LexisNexis temporarily suspends full-text acess to five newspapers

Diane recently posted a message on BBLIB that copied two messages from the LexisNexis Academic listserv. The gist of these messages is that LexisNexis is temporarily suspending full-text access to five newsapers. Here'a question from Robert Duncan of Lafayette College, a librarian on the listserv (the reply from LexisNexis is further below:

>"We regret to announce that the London Times and other news content licensed via News International has been temporarily suspended.. . ."

Or, as we all have come to know and love it in LexisNexis: "Times
(London), The".

I'm sure we all appreciate updates like this and understand the lack of control LexisNexis has in these sorts of situations, but it would be helpful to have more useful information, especially in light of the fact that users won't have a clue because the "About this title" page has not been altered.

(1) What does "temporarily suspended" mean? Has all content for "Times (London), The" been removed, or is new content just not being added?

(2) I don't know of any way to search the LN source list for publishers; can you give us an indication of what might comprise "other news content licensed from News International"?

(3) One can still limit a search to "Times (London), The", but results returned are from the Financial Times (or, as we've all come to know and love it, "Financial Times (London)"). Any idea on a resolution to this awkward situation?

Here is the reply from Meg Fraim of LexisNexis:

Temporarily suspended means that all content has been temporarily removed from all LexisNexis services due to an interruption in the rights to electronically distribute the content. LexisNexis is actively pursuing renewing the rights. We are modifying the Source List entries for News International publications within LexisNexis Academic and by tomorrow, they should indicate "temporarily suspended" in the coverage field.

Five publications were temporarily removed:
1) The Times and Sunday Times
2) News of the World
3) Times Higher Education Supplement
4) Times Education Supplements
5) The Sun

Although you cannot search the LexisNexis Academic source list by publisher, there is an online directory of all sources licensed by LexisNexis located at http://web.nexis.com/sources/. Although this directory includes titles not available through LexisNexis Academic due to licensing restrictions, it does provide a way to search by publisher. I know many other academiclibrarians have indicated that they find it to be a useful tool to augment the source list within the product.

As to your final question, the "search by publication" functionality within LexisNexis Academic does admittedly leave a bit to be desired for titles that include common words since it is searching by title. I can't give you a timeframe for resolution, but I can tell you that I heard encouraging news at the end of last week about some infrastructure changes that may enable us to modify the search logic as early as next year. We will keep you apprised of any developments.