Developments in European information issues: Networks and relays – Services – Products, December 1998

CD-ROM

While users were still struggling with Mistral, other developments were afoot to improve ease of access and enable end-users to undertake searches themselves. The impetus behind much of this development was the Single Market and a growing interest in European matters. Context, although already offering an on-line version of CELEX, produced their first CELEX CD-ROM in 1989. Initially with a limited number of sectors, it quickly expanded to include the full dataset. Other CD-ROM producers - ILI, ELLIS, Chadwyck-Healey and more recently Technical Indexes moved into this strongly competitive market with a version of CELEX and/or other products. Windows interfaces followed DOS and competition continues to develop enhancements - dynamic document links, hotjumping, nicknames of Directives, added text, combinations of databases (including Spearhead or Spicers), notepad options and saved profiles are just some of the value-added features. With the changes in free access to a number of databases, one trend now is towards producing subject-focused datasets.