CELEX developments, January 2004

Although work is in hand to merge EUR-Lex and CELEX and provide free access from 1st July 2004, developments are still being made to the value added services of CELEX. There are two new initiatives in hand, one of which has now gone live. This is the new version of the expert search, Expert 4. The Expert search feature aims to offer information professionals a more sophisticated and precise way of searching the database. In fact the Expert 4 release is not very different from the previous version. The main change is the ability to create a dossier of results to which items can easily be added or removed. The dossier contents can be sorted according to criteria defined by the user and saved. Search results can be e-mailed not just to the user's address but, for example, directly to the person who made the request for information. The other development in the pipeline is the LexAlert service which had been expected to go live at the same time. However the launch date has proved rather optimistic, though it is still hoped that it will be available soon. This feature will offer a tailored alert service which can be created either as the result of a search conducted in the database or within the LexAlert system itself. Compared with the menu search template, the expert search screen, which gives access to the LexAlert button, seems complicated and far from intuitive. It relies on an in-depth understanding of the construction of the database and the legislative process, though with practice it does become easier to construct a search quickly. The main drawback is the fact that the system uses Java applets. As a result some organisations with firewalls in place may be unable to use the expert search successfully. Subscribers can test the expert search for themselves at http://europa.eu.int/celex. For potential new users there is also information there about how to subscribe to the database.