Review of Wolters Kluwer Intelliconnect
FTC Disclosure: Wolters Kluwers provided travel to and accommodations in New York City, breakfast and lunch, a free six month trial subscription and a travels incidentals stipend (which was just enough to cover cab fare) for me to attend a “bloggers workshop” and preview this product early last month.
To start off, I was not an English major and, as anyone who has subjected themselves to my Oscar movie marathon reviews will note, creating detailed reviews and analysis of…well, anything, really…is not my strong suit. You may want to also check out Intelliconnect reviews from Jason Eiseman and Greg Lambert. Not that I’m a total schlub in the writing department, mind you. I’m just saying that my strengths lie in personalizing an experience or idea and then explaining it to others.
Intelliconnect Search Results
So. Intelliconnect. I liked it. The end.
Prior to WK’s request to review Intelliconnect, I had absolutely no experience with this product. I vaguely remembered there being some discussion about it on professional listservs and blogs last year, but as MFPOW didn’t subscribe to it, I didn’t really pay attention too much to it all. So when I say I had totally no experience with this product, I mean I was going in with completely fresh eyes.
Intelliconnect is basically the content of CCH looseleaf services with the added convenience and addons that electronic databases provide. It’s not super fancy or exciting to look at. Some of my colleagues were dismayed by the use of frames in the design and I guess that there are some technological reason why their use is not ideal. However, I sort of liked it. I mean, granted, I’m the sort of person that separates out their M&Ms by color before eating them, but I found the visual separation of content (via the frames, color content indicators, etc) made it much easier for me to grasp what I was looking at and navigate through the materials.
One point that the WK trainers kept making (and thus I assume it is on some sort of talking points list) is that Intelliconnect is for the “Power User.” And after scanning through the listserv and blog post discussions that I linked to above, I guess usability is a big issue that others have had with Intelliconnect in the past. I didn’t seem to have a problem, but then again, I am much more likely to approach this product by drilling down/browsing than by searching and perhaps that helped me.
Intelliconnect Smart Chart
But back to the power user idea, it’s not that a novice researcher couldn’t figure out how to use Intelliconnect easily enough (they do now provide a search bar that allows for federated searching of as much of your subscription content as you want). It’s more that the content and collections would be wasted on them in a way. It’s sort of like why I hide the Ben & Jerry’s when my niece and nephew come to visit and just give them the store brand vanilla…they don’t know what they’re missing and they’re perfectly happy with what they’ve got. But, for the ice cream connoisseur, or subject specialist, they would really appreciate the variety and nuance that one gets from a more sophisticated product.
One of the electronic addons that I really liked was the “Smart Chart” feature. These allow you to do multi-jurisdictional comparisons which, as an academic librarian, I can tell you teaching faculty and seminar students LOVE to look at but are a pain in the butt to compile.
The only real persnickity negative critique I have for Intelliconnect is that I got a warning telling me that I should be using Internet Explorer when I first logged in. Unfortunately, Intelliconnect is not unique among information vendors in not offering cross-browser compatibility. I have to say I’m getting pretty tired of me and the 40% of the population that doesn’t use IE not being taken into consideration in database design. I believe this is on the to-do list of the Intelliconnect team after the other bloggers and I brought this point up to them.
I’m currently trying to decide whether or not to recommend this product for an addition to our library subscriptions. As all of you reading this know, it’s a balance between cost and content and finding out from the patrons “DO YOU SWEAR YOU WILL REALLY USE THIS OR DO YOU JUST WANT IT BECAUSE ONE OF YOUR FRIENDS AT ANOTHER SCHOOL/FIRM HAS IT???” I haven’t looked at budget numbers nor have I shaken down the faculty members that are interested in us subscribing to this, but from a pure content/usability standpoint, it seems to be a good product that would be of great use to a subject specialist.
Hi Sarah,
I was totally suprised today by your review – I was even more suprised about what you said in your disclosure – I think they really want you to buy this. I was even more suprised to see that you are having problems with IE issues, I had an issue this morning because related to IE and it means that I can’t use the print function to print, instead I have to use the save function. They have pretty much said they are not going to do a thing about it because not enough people have this problem – we have heard this before from CCH about similiar things, and of course as librarians we do network and we do know what else is happening to other libraries that subscribe! I can tell you that in Australia we are having quite a different experience. You have the usual divide of some people like it some people dislike it. There was some consultation between the Australian Law Librarians and Intelliconnect, it was to CCH’s advantaged they did this because there were quite a few issues and gaps in their searching model. We are still uncovering issues today!! The intelliconnect help indicates that you can conduct power searching using boolean operators and phrase searching – we have discovered there are plenty of examples where a free text search and a boolean search will give you the same results. You cannot narrow down your search results, your only option is to use the filters – in a sense you are limited to navigational searching only. You will be seriously frustrated at this when you are trying to find a rule in a service such as Federal Court Rules or Commentary on a section of an Act, in some cases you can’t even select a jurisdiction to search for cases in, even when there is a filter. We have come across these incidents and raised them with CCH, but their response has suggested that you can’t conduct that search in that product, but as our needs for this kind of query have been raised it seems that it is probably more far reaching than we thought. In short, you really are getting google results that find hits with a combination of your search terms, you will spend time constructing search strategies to get results and you will spend time flicking through all results to ensure you haven’t missed anything. Most of our librarians only use CCH if they absolutely have to. You might get some interesting responses if you email the Australian Law Librarian List.
Email – alla-anz@vicnet.net.au
Web – http://www.alla.asn.au/home
regards
Cindy
As Director of Platform and Product Development for IntelliConnect in the U.S., which is the subject matter of this review, I can tell you that we have engaged our customers extensively throughout the U.S. and have two major enhancement releases planned for this year — one launching July 4th weekend and one launching in Q4. These enhancements come straight from customer feedback and focus on getting our customers faster to the information they need through enhancements to search, browse and filtering, easier tools for setting up practice area customization and favorite content sets, and much more. The response from librarians and attorneys in the U.S. who have previewed these enhancements has been very positive. And we encourage all of our customers to provide feedback — a variety of feedback methods are availble through the Intelliconnect home page.