across all major law libraries, across the world.” They also “dominated University law school libraries.” Significantly, among “Research Institute Libraries” HOL ranked first while the much larger Lexis and Westlaw dropped to third and fourth. HOL and Westlaw were tied for first among the most popular “subscription databases” in Public Libraries. Among North American law libraries HOL, Lexis and Westlaw were tied for the highest number of subscriptions, in Asia (excluding the Middle East) HOL was tied with Lexis for second place behind Westlaw and in Europe HOL ranked third, behind Westlaw and Lexis. This suggests that the smaller HOL has as great a presence at home and nearly so in Europe and Asia as its much larger competitors, but that it has been less successful in penetrating markets in Africa, Latin America, Australia/New Zealand, and the Middle East.
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