LEXIS-NEXIS Academic Universe became available through the Elihu Burritt Library's Home Page on July 22, 1998. Lexis has been a popular, but expensive, database for  many years because it has a large set of full-text resources in a number of categories. Some of these categories are Case Law, Industry News, Company Financial Reports, biographical information, reference directories, medical journals and newsletters, and articles from major newspapers. Updated at least once a day, Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe can be searched through the World Wide Web interface and requires no special training. The CCSU Library joined over 600 other university libraries in a single contract with Lexis. The large number of users makes the service much less expensive, reducing the cost from as much as $6 per user to about $1.52. This kind of arrangement is unprecedented and may lead to other group purchases by university libraries seeking access to expensive databases.

The only caveat is that Lexis plans to sell advertising on the service like other websites to help offset the cost. They have agreed to exclude advertising for guns, alcohol and tobacco and to limit their ads to companies whose products or services can "benefit users in their education or daily life", because of the large student audience. Academic Universe also only allows users to search headlines and the text of the first page of most articles -- although the full-text can be retrieved if  located in a search. Some publications from the original Lexis-Nexis service are not included at all to further cut costs. The list of excluded titles can be seen at the company's website:  www.cispubs.com/acaduniv/index.html  but the large number of publications still available will greatly extend the full-text resources accessible to CCSU faculty and students.