2018 certainly had its ups and downs. Let’s take a look at some of the major events that happened around the globe this past year:

• North Korea and South Korea vowed to end the Korean War after 65 years.
• The first openly LGBTQ African-American woman was elected as a judge in Texas.
• Canada became the second country in the world after Uruguay to legalize marijuana.
• The Year of the Woman went global.
• Christine Blasey Ford testified against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh on sexual abuse allegations.
• Cuba announced Miguel Diaz-Canel as the new president, ending 59 years of Castro leadership.
• Ireland legalized abortion.
• Meghan Markle became the first woman of color to join the royal family.
• 2018 ended with the shutdown of the Federal government, which has now persisted for more than a month.

Several iconic entertainers passed away, including chef Anthony Bourdain, fashion designer Kate Spade, comic book legend Stan Lee, actress Connie Sawyer, actor Burt Reynolds, singer Dolores O’Riordan, and ‘Queen of Soul’ Aretha Franklin. Other influential people who were lost in 2018 include former first lady Barbara Bush, Senator John McCain, former President George H.W. Bush, UN chief Kofi Annan, and renowned scientist Stephen Hawking.

While all of this news was breaking worldwide, HeinOnline was growing and improving. In 2018 alone, HeinOnline had more than 12 million searches and nearly 500 million hits! We added new databases and new content and implemented new search features. Here’s a brief synopsis of what happened with HeinOnline in 2018.

New Databases

1. Art Antiquity and Law

Art Antiquity and Law is available exclusively in HeinOnline and includes coverage of this industry-leading journal which provides up-to-date and timely coverage of important issues in the art and history communities. In addition to the incredible journal content, several books on this topic are included. Art Antiquity and Law is perfect for legal practitioners, collectors, anthropologists, insurers, investors, historians, and more!

2. Gun Regulation and Legislation in America

This database brings together periodicals, legislative histories, and government documents together for the first time on this timely topic. Gun Regulation and Legislation in America is available free for U.S. Core subscribers, academics, and other institutional libraries. The purpose of this database is to provide a platform for research on the myriad issues related to gun regulation. Our goal is to facilitate productive discussions and help bring all sides of this argument together to effect positive change and prevent more senseless loss of life. We encourage librarians to share this resource openly with all patrons.

3. Prestatehood Legal Materials: A Fifty-State Research Guide, Including New York City and the District of Columbia

Available digitally for the first time, this database is derived from the AALL’s Joseph L. Andrews Legal Literature Award-winning 2005 sourcebook, Prestatehood Legal Materials, which is edited by Michael Chiorazzi and Marguerite Most and is held in more than 350 libraries. This invaluable and comprehensive tool for researchers provides a brief overview of state histories from colonization to statehood and identifies a wide range of both readily available and hard-to-find materials from each state. Also included in this database are links to more than 1,500 full-text documents.

4. John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection

This database is free for U.S. Academic Core and HeinOnline Academic subscribers and includes more than 54,000 documents and nearly 700,000 pages! HeinOnline will continue to add any new documents released by National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Research this critical information in HeinOnline’s user-friendly platform. Data visualization charts below allow the user a quick and easy way to locate NARA documents by Agency, Document Type, Originator and Date. Also included in this collection are books, hearings, other related works, and scholarly articles on this topic.

5. U.S. Congressional Serial Set

The United States Congressional Serial Set, commonly referred to as the Serial Set, is considered an essential publication for unveiling American history. This database is included at no additional charge for HeinOnline Academic subscribers, Core+ subscribers, and subscribers of HeinOnline’s U.S. Congressional Documents. The Serial Set is an ongoing project in HeinOnline, with the goal to add approximately four million pages each year until the archive is completed. Moving forward, we will add newly released material, as well as fill in any missing volumes between 1817 and 1977.

Features include:

• Volume Quick Locator, which enables users to simply enter a Serial Set volume number to retrieve the content
• Citation Quick Locator, which provides users the ability to enter a House or Senate document/report citation for quick document retrieval
• Multiple browse options to accommodate different research methods
• Color-coded H indicators to help users determine volume and document availability
• HeinOnline’s user-friendly advanced search tool, which makes it easy to use the extensive metadata indexing or choose specific section types for quick and detailed searches

6. Paris Legal Publishers Package

HeinOnline has teamed up with Paris Legal Publishers to bring four new journals into HeinOnline’s user-friendly interface. Complete archives and current content are available for Review of European Administrative Law, European Journal of Commercial Contract Law, Journal of Trafficking and Human Exploitation, and Journal of Medical Law and Ethics. These four journals have also been added to HeinOnline’s Law Journal Library with a three-year embargo at no additional cost to current subscribers. They address hot-button global legal topics including human trafficking and exploitation, medical law and ethics, and much more.

New Features

1. Enhanced Metadata in the Federal Register Library

We continue to enhance searching in HeinOnline by adding natural language processing and machine learning tools to different databases. Entities such as location, person, and organization are available in the Federal Register Library within document metadata and search facets, which assist with search and discovery.

2. Map View in State Reports

HeinOnline’s State Reports: A Historical Archive is color-coded with numbers indicating geographic boundaries of the United States Courts of Appeals and United States District Courts. This map view tool comes in handy for users searching within specific boundaries.

3. New Language Facet

The Law Journal Library contains a facet which allows users to refine searches by language. This tool is perfect for users who are looking for journals written primarily in a specific language. All languages are coded at the journal title level.

4. New Citation Format: McGill Guide

The Canadian Guide to Uniform Legal Citation format, otherwise known as the McGill Guide, is available in the Law Journal Library. This was the result of a suggestion from one of our customers, Vicki Leung of the University of Windsor. Our Canadian friends love this citation format! Simply click the cite button to locate this citation format.

5. New Icons

We consistently strive to make your HeinOnline user experience easier and better. We updated our icons to keep users updated on the latest enhancements, newest titles, more information, MARC records, and more! To locate these icons in HeinOnline, look to the left of a title listing. Hover over any icon to see its meaning.

6. Bold Matching Text

We continue to make improvements to HeinOnline’s interface in order to provide our customers with a stellar research experience. Matching text has changed from being highlighted in yellow to bold as a result of a suggestion from an employee here at the Hein Company. This formatting is much easier to read!

7. MyHein Enhancement

Users have the ability to set up multiple tags, or categories, of bookmarks and search queries. This enables researchers to use a MyHein account for multiple projects simultaneously!

8. New Proximity Connectors

Search syntax options are available which aid users in searching for words within a sentence, a paragraph, or a segment. Shortly before these new proximity connectors were added, a HeinOnline user tweeted us about the “/?” search syntax. As a result, a total of 8 new connectors were added: w/#, /#; w/s, /s; w/p, /p; w/seg, /seg.

9. Author Profile Enhancements

This past year we gave Author Profile Pages a face lift! Icons replaced links for several key features, and the overall appearance of the author profile pages was streamlined. Once inside an author profile page, hover over any icon for a brief description of its functionality. We also added a new metric: average number of citations per article. This new metric counts the cumulative number of times this author’s articles have been cited by other articles, then divides this number by this author’s total number of articles written, to calculate the average number of citations per article. This new metric came from a suggestion from Professor Orin Kerr, one of the most-cited legal scholars.

Other Notable Content Additions

Since January 2018, HeinOnline has added:

• 12,421,013 pages, bringing the total page count to 166,635,523
• 147 new journals
• Nearly 40 Cambridge University Press journals
• 1,789 legal classics
• Nearly 15,000 congressional hearings and more than 10,000 CRS Reports
• 3,018 titles to the U.S. Congressional Serial Set
• 365 new titles to World Constitutions Illustrated

New titles and new content for existing titles continue to be added, as well as milestones being reached including:

• The Law Journal Library surpassed 2,500 titles and currently has 2,656.
• An expanded agreement with Cambridge University Press brings nearly 40 journals to the Law Journal Library.
• The Legal Classics database surpassed 11,000 titles and currently has 12,951.
• A new print edition of Sources of Compiled Legislative Histories became available.
• HeinOnline became “legal” when it turned 18 years old!
• The George Wythe Collection was added to the Legal Classics database.
• A new 2016-2017 volume for Subject Compilations of State Laws database became available, containing 600 entries under 225 main subject headings, including new topics like robots and transportation companies.
• Session Laws indexing project continues. The following states were indexed back to inception: Georgia, Indiana, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Mississippi, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Texas.
• Two new chapters, Domestic Violence and Restrictive Covenants in Employment, were added and four chapters were updated for National Survey of State Laws.
• A new partnership with the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) brought a new subcollection to the Foreign & International Relations Database: Part VII: International Human Rights Law Institute.

For a quick visual summary, check out this infographic!

We had another great year and would like to thank our loyal customers for their support and feedback. Stay tuned to see what’s new in 2019!

For questions or for help using HeinOnline, contact our dedicated support team at (800) 277-6995, email us, or chat with us!